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Ask HN: How do you find the weird parts of the web?
372 points by bittercynic on Sept 12, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 115 comments
I used to have an easier time finding truly weird material to read on the web. Things like:

subgenius.com timecube.2enp.com

Things on the fringes of sanity, or sometimes far over the line.

Any resources for finding material that is way out there, but manages to steer clear of hateful/racist/bigoted patterns of thought?




Few ways, in no particular order:

- are.na seems to attract people who have odd interests and it’s full of quirky websites

- webrings are still a thing and there’s a bunch out there worth checking out

- directories like https://512kb.club/ are usually full of interesting sites

- by following links on blogs and sites you find interesting

- some cool forums are still out there (https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php)

Shameless plug but I am currently curating https://theforest.link precisely because of the issue you’re describing.


Do you or anyone else have webrings that are interesting for someone who is into programming, math, fantasy, and sci-fi?

I knew a few were still around, but I'm not aware of any that are actively maintained.

I'm aware sci-fi is technically fantasy, but that categorization has never sat well with me.


sci-fi is technically fantasy

Interesting you’re looking for niche stuff then un-niche-ing SF and fantasy, when you could so easily go many parsecs down that rabbit hole. Here’s one guide to their subgenres - https://larawillard.com/2014/12/10/guide-to-sff-science-fict... - and there are many.

You could do this for almost any topic. Drill down down down. Fungi and unsolved math puzzles and flatbread and occlupanids.

Get far enough down and you’ll find people discussing and writing. These are the hedgerows of the Internet. Nerds are in the details.


Sadly no, nothing that specific comes to mind. I'm personally part of the Indie Web Webring but that's as far as I go when it comes to involvement with web rings.

That said there's a few listed here you might want to check https://sadgrl.online/cyberspace/webrings.html

And if none of those is what you're after I say be the change you want to see in the world and start a new webring!


> webrings are still a thing and there’s a bunch out there worth checking out

Oh wow. As an in-my-head joke, after I read the HN title, “web rings” was my answer to myself, casting my mind back to 1995… Imagine my delight to hear it’s still not only an answer, but a good one.

I don’t even know how much longer after Alta Vista vs Google “The Web” was interesting. My flip knee jerk assumption is Google optimized it all into the intellectual equivalent of the worst of children’s breakfast cereals. These days it’s HN and it’s community that serve as big role as jump-off point to interesting things.


theforest feedback: I like link sites to open in the same tab, like HN


Shouldn't this be up to you and something you can change in your browser?


Interesting. You’re the first person to ask for same tab opening. But it might make sense for this particular case. I’ll have a think.


I think trust people to know and do what they want: left click or middle click. The problem with making the new-tab choice for them is they can't click in such a way as to keep the same tab. I have literally written browser extensions to fix auto-new-tab links, it's that frustrating.


This is a compelling enough argument for me to switch the default.


Another data point: I open almost every link in a new tab, but I also find it very frustrating when a link opens in a new tab by default.


I'm the opposite. I actually wrote a small browser extension to make HN links open in a new tab because it annoys me so much.

I can't disagree with what others have said about making it user-choice though. Maybe some kind of toggle switch that lets users set the behavior one way or the other would work?


In chrome-based browsers, you can also middle-click (mouse wheel click) a link to open it as a new tab.


That predates Chrome by many years, in Firefox if not Opera, Konqueror, etc.


99% of the time I'm using a laptop trackpad, not a mouse.


You that you can open in new tabs with ctrl+click?

Just to be sure.


Yes, I'm aware. I'd rather not have to remember to do it every time though. Just personal preference.


A link should always open in the same tab by default, unless there’s a compelling reason otherwise: for users who prefer to open in a new tab (like myself) they can use the appropriate shortcuts, menu options or click combinations. If you configure links to open in a new tab, it’s impossible for a user to open it in the same tab.


I would agree that same-tab is desirable and the rest of us can use ctrl+click according to our preference.


Following this tangent, I think Twitter has some of the worst dark pattern UX about this. Sure, middle click opens a new tab but it also hijacks focus instead of loading in the background. It's really frustrating when I see X interesting things and want to open them all at once and then go through the tabs.


I've found some really interesting reading on are.na. Something that I particularly enjoy about that mode of discovery is that it is more about curation and discovery. The smallness of the community (it feels small at any rate) means that there doesn't seem to be a big incentive to degrade the overall quality by using SEO-like tactics.


