The whole click-bait industry depends on you browsing within walled gardens (facebook, reddit) and being on the conveyor belt of places your attention has to go.
A flâneur or surfer can just go somewhere else. There's only so much physical real estate you can own. There isn't exactly another facebook or reddit to go to...and if there is, BuzzFeed is all over that shit too.
Basically, the internet has driven the minimum cost of advertising/branding down to bit-transmission prices. Anybody basically can afford to throw shit everywhere and see what sticks.
It's messy out there...
Sure, it's curated, but so were the arcades of the original flaneurs. And you can always follow links.
(I do think that webrings were really well suited for this, though, and that's something reddit, etc. can't quite replicate.)
> Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.
Doesn't the whole click-bait "industry" specifically because people are surfing?
What's more, even on social media, things like "Weird Facebook" come into existence. Huge groups form with no clear purpose other than seemingly to be exactly the kind of internet "arcades" that the article is describing.