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Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?

1036 points by karim ↗ HN
I'll start --- I once spent a couple days on a summer job looking through industrial incidents related to the Great Boston Molasses Flood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood). Wikipedia is definitely full of very interesting rabbit holes.

469 comments

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livatlantis
Great question! YouTube.

I don't use YouTube at all for music recommendations/discovery but every once in a while, I'll chance upon something amazing.

A comment on an upload of Seventh Wonder's The Great Escape[0] led me my discovering Shadow Gallery's First Light[1], which I enjoyed almost as much. (Almost. SW's track, based on Henry Martinson's 'Aniara' poetic cycle is, in my opinion, at another level. Martison was awarded a Nobel prize for his work but unfortuntely commited suicide as a result of fierce criticism against this decision).

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMjO7y-98Ak

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Qt1eqJ26s

tartuffe78
TV Tropes is always good: http://tvtropes.org/
paulrpotts
TV Tropes is amazing. I have some experience writing short stories but diving into the tropes has been a real mind-expanding experience. I can't watch TV shows or movies now without automatically deconstructing the screenwriting. This, ultimately, has become a real time-saver, because since gaining that super-power, I find most TV too boring to watch, and so don't feel at all bad about saving my time for better things.
JoshTriplett
Likewise, but I also find that it leads me to the occasional book, TV, or movie that I enjoy. I'm a sucker for a few particular tropes, and I'll go down the list for those and seek out everything on them.

TV Tropes has had funding issues in the past. I can't help but think that they could make a significant amount through 1) affiliation with Netflix, Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, or other providers of media, and 2) integration with Amazon X-Ray or Google Play's equivalent.

wcummings
RIP my productivity, tvtropes is like heroin to me.
CalChris
There is nothing in the universe quite like a troll on TV Tropes. Maybe a troll on Wikipedia but they're probably all the same person.

Warning: if you say lampshading IRL, no one will understand you. If by strange coincidence you ran into a fellow Troper, you'd have to type it out.

qwertyuiop924
Troperese is a legitimate language, understood by Tropers worldwide. Referencing lampshading is a sort of shibboleth, and it can be used to determine of a potential troper is One Of Us, as can a Fake Thomas Jefferson. An obscure reference could do the trick, and Wicks are another fun one to try.
mkl
"Lampshading" existed as a term used by writers etc. well before TV Tropes came along. I'm pretty sure I first heard it on Usenet in the 90s in a newsgroup primarily for SF writers, where it was well understood. Many terms on TV Tropes are pretty recent, but a lot were already established elsewhere.
taneq
Really? My crew use lampshading all the time.
carole1
What is a rabbit hole? Is it just an interesting site to waste time on?
personlurking
It comes from a metaphor:

> "Down the rabbit hole", a metaphor for an entry into the unknown, the disorienting or the mentally deranging, from its use in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

cooper12
Though in modern parlance it seems to me to be used to refer to an endless hole one falls down and never really finds their way out of.
personlurking
I don't have a favorite rabbit hole but rather I've developed a link-hopping habit that pretty consistently leads down the rabbit hole. Basically, while looking at a site/article that interests me, I usually end up doing a separate search for any concepts or organizations mentioned, then seeing what they have to offer. Rinse and repeat.
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tunap
damninteresting.com is where I 1st read about the Great Molasses Flood, amongst a slew of other bizarre non-fictional events & people. The wordsmiths make the bizarre accounts even more damn intetesting.

edit: link

https://www.damninteresting.com/

DamnInteresting
The finest compliment is that which the utterer is unaware the recipient can hear (or, more appropriately, 'see,' but that doesn't sound stuffy enough). Thanks for the kind words!