> Something that I particularly enjoy about that mode of discovery is that it is more about curation and discovery

Agree and also it feels like no one on the platform has anything to earn from their curation and as a result they use the platform as an actual tool for themselves. And so most collections are views into other people's interests and passions.


Is there a way to report theforest.link sites? One of the first ones I was directed to is casually antisemitic


Really? Can you send me an email with the link? hello at manuelmoreale dot com

Thanks


Here you go:

- https://cloudhiker.net/

- https://jumpstick.app/

- https://theuselessweb.com/

- https://www.viralwalk.com/

- https://www.boredbutton.com/

- https://urlroulette.net/

- https://links.yesterweb.org/

- https://wiby.org/

- http://theoldnet.com/

- https://www.darkroastedblend.com/

- https://randomwebsite.mickschroeder.com/

- https://theforest.link/

- https://geocities.restorativland.org/

- https://usefulinterweb.com/


Search for strange and controversial topics on http://yandex.com . The results are totally different from the mainstream search engines which try hard to prevent fun "misinformation" by always sending you to the sites that never say anything strange.

For example, try "solar warden" (not the video game or the novel which is what the mainstream sites want to tell you about) on Yandex if you want to go down a fun rabbit hole.


This was indeed a fun rabbit hole, thanks for sharing. I love learning details of these secret technologies, even if it's all bullshit. There was another good rabbit hole I went down recently from a reply I got to a comment, may be of some interest to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32148218#32148898


A search for Solar Warden on DuckDuckGO [1] finds results for me, if you're referring to top results on Yandex about 'The Secret Space Program & Black Budget'?

I stopped using Google years ago as I find their search results, aside from being plagued by ads and people trying to game the results, have just become less useful. Which mainstream search engines are you referring to (I think DDG use bing).

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/q=solar+warden


I like that the mAiNStrEaM SIteS actually provide relevant results instead of placing fringe, absurd conspiracy theories first. Seems in line with Russian destabilisation campaigns though so maybe that on purpose?

And providing rt.com's propaganda as #2 on "Ukraine invasion"? Totally not suspicious.

OP asked for "manages to steer clear of hateful/racist/bigoted patterns of thought" though.


How is the idea that the u.s government has a secret space program that is flying around the universe under our noses with godlike technology hateful/racist/bigoted?

Is it now racist/hateful/bigoted to believe in alien technology conspiracies just because anything that's not official government information can be automatically labeled as such? I think the whole solar warden thing and the universe of b.s around it is kind of fun in a timecube kind of way and that attitude that anything that contradicts the government is racist/hateful/bigoted has killed a lot of the fun of the internet.


It's part of the post-fact world that was built up by Dugin's design. This is central to destabilization efforts. They've been trying this for a very long time - Eastern Europe was flooded with shoddily printed ufology magazines in the late 90s, often mentioning topics or sightings in Russia, and in retrospect probably just straight-up translations of centrally written articles.


I'm with you, it's fun. I got Coast to Coast vibes reading one of the pages on it. and I remembered Gary McKinnon from a Count Dankula video about him - didn't realize the conspiracy theory was connected to what he saw when he hacked NASA in 2002.


Sorry, I guess I read other things into "hateful/racist/bigoted" than reasonable. Conspiracy theories have become so insanely dangerous that I saw red flags. Might be a language issue, I am from Estonia.


Its the new communism.

Anything I do not like is racist/hateful/bigoted.


It's the new nationalism.

Anything that wasn't in an official press release from my government, party, or King is foreign subversion.


Feels similar to the new McCarthyism.

Anything I do not like is communist.


Well done citizen! +50 points.

You have unlocked access to bank loans and your children can now go to a level 2c school!


You'd probably come across better if you avoided having both russophobia and bigoteering in one post. One or the other would just imply you have strong opinions, both implies something much less value-neutral.

If the last line was self-criticism reflecting that the russophobia is inconsistent with OP's request I apologize, that's not clear from your wording.


I included the comments about Russia because Yandex is participating in Russian propaganda and censorship.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...


Turn on posts from banned users on this site. I’ve seen some genuinely deranged stuff on here. One time a poster got into a really heated debate about censorship and ended up posting links to a detailed guide on how to commit suicide for some reason!

It wasn’t particularly fun but it was genuinely an odd thing to come across on today’s internet.


I respect the people who have been banned years ago, know it, and instead of creating a new user continue to post dead comments, screaming into the void.


