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Long ago, back in the internet’s youth, it was quite hard to find new web sites. People often learned of them either through the news or word of mouth. To make navigation easier, webmasters would put sites pertaining to particular interests into lists. For example, if you visited a web site about metal, they would have a link page full of other sites that were about metal.
Eventually, Google came along and offered a better search engine than any of their competitors at the time. Since web searching became so easy and reliable, people stopped caring about link lists, as they were now seen as redundant. MySpace emerged a few years later, then Facebook and Twitter followed in their wake. Once that happened, people abandoned the idea of personal web sites and moved all of their content to social media because they saw it as easier and more convenient.
Then, in 2016, all the major search engines began manipulating their search results for political reasons. This got even worse four years later. Web sites that were once so easy to search for were now being suppressed because they were labeled as "misinformation" (i.e., anything that runs contrary to regime narratives). Social media sites were also mass banning people for the same reasons. Some of those users had spent years producing content and building a presence, and it was all deleted with the click of a button.
Search engines also became useless when it came to finding more mundane information. For example, if one were to search for the solution to a tech problem, they would be inundated with a deluge of articles that all read like they were written by bots. They all ramble incessantly, they all include large numbers of keywords with the intent of exploiting search engine optimization (SEO), and they never actually have the information the person is looking for. People are now appending "reddit" to their queries because search engines can no longer be trusted to provide accurate results.
This is where we are now. Search engines have been deliberately crippled to the point where most people now think the internet is just a few big social media sites, a few media conglomerates, and an ocean of spam. We have returned to those ancient days where it’s up to the users to provide links to worthwhile content. I have already done my part by creating a links page directing people to other PulpRev authors. I encourage others to do the same. If you know of any great sites that are of a similar topic to yours, compile them into a link list. Little acts like that will go a long way in making the internet great again.
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(This web page was proudly made with free and open source software.)