It is not lost. 15 years later, it is still up, and it is even featured on Hacker News ;)

https://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.plausiblyden... revealed 370 results, including social networks, blogs and the like.

What may be true is that the global signal to noise ratio is lower than before. A consequence of the web being cheap and accessible. However, that kind of content is not only present but there is more than before. And while it is buried under piles of noise, we have much better tools to deal with it.

Search engines like Google, Wikipedia, Hacker News, etc... will get you loads of quality content. Platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc... can get very instructive if you follow the right accounts, or give you some mindless fun and memes if you so choose. The two are not exclusive.

Something can be an example of what was lost without itself actually being lost.

The pyramids are an example of this distinction.

However I think, from your examples, that you see the world in a fairly similar way to @le-mark and your distinction is more one of labels than anything else.

> The pyramids are an example of this distinction.

The pyramids were never lost. They were in plain sight the entire time. Local people knew about them. They were 'discovered' by European colonizers and integrated into a pop culture phenomenon back in Europe, which included racist tropes and undertones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptomania

I can't find a way to read the grandparent's comment that implies that the pyramids were lost.

Yep, like kuro5hin (gone), everything2 (still there, but stagnant), even jwz's old blog posts. Maybe if there's a decentralized web that gains enough traction, there can be another 5 years before the greedy stream in.

I've heard people say subreddits have taken the place of these things, but whenever I look, they have already converged to the most nanoscopically narrow idea of the respective scope. There used to be more wiggle room for authors, and surprises for readers. Now it's all writing to a well-defined audience, genre, or meme: KPI-driven socializing. In that sense, web 1.0 seemed more fluid and interesting.

What you say is quite a common complaint. I was looking at a moderator's thread on a self-help subreddit this morning and people there were annoyed that the only items that got heavily upvoted (and therefore ever appeared under "top") were memes and pictures instead of the sort of deep thinking that could help people on this subreddit.

have they considered splintering off a selfhelpmemes subreddit or having a meme monday like some other sub do?

> This is a shining example of old web content we've lost in the current era of walled gardens and social graphs.

Five AMAZING geek social fallacies you never learned in school. You wont believe number 4!