I asked a related question here - the one about Boing Boing, Disinfo.com, Dangerous Minds: https://lemmy.world/post/1001839
I’d say somewhere around the late 00’s, things like iPhone, FB, Twitter, etc…started to make the web a lot more…homogenized.
It was fine for the old hands - we’ve seen this kind of thing before and more corporate rule was all too expected. We’ve been through a few migrations and paradigm shifts already. But we could still use our skills, go to the sites we wanted, curate RSS feeds, find the weird bits of the 'net that were still worthwhile tuning into and keeping the polished stuff at arms length.
But then things like StumbleUpon went away and for more and more people totally new to technology (but born into it) they think social media == “the internet” (Which is a depressing notion, having your entire idea of “technology” being something like BigCompany’s tablet/phone connected to BigCompany’s data gathering site to mediate your entire online experience.) Blogging became “uncool”. And of course, very few people, most especially younger people, seem to know about things like RSS.
I used to use StumbleUpon and then it dried up; has anyone used Mix? Or is there something better to use for discovering the weird and the wonderful?
How do you find the weird corners of the net these days? Where have all “The Others” gone to?
I use cloudhiker and webtoll. It’s fairly decent. Though occasionally I get time capsule sites, like personal blogs from the 2000s in geocities. Yes, try it and see with your own eyes.
So much lost content not generated by bots or webscrapers out there