
Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #69

the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary... See more
W. David Marx • The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste
Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed.
Where have all the websites gone?
Almost a half-century later, the journalist Kyle Chayka wrote in his book “Filterworld” that “microtrends” now rise and fall in a matter of weeks. In its quest to retain our attention, social media seemed to have heightened both the quantity and intensity of what we once called a fad: “Under algorithmic feeds, the popular becomes more popular, and ... See more
New York Times • rw-embedded-content[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/style/gen-z-trend-cycle.html]
In the early days of the internet, the Web’s surface was relatively smooth and its “gravitational force” was weak. You could random walk without getting sucked into any black holes. During the 2010s, social media platforms “dug into the Web surface, dragging activities down their slopes … As a result of this magnetic-like attraction, caused by the
... See moreThe Garden of Forking Memes: How Digital Media Distorts Our Sense of Time – AZL
