I appreciate the advice at the bottom, but I'd love to hear more about what other people suggest for finding content that isn't algorithm based.

Relatively niche but traditional bulletin board forums are good. Recent posts to the top do tend make some threads be attention hogs, but there's a human mod in the loop if the forum is small enough.

I suppose chats (usually Discord) also fall into this as well. A smaller community there can be similar to a smaller community on Mastodon, forums, etc.

Any other thoughts? How do people discover new blogs?

Side note, I think I realized or came to the belief about 10 years ago that large groups of humans suck. Moderation becomes impractical or ineffective; content discovery becomes manipulated like this post is talking about. Similarly, large communities on a monolithic platform have to be monetized -- which results in clickbait of a sorts to maintain engagement.

Private group chats are the new social networks. It's apples and oranges but I think for people that really don't want to be "on social media" the alternative is to keep engagement with close friends on a group-by-group basis.

So whatever they share on there is how I get my social-media awareness. It's basically intentionally a very very narrow filter. It has to be.

Then, subscribe to paid publications, journalism, podcasts, newsletters.

Small-blog-aggregators like Kottke are a goldmine. The trick, of course, is to remember to follow the interesting people he surfaces.

And RSS. It never went away. Just use RSS.