Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise?
My only hope at this point is Neocities.
Those who wonder how these niche sites looked like, and example: http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/ This site has an immense amount of data in a reading-friendly format about old, obscure, beautiful photography equipment, in a way I've not seen for decades. Why? Because it hasn't been updated since 2005. And it just works.
You go and find an appropriate subreddit.
Seriously. Subreddits are mini-Internets. Yes, centrally controlled and restricted to newsboard format (the latter is arguably a benefit), but they link out to interesting sites on the "main" Internet, and mostly haven't been poisoned by marketers just yet.
Not an elegant solution, and not a permanent solution - but it works for now.
The "authentic" people are on Youtube and Reddit and Medium and publishing on Twitter and closed Facebook groups. And yet, some of those people sometimes want to make a living on their passion. I would be willing to bet most people on the web in the 90s would have as well, if they could have.
There is more hobby and enthusiast content on the web now than there ever has been, with more depth, greater quality and dimensionality than the 90's web could ever have hoped to offer, as well as far more opportunities for interaction between people. I think that's a fair trade for nostalgia and "quirk."
(Edited for less snark and more clarity since it seems this comment is getting sniped.)
Discovery on YouTube is now comically difficult, getting out of your filter bubble means making bizarre searches and filter edge cases, otherwise you see the same 15 videos weekly.
They've failed to filter the hate content they intended to eliminate, they've failed to improve their curated content volume, and discovery remains bound and gagged in the back of Ad monetization's sedan.
If you were here in 2010 it's worse now. Privacy / safety / predictability, I guess, but the magic is all gone.
YouTube could use an [adult swim] concept. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. YouTube.
And that sucks.
Thanks for the pointer to Neocities.
It’s a good model for other craft sites.
I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.
Ook!
What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though.
Fortunately, in my experience niche sites and communities are still thriving through social transmission, and the fact that so many more people are active online nowadays.