Comment by crmd
7 months ago
Back in the day I was mostly on slashdot, Reddit, digg, and metafilter.
Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).
For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.
You forgot Fark! Except that was unironic brainrot and everybody knew what it was. Unlike now, where critical thinking went out the window and everybody takes things at face value.
Fark was great. All hail Drew!
Wow, I was trying to remember his username, but I wasn't even getting close. Quite impressive haha.
Metafilter is still around and still great content!