I sometimes long for those days of internet when you’d land on someone’s personal page where they’d document hard to find links about some (technical) subject matter and some commentary on them. Discovery of such links often meant that that your understanding or interest in certain subject would completely change. I also loved the painstaking effort someone would make to find and then document information for an unknown (web) traveller. There is a kind of romantic hope in doing this, similar to human beings putting out Voyagers spacecrafts with those golden record.
In the days of ubiquitous search engines days of such discovery are already over. Centralized internet of the present day also means that content follows brutal power law. Interesting links become popular soon enough that you are unlikely to experience Eureka moment with some of these. More likely, you stumble upon something that half of the world is already raving about on one of the social networks. Such content often ends up being something banal, cooked up together to gather click.
I am starting this new series in which I document an interesting article/blog/paper in non-fiction that I stumbled upon. I can’t probably compare what I post to the glorious days I allude to above. Some of these links already qualify for the viral-on-social-nets camp. My hope is that they atleast are interesting and I don’t end up putting out something banal clickbaity that all proles are reading about.