Relatedly, "stuffy enough" is fun to say.

runj__
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pritzker_Architecture_Prize

It has links to architects and those pages in turn have links to beautiful buildings. Also the wikipedia pages of art museums tend to be awesome timesinks as well, you can click through every artist and all of their famous artworks.

cooper12
Related to this, I'm not sure how many people use them, but there are categories at the bottom of every page which group together similar articles, navboxes that list articles that are related, and at the left side of the page "what links here" which lets you find incoming wikilinks. Oh, and on the talk page there are Wikiprojects where you can find categories for projects built around certain areas like Film. Lastly, Wikipedia's Featured Articles are some of its highest quality ones and usually go quite in depth while being well-written and interesting.
analogwzrd
For me, it's definitely Ribbonfarm:http://www.ribbonfarm.com/

I stumbled into Venkat's blog about two and half years ago and I'm still trying to find my way out. The rabbit hole gets even deeper when you look at his list of recommended reading. The material on John Boyd and OODA loops in particular has been bouncing around my head for about a year. Ribbonfarm quickly turns into a choose-your-own-adventure type of experience as it's very easy to bounce between articles and start looking everything that you don't know.

If you're interested in getting below the surface level of how organizations, teams, and business cultures work Ribbonfarm is the best place I know of that really digs into the details. If you're expecting the typical "be a leader, not a manager" platitudes, then you'll be disappointed.

peller
That recommended reading list is so good I'm going to save some people the trouble of finding the link: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/now-reading/
analogwzrd
I never would have imagined myself reading a book about teaching improvisational theater and enjoying it, much less finding it applicable to my career in engineering.
callmeal
If you liked that book, take a peek at "Don't Shoot The Dog"
threepipeproblm
I discovered ribbonfarm after being pointed to Rao's outstanding series about office politics, through the lens of the Office which is here:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Then I decided to read much more material from the blog, but for the most part I have been disappointed. I feel like the authors there love intellectualism to the point that they create fancy constructs even when there isn't much return. Basically I feel like it's trying too hard to be clever. I have found a few gems there, however.

Not trying to pick a fight with anyone, just wanted to share my own experience here.

JonnieCache
It's good in general to be careful of the "this is what I think people are like" genre of blogging. Especially when it's presented with such certainty. See also: slate star codex, TLP. At least those two are working psychiatrists. Venkat Rao is just a guy with some opinions that he has retrospectively derived from his own career progress, as far as I can tell. It smacks of rationalisation.
cambel
Yes, true. But I also think Rao is incredibly self-aware of this. Interact with him. Very strong opinions, gingerly held.
sixo
His writing doesn't seem to convey that to me. On the contrary: there's a kind of pretentious of style that I find uniquely intolerable. Which is too bad, because I'd otherwise probably be pretty interested in some of what he has to say, but I'm too much of a dick to get past it.
sambe
Did TLP just completely stop after being outed or is there something still happening with a book?
JonnieCache
In my imagination he went completely insane trying to write the porn book.

If you want a good continuation, check out Jordan Peterson, who has a much wider framework into which TLP's somewhat narrow worldview can be fitted. He is also a practicing clinical psychologist, as well as a professor. This video summarises a lot of his ideas, but they are fully explained and justified in his university courses, which are all on the channel. "Personality" is a first year course, and "Maps of Meaning" is I think taken by third or fourth year psychology students.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCOw0eJ84d8

(You're probably best off ignoring the culture war drama he's currently embroiled in. Unfortunately the youtube algorithm has now placed him firmly in the alt-right nexus because of this, so his videos might shit up your reccommendations. This is not a reflection of his ideas, far from it.)

melloclello
They definitely spend a lot of time throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, I think (not everything sticks but it's interesting to see what does)
rsync
Agreed. ribbonfarm is terrific. I support his work by paying monthly for the kindle version of the website publications.
octo_t
My current rabbit hole has been the world building stack exchange (http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/) which is (ostensibly) for writers working out scientific or historical justifications for the worlds they invent.

Some of the thought that goes into answers is really cool. Good ones from recently are:

- http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59175/what-...

- http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59171/is-th...

- http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/58745/stand...

mathw
I used to love it, but I do feel that the quality of the questions has dropped significantly since it started. There are now many people trying to find a justification for their pet plot idea, or trying to have the community fix the gaping hole in their universe.

