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 used to browse Boing Boing frequently in the past but then all the ads for their shop got annoying after a while. neatorama has interesting posts though there’s not much commenting if that’s what you’re interested in.
Thank you, I’m checking it out right now. I don’t mind commenting, and if it’s a toxic situation on a given site, I can just skip the comments (Youtube being a prime example of such), it’s just sad that a bunch of Debbie Downers have utterly ruined what was once a fairly vibrant (and fun) community on BB. It’s almost like the inverse of some sites where a bunch of redhats have taken root and done the same, but instead, BB now has a bunch of leftist moral scolds that pop up to remind everyone of every character flaw of $OLD_WHITE_MAN that might be the subject of the article.