For a long time, a tiny handful of sites, especially reddit and other social media and youtube, have dominated my idea of the internet, and I’d love to change that and find cool new places.
Found some blogs tucked away here and there that are interesting:
McMansion Hell - All about horrendous modern housing styles
Things I Won’t Work With - A chemistry blog that is quite hilarious. Sadly there hasn’t been new one of these for years.
I can’t think of others off the top of my head. For the longest time I was usually either on Reddit or Wikipedia.
Oh oh oh! I second Mcmansionhell, its one of my favorite blogs of all time.
I’m starting to spend time browsing through neocities sites lately. It’s so refreshing seeing people just write about their lives or whatever else interests them without the whole social media dick-measuring contest. The amount of creativity that goes into the layouts is amazing too, you never know what the next site will look like.
I loved Neocities as soon as I found out about its existence. It hits me square in my 2001 heart lol. I guess I missed that kind of thing more than I thought I did.
I’m someone who just found out what Neocities is, and I am so delighted! Damn, people are so creative and fun with their sites! It feels so rad to click through whatever unique links and blogs they have.
Thanks a lot for posting this.
Maybe not hidden, but xkcd.com
I like Every Noise at Once. It’s a map of all the musical genres in Spotify with song previews, and every time I browse, I discover something new. If you click into a genre, you can see what artists are associated with it.
McSweeny’s isn’t exactly a hidden corner of the internet, but it’s so good that if there’s any chance you might not be aware of it, not mentioning it would be borderline negligence. I like this recent article on guttural screaming spaces in the office.
TYWKIWDBI - Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently “‘Tai-wiki-widbee’ is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.”
Kottke - “Frequent topics of interest among the 26,000+ posts include art, technology, science, visual culture, design, music, cities, food, architecture, sports, endless nonsense, and carefully curated current events, all of it lightly contextualized.”
News From ME - Personal blog of Mark Evanier, writer for comic books (Groo the Wanderer) and television (Garfield and Friends). Often writes about TV, movies, theater, “and other forms of fantasy”.
Meshnet is definitely one of the hidden corner of the internet, because it’s essentially an invite-only network. One of the network I was from was solely for archiving documentations and sharing projects, it had it’s own search engine, email system, reddit clone, and more.
It is closed now, but I was a member of LUElinks (which then became End of the Internet). It was born out of the GameFAQs “Life, the Universe, and Everything” board which had a reputation of doing immature shit circa 2001-2004 IIRC. One of the members decided it would be cool to do file sharing on LUE so he built LUElinks - instead of directly linking something, you would get a code you could post out in the open and non-members would be none the wiser (I guess). Eventually GameFAQs announced it was wiping its hands of the LUE message board and LUElinks became its own forum community for nearly 20 years. It went through some changes over the years (file sharing stopped in 2013 due to potential legal issues related to a Harry Potter book). But it was 100% the community I was a member of the longest, and I am sad it closed.
a harry potter book did someone post the entire thing on there or something?
Pretty sure it was the latter. If I recall they worked at a bookstore that had advanced copies and they scanned the entire thing into a pdf.
cloudhiker (previously stumbled.cc; basically a modern stumbledupon) may or may not be good for discovering stuff like this, although it also has a lot of big sites fed into it.