It stopped being a hobby, or art, and started being a platform for making money. With the money came the scammers and other malicious actors, and so now, every

It stopped being a hobby, or art, and started being a platform for making money. With the money came the scammers and other malicious actors, and so now, everything that used to be fun is also a security vulnerability. Everything even remotely interesting has to be sandboxed and sanitized, to contain the damage when someone inevitably figures out how to weaponize a toy and upload the resulting bomb to your site. And the moneymaking parts also had to be simplified, so that users without a lot of technical knowledge could still figure out how to enter their payment information. All clicks; no command lines. I suspect fun and weird is still out there, but their signal is drowned by the noise. You have to already know where it is to get to it. An army of fun-finders could constantly troll through the dark waters of the out-of-mainstream net, looking for new and interesting, and then recommend whatever they may find to their social networks. Otherwise, the best site you will never see might be on page 200 for the nearest search term you will ever enter that matches it--ranked well behind all the disturbing rule 34 interpretations of it. The niche-dwellers just can't find each other easily any more. The crowd standing between them is too vast and noisy. And if you don't have a strong community already, your tentative steps into forming one can easily be annihilated by spammers advertising boner pills and 419 scams, sometimes in a language you can't understand, or someone renting a DDoS botnet just to kill your server, or any of a dozen other ways to pave over your paradise.