> screaming into the void

No, not into the void, but to people who care and find their unique content so interesting, in a sea of conformity and boring repetitions of the same ideas again and again.

I have a special color for banned users, to read their words more carefully, because if they care enough to keep going, I care enough to listen.


may have been related to Russia blocking GitHub in their country for hosting suicide pages https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/to-ge...


It was weirder than that. I can’t remember the domain off the top of my head but even if I could, I think we’d be drifting solidly off-topic.


StumbleUpon was the king of interesting yet random content. It seriously needs a reboot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon


stumbled.to is a pretty good replacement. doesn't have the same categories and features, but I find some interesting content on there.


That redirects to CloudHiker which I guess is a renaming?


Yeah


Thank you! I was going to mention StumbleUpon as well, but couldn't remember the name, haha. Used to use it way back.


What about a search engine? https://search.marginalia.nu/


Second this. You can find all kinds of interesting writing and documents with this search engine, I actually came here to say this.

There's also places on the web that are not right off the highway so to speak, you can find them by delving into smaller communities like forums, fediverse is a good place to find stuff like that. weboasis.app has links to a ton of small back road link aggregators and forums. The real internet exists, it's just google and Facebook aren't going to show it to you.


There is also wiby.me


> steer clear of hateful/racist/bigoted patterns of thought

If you want to widen the spectrum of humanity that you're exposed to, you're inevitably going to come across these people. Personally I thought it was well worth it. Plenty of good and bad to be found.


I agree with this.

I'm totally ok with sites on the internet that require you to have a bit of thick skin or being mildly uncomfortable with some ideas, since there's a spectrum that goes both ways, somewhat conceptually related to the Overton window, moral relativism, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Things you disagree with will always exist, and it's occasionally worth reading to sharpen and inform your own opinions—you don't need to adopt the perspective or arguments of viewpoints you disagree with, etc. Personally, I think it adds flavor to thinking, as a willful rejection of hegemonic thought practices. Occasionally, on an empathetic reading, you grow to understand that people who have opinions who make you uncomfortable at face-value sometimes have good intent behind it, and in a critical lens you realize they may just be misguided in how to resolve a problem they see. (Certainly not in all cases, but we're humans—it's good to not reduce differing perspectives to one-dimensional readings.)

But what should not exist is content like (for lack of better examples) Kiwifarms, where bad actors used the relative anonymity of the internet plus crowd psychology to radicalize folks in their in-circle and cause extreme, mortal harm to others. That's not the good weird web.


The choice isn’t to avoid such people completely, it is impossible. The problem is minimizing contact with such patterns as much as possible, and this is getting increasingly difficult.

There is a treasure trove of amazing stuff on Reddit, Twitter etc. But finding that stuff is getting harder and harder. There is much more money in promoting hate, bigotry etc than positive, interesting stuff.


As long as you know the difference and know where you stand yourself, morally / value-wise.

I believe there's a big percentage of people who hadn't yet had their moment of self-actualisation or whatever the phrase is, who listened to the right(wrong) people at the right(wrong) time and ended up believing the earth is flat or the holocaust never happened.


And bear in mind that your internet browsing may be logged by your government.


Random thought: if the commercial web has all but devoured the original web, leaving only a fraction of the interesting parts behind and which are no longer really growing in number, isn't this counter to the reason why we decided we needed search engines altogether? Wouldn't it be nice if someone made a modern Yahoo! Directory equivalent for those random olde worlde curios we all pine for? Something like a modern decentralized Geocities


You can try SearchMySite:

"The searchmysite.net search engine is a niche search, focussing on the "indieweb" or "small web" or "digital gardens", i.e. non-commercial content, primarily personal and independent websites."

https://searchmysite.net/


All you had to do was ask.

Here’s one I found recently: http://www.betainfoguide.net/

The social tech of 2007 in the web tech of 1997 for the tape tech of 1977. I swear if browsers still supported the blink and marquee tags there would be some of that on display here.


I don't know about blink, but there is a marquee tag on the front page and it works as expected in Edge.


indeed! came to post this: https://i.imgur.com/jHoTdJU.png


[Mostly NSFW] If you want to explore knowledge about the human body and what people do with it, I suggest «The tree of reddit sex life» as an exploration start point:

https://observablehq.com/@stared/tree-of-reddit-sex-life


You have to join the hidden un-Googleable communities where the people who create such things gather.


