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

[bittercynic]

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?

[manuelmoreale]

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.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

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.

[bch]

> 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.

[arbirk]

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

[pdinny]

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.

[status200]

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

[Kovah]

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/

[narrator]

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.

[uejfiweun]

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

[beermonster]

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

[yaddaor]

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.

[braingenious]

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.

[yreg]

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.

[tonto]

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...

[1970-01-01]

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

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

[tsol]

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

[hag]

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

[themodelplumber]

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

[betwixthewires]

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]

There is also wiby.me

[matheusmoreira]

> 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.

[cptcobalt]

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.

[akudha]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

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.

[crazytalk]

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]

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/

[SllX]

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.

[zephyrfalcon]

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

[ZeWaren]

[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

[Apreche]

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

[hectorlorenzo]

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.

[baristavibes]

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, ...

[krapp]

>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.

[spangry]

> 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)

[really_relay]

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

[anigbrowl]

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.

[Theodores]

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.

[anothernewdude]

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

[arboles]

Search engines that roll their own unique crawlers:

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

[rapjr9]

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/

[Stamp01]

You're on the right site for it.

[jimjimjim]

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