There are facts and opinions that many people know which are super hard to find online:
If you go to a bar in a new city and strike up a conversation, you can find out a huge amount of information about neighborhoods, risk, feelings and attitudes of people in a city. Yet, if you want to find this out online, where would you go? There's no place I know. Reddit might be somewhat useful if the city is big enough and you search; crime statistics are useful (e.g. the charts on city-data) but I'd rather have a 20 minute conversation with a resident than any of those.
Say you have a new hobby and want to find out the state of the art. Any search you make will be so targeted to be basically useless. There may be good youtubers, but surprising numbers of them may be corrupted. Either directly through payments, or by being downstream of other corrupted agents. With time you can identify people who have reasonable stories for why they would not be corruptible, but it requires a lot of investment.
In the old world, you could just go to a newsgroup and read the FAQ and basically get up to speed on what's actually going on in a domain.