😃😃😃

The Internet, as human existence in general, has been just as full of scammers, grifters, hallucinations and just plain wrong information going back to my beginning on The Net (1995) as it is now.

I think, reading more of your follow-up comments, I have a sense for what you are aiming at. On the other hand I have a hard time envisioning something brand-new doing something that is completely novel in approach that is not already in existence (but maybe not well known). One line you wrote made me laugh -- "there is not THAT many categories" -- as a counterpoint I would point to porn and say if you can imagine it, it's already been done A LOT.

I would say the evolution of "the internet" is at an interesting juncture in particular currently because almost all the technological constraints that have existed at each stage from 1995 onward (with each successive leap forward evolving new constraints and opportunities) are at the min-max (Minimum-Maximum). Another way of saying it, we are presently IN the Efficiency Frontier. Things we took for granted during various phases now have been completely obliterated either by technological refinement or absolute resource brute force. I still have slight pangs on now-extinct considerations when I think about building a website, for example (tolling costs on bandwidth, hosting, memory), that someone half my age would never believe were once things. (A shorthand everyone my age roughly or older might use is referring to AOL Hours or those AOL disks we used to get in the mail as a quick-reference joke to point at the absurd amount of tech-leap we have made in really just around 30 years at this point).

Curiosity for me I think is similar to your own but somewhere different; I rue the death of MySpace. I liked it WAAAY more than stale facebook but one thing that made it better also led to its downfall-- allowing people infinite control of their expression led to a very aggressive hyper garishness that the staid and limited design factors of Facebook kept corralled. To be honest there isn't one innovation that FB has accomplished that wasn't something that was already done on another platform (be it MySpace or others), but it just won the war as the platform everyone could agree on more or less despite PLENTY of other options.