I think the thing is we used to search for content, e.g. go to programming forum, specific language sub-forum, specific topic sub-sub forum, etc. now we have "

I think the thing is we used to search for content, e.g. go to programming forum, specific language sub-forum, specific topic sub-sub forum, etc. now we have "feeds", infinite scrolling of content we never asked for, paywalls and cookie popups. I feel like the solution would be complete backend/frontend separation. imagine reddit as being only a comments database, your user is an api key and the website is just one of many frontends displaying queries on that database. right now we have only one frontend pushing whatever "the algorithm" thinks is optimized. but maybe then we will have freedom.