10 ms·

Ask HN: How do you find the weird parts of the web?

• codevark 4y ago
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  What about a search engine? https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
  • betwixthewires 4y ago
    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.
  • wan_ala 4y ago
    There is also wiby.me
• really_relay 4y ago
  https://www.thinking-about-things.com https://www.thinking-about-things.com and https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com https://www.readsomethinginteresting.com are pretty good
• earthboundkid 4y ago
  I think these things have always spread by message boards. Today that probably means Reddit.
• narrator 4y ago
  Search for strange and controversial topics on http://yandex.com 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.
  • uejfiweun 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32148218#32148898
  • yaddaor 4y ago
    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.
    • narrator 4y ago
      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.
      • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  StumbleUpon was the king of interesting yet random content. It seriously needs a reboot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon
  • tsol 4y ago
    stumbled.to is a pretty good replacement. doesn't have the same categories and features, but I find some interesting content on there.
    • kencausey 4y ago
      That redirects to CloudHiker which I guess is a renaming?
      • tsol 4y ago
        Yeah
  • hag 4y ago
    Thank you! I was going to mention StumbleUpon as well, but couldn't remember the name, haha. Used to use it way back.
• Stamp01 4y ago
  You're on the right site for it.
• wan_ala 4y ago
  I like looking at neocities. You can find some weird shit in links on message boards.
• Apreche 4y ago
  You have to join the hidden un-Googleable communities where the people who create such things gather.
  • hectorlorenzo 4y ago
    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.
    • Kaibeezy 4y ago
      the farther you go from mainstream, the more you encounter people who create stuff Well said and often true. There are quiet corners.
    • ericgoesoutside 4y ago
      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 https://www.kickstarter.com/zine-quest) entries has been particularly fascinating.
    • vlark 4y ago
      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.
• runnr_az 4y ago
  I subscribe to https://webcurios.co.uk https://webcurios.co.uk … weekly curated list of unusual projects and finds…
• jawmes8 4y ago
  How did you find the timecube site?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  I am on a pair of discord servers that have a bunch of weirdos. I know better than to advertise a small community though.
• denkmoon 4y ago
  You read what other weird people write and follow your nose.
• manuelmoreale 4y ago
  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/ 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 https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php) Shameless plug but I am currently curating https://theforest.link https://theforest.link precisely because of the issue you’re describing.
  • pdinny 4y ago
    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.
    • manuelmoreale 4y ago
      > 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.
  • arbirk 4y ago
    theforest feedback: I like link sites to open in the same tab, like HN
    • dmurray 4y ago
      Shouldn't this be up to you and something you can change in your browser?
    • manuelmoreale 4y ago
• SllX 4y ago
  All you had to do was ask. Here’s one I found recently: http://www.betainfoguide.net/ 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.
  • zephyrfalcon 4y ago
    I don't know about blink, but there is a marquee tag on the front page and it works as expected in Edge.
    • boltzmann-brain 4y ago
      indeed! came to post this: https://i.imgur.com/jHoTdJU.png https://i.imgur.com/jHoTdJU.png
• random123973 4y ago
  • Markoff 4y ago
    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 https://divolt.xyz and logging in Join the server: https://fmhy.divolt.xyz 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.
• senectus1 4y ago
  oh this posting is not good for my productivity...
• bhedgeoser 4y ago
  Go to reddit.com
• memalign 4y ago
  Gossip’s Web is one of my favorite sources: https://gossipsweb.net/ https://gossipsweb.net/
• jhoelzel 4y ago
  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.
• wernsey 4y ago
  Always read the comments on HN. This is the way.
• sidcool 4y ago
  Reddit has a lot of such rabbit holes, but one needs to wade through a lot before finding it.
• braingenious 4y ago
  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.
  • tonto 4y ago
    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-get-off-russias-blacklist-github-has-blocked-access-to-pages-that-highlight-suicide/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/to-ge...
    • braingenious 4y ago
      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.
  • yreg 4y ago
    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.
    • csdvrx 4y ago
      > 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.
• fsflover 4y ago
  Try to go to i2p darkweb: https://geti2p.net https://geti2p.net. "Eepsites" like planet.i2p collect stuff from various corners of it.
• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > 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.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    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.
    • b800h 4y ago
      And bear in mind that your internet browsing may be logged by your government.
  • akudha 4y ago
    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.
  • cptcobalt 4y ago
    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 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.
• rapjr9 4y ago
  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/ http://www.theoddityarchive.com/ "psychotronic" http://sainteuphoria.com/ http://sainteuphoria.com/
• Kovah 4y ago
  Here you go: - https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/ - https://jumpstick.app/ https://jumpstick.app/ - https://theuselessweb.com/ https://theuselessweb.com/ - https://www.viralwalk.com/ https://www.viralwalk.com/ - https://www.boredbutton.com/ https://www.boredbutton.com/ - https://urlroulette.net/ https://urlroulette.net/ - https://links.yesterweb.org/ https://links.yesterweb.org/ - https://wiby.org/ https://wiby.org/ - http://theoldnet.com/ http://theoldnet.com/ - https://www.darkroastedblend.com/ https://www.darkroastedblend.com/ - https://randomwebsite.mickschroeder.com/ https://randomwebsite.mickschroeder.com/ - https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ - https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/ - https://usefulinterweb.com/ https://usefulinterweb.com/
• akshayrajp 4y ago
  wiby.me takes you to older websites. Some of them can be weird.
• rawoke083600 4y ago
  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)
• b800h 4y ago
  You're familiar with the (now sadly degraded) deoxy.org?
• crazytalk 4y ago
  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
  • rpigab 4y ago
    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/ https://searchmysite.net/
• rvba 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles 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").
• jimjimjim 4y ago
  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 http://www.principiadiscordia.com fnord
• Area12 4y ago
  I find Boing Boing ( https://boingboing.net/ https://boingboing.net/ ) is a good newsletter of weird stuff.
  • aerostable_slug 4y ago
    It's a pity they don't have a filter button to hide the political posts in favor of actually interesting content.
  • vlark 4y ago
    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.
• ForHackernews 4y ago
  It's broken right now, but check out the Marginalia search engine: https://www.metafilter.com/194653/Marginalia-Search-Serendipity-Engineering https://www.metafilter.com/194653/Marginalia-Search-Serendip... https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu
• baristavibes 4y ago
  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, ...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • krapp 4y ago
    >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.
    • billyhoffman 4y ago
      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.
      • krapp 4y ago
        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.
• tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Well, here's a site: https://npstn.us/about https://npstn.us/about
• raniceyue 4y ago
  I have 2 - http://whale.to http://whale.to - https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/ https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/ Both are crazy conspiracy theory websites
• xojoc 4y ago
  You may like my Mastodon or Twitter bot: - https://twitter.com/IndieRandWeb https://twitter.com/IndieRandWeb - https://mastodon.social/web/@FunRandWeb 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 https://github.com/xojoc/randomwebsitebot The websites are taken from https://stumblingon.com/ https://stumblingon.com/ at the moment, but I'll add more sources in the future.
• e12e 4y ago
  While I think the other suggestions here are more what you're looking for, https://neocities.org https://neocities.org have managed to grow a community of sorts with a 90s/early 2000s "home page" feel to them.
• zorrolovsky 4y ago
  The other day I casually found Neocities... a sort of Geocities revival that I found interesting: https://neocities.org/browse 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 https://fosstodon.org/explore
• ChoGGi 4y ago
  Personally, I found out about the church from the radio not the internet. Though the website is fun.
• ZeWaren 4y ago
  [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 https://observablehq.com/@stared/tree-of-reddit-sex-life
• atulghorpade 4y ago
  Interesting
• Daub 4y ago
  I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
• ta8347 4y ago
  https://telehack.com https://telehack.com
• Theodores 4y ago
  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.
• arboles 4y ago
  Search engines that roll their own unique crawlers: (a big list of them) https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
• sumosudo 4y ago
  start with the best search engine. searx.org
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  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.
• MollyRealized 4y ago
  www.metafilter.com
• curveball3301 4y ago
  xmofi 0qe 01110100010 100110:00 mj tev qeb crqrob albpkq kbba rp qeu abjbqof fc orav n xka x tfqe jxoh zixdub