During the initial couple of weeks/first month of Phuks, I started looking through a bunch of aggregators, or "Reddit alternatives" to see what other people were doing and come up with a few ideas for Phuks. As it turns out, there really aren't that many good ones. They are either too facebook-ish, too twittery or don't have any kind of gimmick that sets them apart from others. Phuks probably fits into this category, although we do have a surprising amount of features compared to others when you consider there are only two people working on the site and it is still early days.
After I looked through these sites, I didn't stop. I looked through textboards, imageboards, decentralised client based sites and even discovered sites only accessible through ssh. I manoeuvred through numerous small web rings for the first time in years. Most of these sites have a very similar vibe to Phuks, even though the technical differences between them are huge.
I realised that nobody needs a "frontpage of the internet". That is a big problem with the internet. Although it is incredibly convenient to have hundreds of posts appearing in a feed for you, giving you minute to minute updates on news or whatever it may be, the vastness of it detracts from the sense of community. You're also going to always find exactly what you want. Again, convenient, but to me it is completely uninteresting. The time I would spend on Reddit browsing basically the exact same shit every day could have been spent participating in smaller communities that are actually enjoyable to be a part of.
As a result of the creation of Phuks, I am now a part of other sites that are completely unrelated to Phuks. Sometimes it will take me 2 days to get a reply to a question, and I don't have a news feed that tells me what just happened a minute ago, but I'm not just floating in a sea of shit anymore. I still look at the same amount of content, but it is more varied. Perhaps the only way to solve the problem of the circlejerk is to change the way we browse.
...suuuuure.