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?
- 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.
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.
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?
Just to be sure.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Thanks
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.
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.
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.
Anything I do not like is racist/hateful/bigoted.
Anything I do not like is communist.
Anything that wasn't in an official press release from my government, party, or King is foreign subversion.
You have unlocked access to bank loans and your children can now go to a level 2c school!
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/russia-yandex-...
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).
It wasn’t particularly fun but it was genuinely an odd thing to come across on today’s internet.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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."
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.
Well said and often true. There are quiet corners.
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.
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.
And as far as Gemini goes, I suspect it's far more homogeneous, culturally and politically, than even the early web was.
Why is this? (genuinely asking)
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.
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.
(a big list of them) https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
http://www.theoddityarchive.com/ "psychotronic" http://sainteuphoria.com/
- 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.
- https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/
Both are crazy conspiracy theory websites
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 also like Fosstodon, a FOSS-oriented Mastodon instance. Plenty of interesting people to browse and follow: https://fosstodon.org/explore
I can safely reccomend the appollo app for your phone.
This is the way.
https://www.metafilter.com/194653/Marginalia-Search-Serendip...