4 ms·

I love these stupid fun projects. There's no commercial motivation, no shady manipulation: it's just _fun_. 'Whimsical' is the word that I think best describes

I love these stupid fun projects. There's no commercial motivation, no shady manipulation: it's just _fun_. 'Whimsical' is the word that I think best describes it. I love the whimsy of it. I wish more of the internet was like this.

nationcrafting 6y ago
>I wish more of the internet was like this. I love that they're hosted on their own websits, too. Like the hamsterdance and other stupid things from the 90s. So much fun stuff nowadays is just memes on Reddit, fb or other social networks. They're still fun, but they close the gardens one joke at a time. Can you imagine how much less conformity there would be if even 10% of fb users also had fun on their own website or self-hosted blog?
aahhahahaaa 6y ago
Even better, it actually saps productivity.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
>I wish more of the internet was like this. It used to be. I'm am old pre-WWW guy. We had a lot of whimsy, "back in the day." Then serious money started to happen, and that changed everything. It's not all bad -at all. I think a lot of modern stuff is very cool, and I'm glad folks are making money on this, as it helps with that ol' "rising tide lifts all boats" thing. But I do sort of miss the "dorky" whimsy (I wonder if anyone remembers "Kill Dean's Inits!"). The current IT scene is fairly cutthroat and deadly serious.
- dhosek 6y ago
  My favorite bit of old-school whimsy was Kibo, who would join any usenet thread that his name was mentioned in. Then there was the green card lottery spamming which was, in my estimation, the day the internet died.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    > Kibo Wow. I'd forgotten all about him/her (probably him).
    - kick 6y ago
      Him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry
- bjt 6y ago
  By pure volume, there's got to be more whimsy on the internet today than back then. There are orders of magnitude more people on it. But sure, the percentage is probably lower. That says to me that this is a search problem. Could we build a search engine that favors indie/personal labors of love over commercial sites? Or maybe it's a curation problem rather than search. In which case a site like HN is just the thing to help it bubble to the surface.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    Back in the early days of the web, one of my regular stops was Worst of the Web which was a collection of the most embarrassing things people put up on personal "home pages." (As an aside, at a work meeting last week, someone used the term home page to refer to a web page and I was instantly transported to 1995. I remember one upper level manager excitedly declare that the term home page should only refer to the page that opens when you start the browser and not to the page that we had at our companies main address.)

nationcrafting 6y ago

>I wish more of the internet was like this. I love that they're hosted on their own websits, too. Like the hamsterdance and other stupid things from the 90s. So much fun stuff nowadays is just memes on Reddit, fb or other social networks. They're still fun, but they close the gardens one joke at a time. Can you imagine how much less conformity there would be if even 10% of fb users also had fun on their own website or self-hosted blog?

aahhahahaaa 6y ago

Even better, it actually saps productivity.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

>I wish more of the internet was like this. It used to be. I'm am old pre-WWW guy. We had a lot of whimsy, "back in the day." Then serious money started to happen, and that changed everything. It's not all bad -at all. I think a lot of modern stuff is very cool, and I'm glad folks are making money on this, as it helps with that ol' "rising tide lifts all boats" thing. But I do sort of miss the "dorky" whimsy (I wonder if anyone remembers "Kill Dean's Inits!"). The current IT scene is fairly cutthroat and deadly serious.

dhosek 6y ago
My favorite bit of old-school whimsy was Kibo, who would join any usenet thread that his name was mentioned in. Then there was the green card lottery spamming which was, in my estimation, the day the internet died.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > Kibo Wow. I'd forgotten all about him/her (probably him).
  - kick 6y ago
    Him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry
bjt 6y ago
By pure volume, there's got to be more whimsy on the internet today than back then. There are orders of magnitude more people on it. But sure, the percentage is probably lower. That says to me that this is a search problem. Could we build a search engine that favors indie/personal labors of love over commercial sites? Or maybe it's a curation problem rather than search. In which case a site like HN is just the thing to help it bubble to the surface.
- dhosek 6y ago
  Back in the early days of the web, one of my regular stops was Worst of the Web which was a collection of the most embarrassing things people put up on personal "home pages." (As an aside, at a work meeting last week, someone used the term home page to refer to a web page and I was instantly transported to 1995. I remember one upper level manager excitedly declare that the term home page should only refer to the page that opens when you start the browser and not to the page that we had at our companies main address.)