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How I find interesting content online

September 28, 2022

Sometimes when I send my friends articles or links, they ask how I find them. Here’s a list of my best tips and tricks for coming across interesting content online.

Niche Content

Get curious

The easiest way to find random things is to go down rabbit holes. The easiest way to go down rabbit holes is to be curious about something. Maybe it’s a question, problem, or broad topic. Whatever it is, start with random Google queries, Twitter searches, Reddit threads, and YouTube videos. This is the most organic way to find cool people and things.

Find a primary source

Here’s another strategy: find a creator whose content you like. Read and keep up with their stuff. Look into the people and things around them. Rinse and repeat.

Personally, I stumbled upon Wait But Why and Mark Manson in my freshman year of high school — the former of which inspired me to start a blog. When looking at other blogs, I found LessWrong and the Effective Altruism Forum. At some point, I clicked on an exurb1a video on Youtube, which led me to discover channels like Kurzgesagt, Nerdstalgic, and Folding Ideas, to name a few.

So while there’s some luck involved in finding content, it doesn’t have to be completely random. If you can find a creator you like, there’s a heightened chance you’ll like the content they endorse.

Click the links

Many blogs and websites have a lot of links on them. Many essays themselves are heavily embedded with links.

Click these links.

Well — you don’t have to click the links. But to maximize serendipity, click these links. If I see something remotely interesting about a post title, I open it in a new tab and look through it later. Sometimes, the link is a whiff. But other times, I discover someone really cool or read about some new concept which I might never have learned about otherwise.

Keep an archive of links

Store interesting links in some database (Discord server, Notion, Google Docs). Then, frequently revisit these links; you’ll come across things you missed and see old things with a new perspective — both of which will be refreshing, and may lead you down new rabbit holes.

The other day, I was going back through my saved links and liked Tweets in order to compile them in Notion. I was expecting a quick in-and-out maneuver, but as things would have it, I ended up with over 100 tabs of fresh content.

Have friends that send you interesting content

Simply become friends with cool people, like me.

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That’s pretty much it. For some more concrete suggestions, here’s a broad list of sites that I like, somewhat listed in order of personal significance. They could all use infinitely more exploration.

Other sites I didn’t feel like labeling: