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Comment by alva | Hacker News Reader

The joys of the world wild west are still out there for curious surfers. Admittedly it does require a lot more effort, especially for a younger generation who may not remember what the early web is like and how you would traverse it. I still get a thrill finding 'hidden' communities on the internet.

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Here's a collection of jumping-off points to curious communities I've spent many a happy hour exploring:

http://ribbonfarm.com https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/ http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/ http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ https://meaningness.com/ http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/

Enjoy :)

We need a DARE program to warn unsuspecting children about people like you ;) LessWrong is a rabbit hole you'll never find your way out of.

Oh it starts off harmless. "I'll just read a couple", you say. But a year later you're mainlining SSC and pissing off all your friends talking about "virtue signaling". And then a year after that you're living in Berkeley, dating five people, and giving a third of your income to MIRI. Kids, just say no!

Well, dating five people if you're (mostly hetero) female; dating one or two people, who are each dating five people, if you're (mostly hetero) male.

Edit: Arguably, this is a better outcome than monogamy in a highly gender-skewed community (e.g. 1 in 2 het men dateless).

Source? (I'm not being argumentative, just genuinely curious if this is anything but anecdote.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lhg/2014_survey_results/

50% monogamous, 15% poly.

Every lesswrong group I've visited - in the US, Europe and India - had multiple polyamorous people present and discussing polyamory, so I'd be surprised if this poll is way off.

Oh look at that, a perfect opportunity for me to plug that I ran the 2016 survey with updated results:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nmk/2016_lesswrong_dias...

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nor/2016_lesswrong_dias...

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nqa/2016_lesswrong_dias...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx2/2016_lesswrong_diaspora_survey_a...

The one that concerns you is that LessWrong is now 18.2% polyamorous. This might just be an effect of increased scope of survey respondents though.

Anecdote, i.e. me dating a girl with 3 boyfriends in the Bay Area.

Please go back in time and invent this program. I definitely need to stop mainlining SSC.

Rationalist fiction is also tons of fun. Here's a great sample story from this community if you have an hour or so free: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep...

Stop making me want to read it!

Thanks for the links, I enjoy discovering sites with interesting content.

They probably wouldn't be classed as unknown/obscure, but I always seem to find something interesting on Brain Pickings and Colossal, worth a look if they're new to you:

https://www.brainpickings.org/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

Principia Cybernetica introduced me to pantheism (not really a theism at all). It is wonderful that the internet still allows people to stumble upon things that can positively change their life, even if it is hard to find those things. It was probably harder to find such things before the internet.

I've started collecting my weirdest links, though I'm not sure what to do with them yet. Hundreds of watercolors featuring Nazi war criminal Reynard Heidrich transforming into a female bird, a studio producing sexy anthropomorphized American warships that's started shifting towards Trump propaganda, a network of alt-right teenage girls' tumblrs, mostly based out of Nebraska, subreddits for conspiracy theorists focusing entirely on an unremarkable seeming dude who is apparently at the center of the new world order... the internet's weirder than it's ever been.

Please post them on a pastebin. The alt-right tumblr and conspiracy reddit sound amazing

Tumblr is full of weirdness, I would call it the modern velocities minus the 90s designs. And it gets even weirder on the chans and the deepweb.

Yeah, who is this seemingly normal guy? I want to know!

I second this. That's really intriguing! I'm imagining that there is some random dude out there that somehow became the focus of some nutty conspiranoids and I can't stop laughing.

And here we thought Weimar Germany produced bizarre art.

You're sitting on about 100k worth of Reddit karma.

I used to enjoy visiting StumbleUpon and seeing what kinds of random places I'd end up. Then one day they asked me what kind of content I enjoyed, and wouldn't let me do anything else until I told them. Stopped going after that. I miss the ease of ending up somewhere totally unexpected that it once gave me.

I'm a fan of finding odd corners on the 'net, what's your technique?

I mostly find the odd places when searching on and for discussions of old stomping grounds. That usually leads me down a long path of links. Sometimes I discover by joining oddly named and sparsely visited IRC rooms. Occasionally great sites are posted to 4chan.

A recent discovery was made when looking for recent references to Temple Of The Screaming Electron. This search led me to two weird corners (potentially NSFW).

1. http://www.popeye-x.com/title123.htm As far as I can tell originally set up by a group of programmers (and I think phreakers, digging through the archives ), based in Texas with a common connection to a niche Austin based radio station. Highly original, deeply buried links, multiple hidden forums.

2. http://nobodytm.com Not even sure how to explain this one! Has a chat room that the owner sometimes frequents with cryptic messages that appear to mean something to other participants.

Deep forum links on weird topics is my goto, but IRC may be something I should get back into.

I kinda miss the web being made of forums, I feel like that's a tradition that's less healthy than it was. Facebook groups or slack channel or Stack Exchange just don't do it for me the same way

> Deep forum links on weird topics is my goto

What about this?

http://miketysontattoos.blogspot.ca/2011/06/quotient-rule-di...

Not quite a forum link, but I really couldn't figure out what the purpose of that site was. Some sort of spam/seo seeding operation? Where does the source material come from.

That is crazy stuff. Weird as a numbers station

I was trying to find a subreddit to help promote a friend's video when I found this and now check it every day:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube

The rules are something like < 1000 views in six months. So it's all obscure stuff.

Strange subreddits are good. StumbleUpon isn't useful for much, but permitting tons of categories and going wild with it is a good way to get weird.

Anything that allows chaining is a big help, which is why people get to "the weird part of Youtube" more easily than the weird parts of the general internet. Sometimes you can exploit this by dipping in and out of linkable things (it's like recreating webrings). Try following chains of linked subreddits or tumblr accounts, then popping back out at some odd-looking link they point to.

But honestly, it's hard. I find a lot of 'weird internet' by reading the SlateStarCodex link collections, and otherwise letting other people do the hard work for me.

Data-mining reddit is often a good start.

reddit serves some very narrow niches and outlinks to some very curious places.

Can you give an example of one of these curious places? Now I'm curious...

I like this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/internetisbeautiful

That's one of the default subs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/4l3svc/list_of_de...

Sometimes people will deliberately manufacture an experience like this for a creepy story/etc, which can be fun.

Internet mythmaking in general ('creepypasta'/etc) is a fun rabbit hole to go down. Most are mediocre, but a handful of stories are genuinely brilliant:

http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Psychosis

http://thebooksofsand.blogspot.com/

I used to enjoy perusing rationalviews.com - but it seems that they're shutting down.

Sorta bummed about that, but I get why. Too few people contributed to the discussions

i feel like a lot of the freewheeling gibsonian stuff is happening on tumblr - it provides a relatively easy way to push content to the internet without overly constraining the form of that content.

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