How to Find the Good Side of the Internet
The internet is filled with amazing websites. But if you only stay on the highways (social media, big websites, algorithmic feeds) you’ll never experience any of it.
So how do you find ‘The Good Side of the Internet’?
This is highly subjective, but in my opinion some of the best the internet has to offer is found on small niche websites. Hobbyists, hackers, tinkerers, and thinkers.
Recently I discovered a community of people hosting their own websites on mobile phones and even smaller devices1. Years ago I discovered my interest for financial freedom through blogs like Mr Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme.
How can I replicate these experiences?
First up, the most important part is this: avoid algorithms.
I’m not against algorithms in general. YouTube does sometimes serve up wonderful videos. I love my Spotify ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist. But the algorithms that run some of the biggest websites on the internet are not going to serve you what you need. That is the unfortunate state of affairs right now.
Maybe it will get better. Maybe it won’t. Maybe part of the problem is you won’t find weird outliers by going to an algorithm. Idk. What I do know is that I always find way more interesting stuff on the internet when I go for human curation over algorithmic feeds.
Usually, all I need is one good website. From there the spiderweb spins out a community of like-minded people.
The process is really quite natural. You browse a website and start reading. Soon enough you encounter outbound links. Click these and visit them! Links are the most basic form of human curation on the internet — baked in from the very beginning of the protocol. And amazingly this form of curation continues to work to this day. It just takes a bit more work than mindlessly scrolling algorithmic slop.
I sometimes wish there were better discovery tools. Better ways of finding these gems on the internet. But I have not found any that works. And maybe this is for the better — maybe this is another case of ‘the journey is the reward’.
We have the basic tools of the internet: websites and links. With a bit of curiosity it is still possible to find the good side of the internet.
Footnotes
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I discovered the entry point to this niche through Hacker News — an algorithmic site. From the entry point I found all the other interesting places though human curation. Hacker News is an internet highway. It’s one of the better ones but you are still going to miss out if you don’t deliberately take detours and visit the smaller, unpaved roads. ↩