We used to use our curiosity to find stuff we liked, which felt more satisfying than any algorithm's statistically-determined aggregation.

Today's kids will still do that, in their own way. I'm not convinced there's anything here other than old man and cloud. We did it our way, in our time. I don't think this generation is actually for-reals-this-time the one where technology finally neutered human curiosity and wrecked it all.

In the days you speak of the internet was the frontier for the curious and early adopters. The rest of the world caught up and now it's a fully commodified and industrialized space. Nostalgically trying to recreate the early internet isn't the way forward. I don't know what is but I know the kids will find it.

I remember figuring out how Google operators worked (back when they still did) and using them to find mp3s, PDFs, and old servers.

The younger people I see on social media are mostly all on the plantation but at least some of them have found creative ways to use it for their own purposes (e.g. evading word filters or building their own communities on direct platforms like Discord or WhatsApp). I see this a lot on Reddit, too (although I’m not sure if the crowd there is young anymore).

I think the key issue is that a lot of kids see the internet primarily as something they can make money off of, so they go to the platforms that promise a ready-made audience. When I was younger having anything I put on the internet get even a few hundred views would have had me elated, whereas for an aspiring professional content creator, getting a few hundred views just means that you failed.

For those who don’t have these kinds of aspirations, the new meta is group chats; Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter. The advantage here is that the messaging space is highly competitive and users are not going to tolerate receiving their messages in non-chronological order the way they do with their feed; this makes private messaging somewhat future-proof against the worse excesses of social media while still being more accessible than something like IRC.