Nice post by websitereview on Neocities about how to surf the web and find cool sites that are off the beaten track.
I call this the Halmos technique because I first read about it in Halmos' autobiography (I Want to Be a Mathematician, for those curious). He describes how he found good books and papers in mathematics. What you do is you take one book or paper, then go to their works cited and check out those books and papers' works cited pages. After three iterations of this, you'll see the same titles pop up again and again. Those are not only likely the good books and papers to check out, but in just doing this exercise, you're likely to come across a lot of interesting random books and papers that are lesser known that catch your eye.
https://websitereview.neocities.org/search
Websitereview says don't trust the algorithm, and I think that's generally good advice... but another approach is to train the algorithm to work for you. When I first started curating YouTube videos for Culture Machine, I found that a good strategy was to hide videos and channels from my recommendations if:
- the video looked like clickbait or some other obnoxious thing, OR
- I already knew about the channel
There's a dropdown menu on YouTube's video recommendations where you can choose "don't show me videos like this" or some such.
After a few days of doing this, I had trained YouTube to show me a more eclectic mix of videos. I don't know if the same technique would work for other platforms, though.
Anyway, if you're looking for a place to start surfing, websitereview's links page can be found here.