Regarding the discovery problem... I've been on the internet since the 90s, and centralization was inevitable from the start and visible from the early days.

Regarding the discovery problem... I've been on the internet since the 90s, and centralization was inevitable from the start and visible from the early days. Independent bloggers started blog rolls where they link to other bloggers. And soon you could find this copycat behavior where everybody linked to the same "top" bloggers, establishing hierarchy. All traffic to a handful, the rest gets nothing. In absence of search engines, we had portals with links. But the real estate is limited, so again hierarchy is established. All traffic to the head, none to the tail. Then we "democratized" it with things like Digg.com, but not really. A handful of people (at one point in fact only one user) decides what gets on the homepage. Now things are far worse even with influencers snowballing into power and algorithms promoting what plays on our emotions. You'll see this pattern everywhere you go.