Somewhat related, there is a site I follow called royalroad. Royalroad is a site for web serials, which are basically books uploaded to the internet chapter by chapter.

Although royalroad used to be only google ads, at some point they started accepting user submitted ads. (Also, ads on that site have always been unobtrusive).

I like these ads much better because they are more privacy respecting (literally an a image and a link).

Also, they are really funny. User’s with no art skills will make memes, or doodle stick figures, and I clicked on that one anyways, and the story was soooo good.

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their “neighbours” in the ring that’d eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you’ll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery “someone else’s problem” and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.

That sounds awful

For blogs there are also ping-backs, which serve a similar function, i.e. if a blog-post is mentioned on another blogging site the original page is automatically notified via the comment section of the blog-post in question.