That said, there are some amazing answers, well thought out and well researched, and I love some of the questions about cultural impacts of technological or biological speculation.

sethrin
I have to say, that last is a particularly bad question. Asking about the spacetime interval between two points has an answer. Asking about the spacetime interval between two points when you have some unspecified magic which can shorten that interval can only be answered by asking the parent what type of magic he was thinking of and how it works.
luos
Currently my favourite time wasters are learning channels on youtube. Especially not the "weird" ones like VSauce because I think those are pretty unwatchable. I like SciShow / SciShow space even though that's borderline weird :)

My current fav is Sixty Symbols, endless very interesting videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvBqzzvUBLCs8Y7Axb-jZew

Also PBS Space Time, MinutePhysics, MinuteEarth.

Broken_Hippo
I've been through so many of these - but not Sixty Symbols. Thanks!

Also interesting is Crash Course, made by some of the same folks as SciShow. Really more for high school students, but interesting enough that I don't mind them repeating information I do know and I pick up on new stuff.

qwertyuiop924
How could you forget CGPGrey and ViHart?

Oh, and also Tom Scott, if you haven't seen him yet.

adrianN
Secure Contain Protect http://www.scp-wiki.net/
idlewords
This is a wonderful rabbit hole. It can be hard to find a good entry point but worth perservering, particularly if you're alone somewhere late at night.
szatkus
In my opinion it's fine to start from top rated entries.

http://www.scp-wiki.net/top-rated-pages

failrate
I have mild OCD, so I ended up reading all of them in order over a few months.
Sorry_Rum_Ham
A few months? Man, that's fast.

Literally one of the things on my bucket list is to 'catch-up' on SCP. But I read so damn slowly and new entries are added all the time, so, it's likely never gonna happen.

Still enjoy the hell out of scaring myself at night by reading them, though.

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JamesLeonis
I was also going to suggest this. It made watching Stranger Things even more enjoyable.
mrbill
Definitely. One of my favorites.
hazeii
The one I'm currently in.
exolymph
slatestarcodex.com, I haven't nearly read all the archives and I'm always running into links to Scott's work
msluyter
Slate Star Codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/, for a lot of interesting socio-philosophical discussion on a variety of topics.

Meditations on Moloch is one of my favorites:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

exolymph
"I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" is one of the greatest pieces of political writing ever. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
eseehausen
It's interesting how much this reads like footnotes to Derrida , especially in the beginning (other cliffnotes here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH7c or http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ce/s6403/jacques_derrida.pdf if you feel like reading the original). It's nice to see ideas move from so theoretical that LW and associated communities would likely dismiss to digestible forms like this. It gives me hope for communication amongst outgroups that are pretty virulently opposed to each other (Continental theorists and let's say the vanguard of popular "rationalism"), mostly due to their proximity.
alanh
I don't seem to have enough context to follow the point you are making. What are continental theorists? In what way are they apposed to the Less Wrong crowd?
eseehausen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

For the reasons for the opposition, it's difficult to point to any article that doesn't almost willfully misunderstand the other side. I haven't listened to this episode, but In Our Time is usually good about bringing in experts from both sides to discuss issues: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/bridging-the...

You can probably substitute "The Less Wrong crowd" for "analytical philosophers", as they're sort of the hobbyist or non-institutionalized version of the latter. You could also just try reading the Derrida article I linked to see why people with a rationalist bent have historically recoiled from his writings.

JamesBarney
Can confirm. I found slatestarcodex and immediately spent > an hour a day reading through every post he had written over the past several years.
zaaakk
Slate Star Codex: if you're a man who is involved in tech and not interested in any legitimate philosophical or sociological inquiry, we've got you covered
mathw
TV Tropes.

Just don't go there.

jclem
Ulillillia: http://www.ulillillia.us/sitemap.shtml

Useful sections include the one on tips to speed up mowing the lawn. Less useful ones focus on things like how to open soda bottles.

bass_case
I was surprised to find someone else posting Nicks site :)
mpeg
http://everything2.com is (kinda) still going strong.
cthulhujr
About a month ago I started visiting again after years of it being long-forgotten. I was pleasantly surprised to see it's still (kinda) going strong. Reminds me a bit of Medium today, but a lot less preachy.