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First of  all, I want  to say congrats  to cat for  two years of  running their
phlog Fax Sex.[0] But something in particular caught my eye. To quote:

    The web was once a wonderful place. I remember when Yahoo! was
    curated by human beings, not algorithms. I remember blogs written
    by people about their lives, not written by influencers about
    the products they've been handed. I remember when advertising
    was a rare occurrence instead of the framework sites are built on.

Yeah, I have to agree with this sentiment  I don't think the Web itself is bad,
just heavily abused by a bunch of very greedy and very ignorant people. Many of
these people being actual developers doesn't really help matters, either.

If you want a couple of examples of very good places on the web, I can name two
without fail: Curlie and Dreamwidth.

Curlie[1] is what became of the  former Open Directory Project (DMOZ), with the
community taking  over after AOL shut  the project down during  the creation of
Oath. It's a web directory curated by people[2], rather than algorithms and SEO
gaming,  and I  absolutely love  it. I've  supported them  since the  DMOZ days
/because/ of their desire to keep it  community-based, and I do try to continue
supporting them where I can.

Dreamwidth[3] is a community-developed open source version of LiveJournal, from
before  its  purchase by  their  current  owners.  It doesn't  have  modernized
"features" shoehorned  into it, and  everything is community oriented,  down to
them taking donations and providing paid  plans over forcing ads on anyone. The
staff are amazingly nice as well, and every interaction I've had there has been
a positive one.

There are plenty of  other examples, though many are likely lost  if you try to
do a search for them on any  web crawling engine. Curlie should help with some,
though.

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[0]: gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20190616.txt
[1]: https://curlie.org/
[2]: I won't say "humans", because I am dragonkin, and there are other *kin who
     help there.
[3]: https://dreamwidth.org/