That seems like a real romanticization of the early internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous.
Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results.
Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.
>the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack,
They all exhibit a tremendous level of "likethink" bubbling, I find everyone on a given platform to be more or less the same spewing the same crap over and over again.
Contrast Geocities, where you could find everyone and everything imaginable, short of straight up illegal stuff.
Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results.
Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.