Yes, this. I've recently been reading a lot about OSR and indie zine-like TTRPGs. Almost indiscriminate link-clicking seems to be the safest way to end up in the weird zones of any hobby. The beauty of it (in this specific case) is that the farther you go from mainstream, the more you encounter people who create stuff. Weird, wonderful stuff.


Heh, my screentime went up this last week because I also recently discovered this rabbithole during a downtime from regular game night. Reading through old Zine-Quest (https://www.kickstarter.com/zine-quest) entries has been particularly fascinating.


Yes, but do you know about the Mongrel Banquet Club? The secret cabal of OSRians and their behind-the-scenes machinations? Google it my friend, google it. Many of the weird folk you allude to were members, I hear.


the farther you go from mainstream, the more you encounter people who create stuff

Well said and often true. There are quiet corners.


Not to diminish the quality of the content in the answers of other respondents, but don't link directories and self hosted HTML blogs filter for a certain potentially unwanted writer bias? i.e. 30-something, male, agorist, nostalgic for the old internet, oddly niche hobbies, English as first or second language, ...


>but don't link directories and self hosted HTML blogs filter for a certain potentially unwanted writer bias? i.e. 30-something, male, agorist, nostalgic for the old internet, oddly niche hobbies, English as first or second language

I suspect the bias is wanted, consciously or not. Part of the nostalgia for the 'old web', which this specific thread is a subset of, is for a return to the sense of homogeneity and community from when the web was primarily the playground of white male adolescent nerds, a culture with common referents and ideals. It's a kind of "white flight" from the modern web in that sense.


It’s a flight from SEO optimized nonsense and junk food content. I don’t care at all if a creator looks like or thinks like I do. I want to read interesting content.

As an example, Gemini has a strong collection of LGBTQ+ and furry creators. I am in neither of those groups, and I’m enjoying the content immensely. Not because of how the authors identify, but because they are writing with passion and detail into interesting topics. That’s what I crave

Attributing desire for “the old/weird web” to Some kind of identity monoculture is a disservice.


Except there's plenty of interesting content on social media platforms and "commercial" sites. Lots of content by LGBTQ+ and furry creators. Plenty of writing with passion and detail on interesting topics, although granted much of that writing is for video.

And as far as Gemini goes, I suspect it's far more homogeneous, culturally and politically, than even the early web was.


If anything the opposite. The goal is to return to a web before facial verification was required to create accounts and before everyone knew you were a dog.


> don't link directories and self hosted HTML blogs filter for a certain potentially unwanted writer bias? i.e. 30-something, male, agorist, nostalgic for the old internet, oddly niche hobbies, English as first or second language, ...

Why is this? (genuinely asking)


https://www.thinking-about-things.com and https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com are pretty good


I continue to like the chans for this. They have a bad reputation for bigotry but many chan users are just as hostile toward this as anyone else, and treat cesspools like /pol/ as containment boards whose malign attitudes need to be kept out of other boards. This is true even on 4chan itself, and there are many more obscure examples.

For that matter, even superficially toxic online spaces are often highly contested and exhibit recognizable dynamic patterns, notwithstanding the anonymity of the participants.

Alternatively, anything is possible at zombo.com.


One way is to have a 'weird interest' and go on the in-depth research needed to back up a hunch of yours.

The interest does not have to be that weird. Along the way you might contact someone that has the same interest as yourself, for example to ask if they have an image in a different format or at a higher resolution. With a bit of rapport and infectious enthusiasm for their subject, I am sure you can get more into it with sources for the original content shared.

History is a good way to get on this journey. I am fascinated by what people ate in times past, and on a quest to find an answer to whom man's best friend really was. The sheep is the front runner on that, not the dog. There is no absolute answer, nobody has put me on a deadline to come up with a definitive answer, it is just pure, self-directed study for the joy of learning.

I like things that are outside of Google search results. I also view Google search results as a facsimile for a full web search. With your phone there is that feature to identify songs with Google Assistant. Even if you are not online it will get results for most songs. It has a cache of what it thinks is enough for most people. I think Google search results as a whole are like that.


I am on a pair of discord servers that have a bunch of weirdos. I know better than to advertise a small community though.


Search engines that roll their own unique crawlers:

(a big list of them) https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...


