Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc. I'd say this story refutes that one.
Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then.
Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.
It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.)
Cities were very often http://city.state.xx.us.
Now many (most?) states have vanity URLs, and the cities are worse. I think Chicago's changed its URL at least three times.
I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has been captured by advertising or killed.
When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity, but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry - influencers blegh...), then the web starts to feel like a bland wasteland.
Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same drivel again.
I guess it's what the people running it want but I find myself going there less and less every day and only look at a few curated subs
It's my observation that the average redditor is more interested in gaining upvotes via silly class-clown behavior, than actually contributing meaningful conversation. Or interested in upvoting silly comments.
Even in subreddits where the topic of discussion is something serious, such as a forum for advice seeking, people can't help but reply to posts with jokes.
What is worse is when people are downvoted for a reply which is intelligent and serious, but is contrary to popular opinion.
To be honest, I don't know why a similar app or extension hasn't come up to replace what Stumble did. Surely there's advertising potential there (1 ad per every X clicks) and even a subscription option (remove ads or access to unlimited interest categories for $x dollars).
And there's both a reason for that being the case(nobody wants spam, and moderating can curate effectively in the best subs) and for it being harmful(community interaction ossifies into a familiar set of things that get upvotes, which subsequently pollutes every thread).
However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.