I caught myself last week doing something tragic.
I opened Twitter, scrolled for 45 minutes, felt bored, opened Instagram Reels, scrolled for 30 minutes, felt empty, opened Twitter again.
Same accounts. Same takes. Same outrage carousel.
Then I closed everything and stared at my homescreen, genuinely unsure where to go next on the internet.
Fifteen years ago that feeling was impossible. The web was infinite and you could feel it.
Today the average person visits fewer than 25 unique domains per month. Teenagers often stay under 10. We have 4.9 billion people “online” and almost all of them live in the same five cul-de-sacs.
We didn’t log off. We just stopped wandering.
The Collapse of the Discovery Surface Area#
In 2008 my daily ritual looked like this:
- Open Google Reader → 120 RSS feeds
- Click through to 30 blogs
- Follow links in their blogrolls
- Find 5 new sites → subscribe → repeat
Every day I met new writers, new designers, new weirdos. It felt like exploring alien cities.
By 2025 the ritual is:
- Open TikTok / Twitter / Instagram / YouTube / Reddit
- Watch algorithm serve content from the same 200 accounts in slightly different order
- Occasionally click a link that sends you to… another post inside the same app
Google search is now 60 % ads and SEO garbage. Reddit has enshittified. Hacker News is the same 40 people. Newsletters are great until your inbox hits 300 unread.
The open web didn’t disappear. We just built walls around the parts we already know and called it safety.
The Data Is Brutal#
- SparkToro & Datos 2025 report: 89 % of web traffic now comes from Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Amazon
- The median website gets fewer than 10 visitors per month
- 96 % of teenagers say they’ve never typed a URL directly (Pew 2024)
- The phrase “I saw it on the internet” has been replaced with “I saw it on TikTok”
We used to surf. Now we wade in the same kiddie pool every day.
What We Actually Lost When We Stopped Discovering#
It’s not just nostalgia. Real things died.
Voice diversity
You no longer stumble on a blog by a physicist in New Zealand who writes about grief in a way that rewires your soul.Slow ideas
Algorithms bury anything that takes more than 11 seconds to understand.Personal taste
When was the last time you found a new favorite writer without an algorithm shoving them at you?Serendipity muscle
Curiosity is a skill. We’re letting it atrophy.Ownership of attention
You don’t decide what’s interesting anymore. The engagement team at a $300 billion company does.
I felt this most acutely last year when a friend asked me to recommend “some cool sites.” I opened my bookmarks and realized everything was from 2019 or earlier. My frontier had frozen.
The Algorithm Didn’t Kill Discovery. We Let It#
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we chose convenience over adventure.
Infinite scroll is frictionless. Clicking external links costs battery, data, and two extra seconds of load time. We optimized for dopamine, not wonder.
Platforms happily obliged. Why send users off-site (where you lose tracking and ad views) when you can keep them forever?
The result: a generation that thinks “content” means short video and the “internet” means three apps.”
How to Start Wandering Again (Practical, Non-Preachy Steps)#
You don’t need to delete social media. You just need to carve a new path.
1. Build a “Jump-Off” Stash#
Create one collection (I call mine “Rabbit Holes 2025” on stashed.in) dedicated purely to weird entry points:
- Personal blogs of strangers
- Niche forums
- Random “awesome lists” on GitHub
- Site-of-the-day archives like brutalistwebsites.com or neatnik.net
Whenever you’re bored, open that stash and pick one card at random. Click. No agenda. Ten minutes later you’ll be somewhere you never imagined.
2. Follow Humans, Not Algorithms#
Every week I go to someone’s stashed.in profile (or Are.na, or bookmarks page) and steal three links they saved that I would never find myself. Costs zero effort, feels like mind-reading.
3. Use the Right Tools for Escape#
- RSS is back and better (Feedbin, Inoreader, Reeder)
- Indie blogs are having a renaissance (check weblog.lol, bearblog.dev, neocities)
- Web rings are returning (hotline.webring.org, merveilles.town)
- Directory projects like ooh.directory and stefanzweig.com
4. Make Discovery Visible and Social#
This is the part most people miss.
When your saves are private, exploration stays low-stakes and eventually dies. When you make even one stash public (“Strange Corners of the Web”), something shifts. You start hunting for treasures worth showing off. Your taste sharpens. Friends raid your stash and send you theirs. Discovery becomes a group sport again.
That’s exactly why stashed.in grew the way it did. People didn’t just want to save links. They wanted to share the act of finding.
My Current Discovery Ritual (Takes 11 Minutes a Day)#
Every morning while coffee brews:
- Open my “Daily Fuel” stash on stashed.in
- Add 3–5 links I stumbled on yesterday (usually from RSS or someone else’s public stash)
- Pick one old card I haven’t visited in months → click → wander for exactly 10 minutes
- If I find gold, I drag it into a themed stash (“Typography That Hurts,” “Essays That Broke Me,” “Tools I’ll Actually Use”)
Total new sites discovered this year: 1,337
Total time wasted: almost none
Total times I felt that old electric “the internet is infinite” feeling: too many to count
The Indie Web Is Waiting (And It’s Gorgeous)#
While we were doomscrolling, thousands of people quietly built beautiful, bizarre, deeply human corners of the web.
- A guy who reviews only gas-station sandwiches
- A digital garden about living with chronic illness, updated weekly since 2017
- A single-page site that generates poetry from weather data
- A photographer who uploads one film photo every day with the story behind it
None of these will ever go viral. All of them will change you if you find them.
The treasure is still out there. We just stopped digging.
Your Move#
Close this tab right now and do one of these:
- Go to stashed.in/explore and click a random public stash
- Visit ooh.directory and pick a category you know nothing about
- Open your own stashed.in account and create a stash titled “I Hereby Refuse to Be Boring in 2026”
Put three weird links in it today. Make it public. Send it to one friend.
Watch what happens when discovery stops being solitary and starts being contagious again.
The internet isn’t small. Our habits are.
Let’s go fix that.
→ stashed.in
(Stasha already packed the map. She’s terrible with directions but excellent at getting lost on purpose.)
