I really enjoyed this. It is very similar to "Please, enough with the dead butterflies!" [0] I'd like to see a list of everything like this. Similar to Awesome falsehood [1] but not quite.
I wish more old www sites were still up. YTMND suffered a server failure. fark.com seems up, but rather a shadow of its former self. Shock sites seem to have mostly gone away or devolved into a sea of ads.
(Your site gave a sudden surge of nostalgia, and for some reason those sites were the first to jump to mind.)
https://poo.com/ is another slice of old www style. It's not a shock site, just a chat site. But it has some funny functionality like a radio you can listen to, and customizing your avatar with various multicolor schemes and blinky text, myspace-style.
How about modernizing the old animated gif/flash sites so they work in modern browsers? I've started on hamster dance[0] and leekspin[1], but the sounds leave something to be desired (hamster dance is more annoying than I remember, and I completely forgot the sound on leekspin).
YTMND is up, at least partially. ytmnd.com says: "As of 2019-12-01, YTMNDs and the search are back online."
Random example (http://picard.ytmnd.com/) works.
> I reserve the right to link to dipshits and crazies. I link to what piques my curiosity, what amazes me or what horrifies me. This includes you.
Awesome site. Thanks
> You might also look at it like: maybe I’ve friended these links. But instead of putting them in a big number that represents my friends—my 11 friends, for instance—I list my friends out neatly and try to coax you to meet them.
Perhaps there is no need for friending. For likes. For upvotes. For hashtags. For boosts. For trending. For rank. For followers. For an algorithm.
Perhaps linking—and spending time telling you why I linked—is good enough. Perhaps it’s superior!
Profile checks out. todays.pointless.click looks good :D I started https://furious.engineering/ to add random stuff, but so far there's only one which shows the spanish equivalent of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.
I think these ones could be added to awesome-falsehoods. I'd love a list that was more centered on this idea, but for now awesome-falsehoods would probably be the best place for it. Maybe a design or visual category?
I had hoped that the internet, beyond the 90s, would be a place where almost everyone has a webpage like ours populated with whatever it is the individual decided was noteworthy.
To an extent it's come true in a small subset. But discovery is the hard part. Right now discovery leads you to social media pages full of, for the most part, a low budget substitute for air.
I feel like everyone running a webpage/blog like that should have a somewhat standardised page crosslinking to pages/blogs that person likes to keep track off
Ya, I also assumed, hoped?, the 80s quirkiness (weird news, dr demento, archie mcphees, zines, and other earnest trivias) would have flourished. Making the jump from BBSes to the web.
Instead we got ad funded autobot outrage factories.
View the HN comment section for some more examples (ants, trains,..). I feel inspired and will most likely write a blog post for the parachute emoji soon.
That's really great! I'm surprised it didn't make it onto the front page. Oh well.
I wouldn't have thought so if it had made it, but I think think maybe the name should be changed to something like "Awesome Uncanny Design" or something, and perhaps the logo could be something that evokes the uncanny valley or the twilight zone or something. The current one might make it sound like we want to ban this stuff, which is not the idea. I just want people to be aware of it. It also isn't all crap, so maybe an upside down smiley face would be a more fitting emoji, or a horse, parachute, butterfly, or another example.
Yeah, I admit I was stuck on what to name it too! Uncanny evokes a nature of mystery, which I'm not sure is totally approproate here.
Haha! I literally just Google'd "something that is attempted but misses the mark", after writing the above paragraph, and I found this article on Wikipedia [1]. It means "tragic flaw" or "to miss the mark". Feels quite apt! Perhaps "Hamartian Design" could work.
0: https://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies... ( HN 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 HN 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 )
1: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood