The longer I spend away from firehose style social media (and thus the more old interests I've had time to delve through for days at a time until my ADHD is satisfied with them) the more it keeps feeling like there's less there there online.
Partly social media caused gradual long term atrophy of other communities and sites, sure.
But also partly the enshitification of search engines has made finding the gems that are still out there so much harder. Not just because the results are worse, either. Not even just because of the automated SEO sludge farms burying everything useful or good so they can get the ad impressions. SEO also spent a long while actively punishing other methods of discoverability like links pages.
And we don't even have StumbleUpon as a workaround anymore. Hell if you look up replacements for StumbleUpon it's either more social media, or a "here, input your interests so we can develop an ad profile!" site, or just "Every week we'll send you a bunch of useful websites" mailing lists.
I don't want USEFUL websites. I want INTERESTING websites. I want to randomly find Discordian shit or homemade animatronics or collections of the most outlandish fan theories for X-Files.
I don't want this "More efficiently convert calories into javascript" crap.
I want unexpected things, or at the very least to find more than two things of the sort I'm looking for, one of which is virtually non-functional but also duplicated ten million times across different urls.
I want search engines that don't decide that what you actually want is this other vaguely similar but far more lowest-common-denominator thing that you didn't ask for.
Or at the very least an nsfw friendly StumbleUpon clone that isn't ludicrously expecting to be a profit venture.
Capitalism needs a muzzle. It chews up everything.
