Another aspect is that your view of the internet, which on its own is incomprehensibly large, is largely shaped by the tools you use to interact with it. It's difficult to become aware of just how much your choice of internet gateway will shape your view of what exists.

If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects.

If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.

If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.

If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes.

and so on and so forth.

My navigator tends to remember the websites I view more, which are mostly communities, and I tend to click on the links it has when the browser opens. So I tend to use these communities as the internet gateway as you say - like hacker news! This concept of the internet gateway and the perceptual islands of ideas is really interesting, I think you should someday write about this.