Use your imagination. Think up keywords for weird stuff, type them in on search engines, eBay, Etsy, everywhere and see what turns up. Be somewhat vague, like "wireless LED". Also try searches on things you already know of and see what is related. Try "Webb Wilder" and "Subgenius" and see what sites are returned and don't look at those pages but at the sites themselves. Be persistent, you may have to wade through a lot of non-weirdness.

http://www.theoddityarchive.com/ "psychotronic" http://sainteuphoria.com/


You're on the right site for it.


There are many great sites out there. People may think they are dead or lost because they don't attract millions of view per day, but "back when the web was good" there were just less people on the internet. And a lot of the bulk of the people online padding out the numbers these days are never going to be interested in these sorts of things anyway. To find new sites it can be fun following a topic down a wikipedia rabbit hole looking for external links etc. for example start with discord on wikipedia and eventually end up with something like http://www.principiadiscordia.com fnord


Well it's def not the best way.. but I find mostly a subredit for any weird of wonderful interests I might have at that time, sorting the post by top-x (week, month,all time) can give you some quick domain-knowledge or important urls. YMMV(Greatly)


You may like my Mastodon or Twitter bot:

- https://twitter.com/IndieRandWeb

- https://mastodon.social/web/@FunRandWeb

They post every two hours a link to an indie website.

Source code for the curious: https://github.com/xojoc/randomwebsitebot

The websites are taken from https://stumblingon.com/ at the moment, but I'll add more sources in the future.


xmofi 0qe 01110100010 100110:00 mj tev qeb crqrob albpkq kbba rp qeu abjbqof fc orav n xka x tfqe jxoh zixdub


I have 2

- http://whale.to

- https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/

Both are crazy conspiracy theory websites


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles

Various other lists on wikipedia. (I think there is a "list of lists" with thousands of lists).

Sites that show lists of subreddits.

There are things like "first world problems", "secod world problems" - and much much stranger stuff the higher you go ("I wanted to bake a cake from scratch, but in order to do that, I had to create a new universe").


I subscribe to https://webcurios.co.uk … weekly curated list of unusual projects and finds…


The other day I casually found Neocities... a sort of Geocities revival that I found interesting: https://neocities.org/browse

I also like Fosstodon, a FOSS-oriented Mastodon instance. Plenty of interesting people to browse and follow: https://fosstodon.org/explore


Gossip’s Web is one of my favorite sources:

https://gossipsweb.net/


I regret that I have but one upvote to give.


While I think the other suggestions here are more what you're looking for, https://neocities.org have managed to grow a community of sorts with a 90s/early 2000s "home page" feel to them.


Personally, I found out about the church from the radio not the internet. Though the website is fun.


Reddit has a lot of such rabbit holes, but one needs to wade through a lot before finding it.


https://telehack.com


I think these things have always spread by message boards. Today that probably means Reddit.


Mostly my social bubble and of course reddit! I even read hackernews through reddit, thanks to the sub forum. Otherwise there is the good old google bang for site:reddit.com for anything of interest =)

I can safely reccomend the appollo app for your phone.


Try to go to i2p darkweb: https://geti2p.net. "Eepsites" like planet.i2p collect stuff from various corners of it.


I find Boing Boing ( https://boingboing.net/ ) is a good newsletter of weird stuff.


Be sure to have an ad blocker for Boing Boing. My god, the irony of a site that rails against the bad practices of web commercialism embracing all the bad practices of web commercialism.


It's a pity they don't have a filter button to hide the political posts in favor of actually interesting content.


You read what other weird people write and follow your nose.


oh this posting is not good for my productivity...


Well, here's a site:

https://npstn.us/about


How did you find the timecube site?


I like looking at neocities. You can find some weird shit in links on message boards.


Always read the comments on HN.

This is the way.


You're familiar with the (now sadly degraded) deoxy.org?


It's broken right now, but check out the Marginalia search engine:

https://www.metafilter.com/194653/Marginalia-Search-Serendip...

https://search.marginalia.nu


wiby.me takes you to older websites. Some of them can be weird.


start with the best search engine. searx.org


Interesting


www.metafilter.com


[flagged]


TIL they have Discord

their megathread is way better than r/piracy

any list which doesn't include Pahe, PSA and Knaben is for me not worth reading

edit:

Greetings everyone, as you may know our discord server was nuked weeks ago along with several others, and so we have made the decision to move to revolt entirely.

You can get started by:

Registering[1] an account at https://divolt.xyz and logging in Join the server: https://fmhy.divolt.xyz Some points to note: 1 - this is an entirely self-hosted instance, so you must register a new one even if you already have one on the official instance.


Go to reddit.com




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