To tie this back into original topic, in my opinion this is a sort of "algorithmic thinking" which infects people, even in noise and black metal and so on. Everyone complains about how social media is shit, but there is still good stuff to be found, if you are willing to look for it. I have discovered a handful of very good artists through surface-level platforms like instagram (Erica Frevel, Georg Jutvall, Conall Kearney to name just a few), but you have to specifically seek out these things, it's not enough to just be delivered content by the algorithms.
With websites, there's still so much mind-bending fucked up stuff on the internet, it is just that centralization and censorship on platforms like instagram is... not 'effective,' but pervasive? You can't type the word "fuck" or "taliban" or "anorexia." But if you are willing to go outside the big platforms, to put in just a BIT of effort, you can still find great stuff out there.
For instance, back in 2019, there was a news story making rounds for a day about a girl who was obsessed with the columbine school shooting and was wanted by police, traveling to colorado and causing hundreds of schools to shut down. they found her dead in the woods of suicide later that day. don't remember all the details. but with minimal effort at the time it was easy to find her personal website, which is still up:
https://dissolvedgirl.neocities.org/welcomepage.html. now thoroughly linked thru to reddit and so on....
Point is, internet is getting worse, but also people are lazy, and if our small scenes are good for anything you would hope it would be instilling in people the desire for unknown, for the search, for flipping through stacks literally or not. It's political because we are creating a separate set of cultural artifacts, we don't want (or at least I certainly don't) to be associated with the dominant culture in any way.
edit: I'll give you another good website:
https://cryptome.org/
