One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even

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But even with all their flaws, the existence of dozens of massive, collectively-maintained, curated and organized libraries of communal culture are still something like a miracle of the web. Tellingly, these kinds of sites rarely get launched these days, and the ones that have survived all follow a fairly common set of patterns. They often start as... See more

The society of the 2010s said the goal was to make everything for everyone. Algorithms promised us we could kill all the tastemakers and just discover what we like for ourselves.

What we’re rediscovering now, as Chayka also demonstrated in filterworld, was that that principle just made everything look and feel exactly the same. Taste trended towards

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