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What is a lesser known, yet interesting, internet rabbit hole you've stumbled upon?
There was one which i found a long time ago via a post on r/nexpo or something similar about a subreddit which appeared to be some sort of cult, i dont really remember the details now though. Also, apologies if this isn't the right board.
Two things I want to comment first: great question OP! Second: I also enjoy nexpo’s videos, but I remember being particularly stunned by one of his videos about a person who left fliers around a town. The fliers had an ugly, xeroxed copy of a pencil sketch, which was a portrait of a strange-looking man. The text in the flier said something like “if you’ve ever encountered this man in your dreams, please call [phone number].” It claimed to be a dream research center. And I believe there was a cult attached to it. Fascinating video.
If you enjoy those kind of videos, I highly recommend a series called “down the rabbit hole” by Frederic Knudson on YouTube. Some of my favorites are TempleOS, in which he explores a computer operating system made by a man with schizophrenia, and Mother Horse Eyes, where they investigate a Reddit account that keeps leaving seemingly random, creepy messages about government conspiracies and alien technology.
Some friends also sent me down a random rabbit hole recently in which you search “Appalachian TikTok”, and it consists of videos where people talk about their creepy experiences while living in the Appalachia. Lots of talk about skinwalkers and cryptids.
I also gleefully discovered metabunk, a forum where they discuss the latest in UAP’s with an analytical eye. Their methodology is INCREDIBLE. They think about analyzing aspects of claims I never would have thought of. They are geniuses. I’ve spent many hours reading through their posts and detective work.
As you can see, I love exploring the paranormal. Even though I don’t believe in 99% of it, the lore fascinates me to no end.
I think wendigoon covers some paranormal topics in his videos, definitely recommend the channel. And this thread has some good suggestions for channels like nexpo if your interested: teddit.net/r/NExpo/comments/ks4bsr/other_channels_like_nexpo/
Oh this is my bread and butter, thank you! I am a huge cryptid and paranormal nerd (also skeptically, but i wish it was true)
Another couple of channels on YouTube that I completely forgot to mention are “The Why Files” and “ScareTheater”.
The Why Files tends to focus on some really interesting subjects and conspiracy theories that I had never heard of before regarding aliens, ancient civilizations, time travel. One of his recent videos about crop circles was jaw dropping, especially an incident involving Carl Sagan. Another video about time travel experiments was also very fun to watch. The narrator ends every video by reviewing the lore he introduced and whether his research can back up the claims as likely or unlikely to be true (more on this later). The stories are often very well told, but I must offer a couple of disclaimers that bring the channel from a 10/10 to ~7/10 in my eyes.
Firstly: “Hecklefish”. I figure most people won’t mind the narrator’s alter ego / sidekick / heckler goldfish, but I honestly don’t really care for the shtick. The jokes feel a bit on-the-nose and annoying at times, toeing the “angry orange” cringe territory more often than I’d like. Second: I understand why, but lately he’s been softballing his analysis of his stories to not alienate some of his more gullible viewers, and I absolutely despise when similar content creators do that. Instead of outright saying “this part of the story likely didn’t happen because xyz”, he says “some people say it’s not true because xyz, but let me know what you guys think in the comments”. Feels like a cop out, but despite this… the content is fascinating.
ScareTheater is a smaller channel that mostly focuses on horror and creepy videos, stories about the dark web, mundane videos with creepy backstories, serial killers etc… all of his videos are excellent and worth watching. He occasionally asks his audience “let me know what you guys think”, but only when he thinks the situation is inconclusive. If he thinks a story is fabricated, he will outright say it and provide receipts, and his investigative skills get better with each video. I highly recommend that channel.
Here’s a great video from ScareTheater in which he attempts to debunk a few bits of creepy media.
Please enjoy!
Thank you so much for this lovely list! I will absolutely check out everything in the next few weeks!
It’s somewhat difficult for me to gauge which rabbit holes are well-know and which are obscure, so please excuse any obvious contenders, but here are some of my favourites:
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
A classic, this in-depth web journal details the search to solve the mystery of happened to a family of German tourists who disappeared in Death Valley in the 90s.
Prions are Forever
I’ve been down the prion rabbit hole way too many times, but found this article gave me the best handle on how they work and the frightening implications of their mechanisms. Wiki page
Uncontacted Peoples
This wiki page is always a great jumping-off point to fall into the isolated societies rabbit hole.
Tristan da Cunha
In a somewhat similar vein, this tiny British Overseas Territory is potentially the most remote permanent island settlement in the world, and it has a very recent history. They also have a website.
Jewish Pirates
This was a short but interesting read. Though only a few hundred practicing Jews remain in Jamaica today, Kingston’s population was at one point 20% Portuguese and Spanish Jews.
Nintendo Satellaview
A curious piece of video game history, this SNES peripheral was released by Nintendo in the late 90s. It allowed to console to download media via satellite broadcast, and though it was only in production from 1995 to 1999 and never released outside of Japan, 114 games were created or remade for it.
This just reminds me of how much I miss StumbleUpon. 2000s internet was my favorite era, I think. Can't wait to see what everyone else finds!
My personal favorite is https://frvr.com/ - free, web-based games that have 0 ads. A few are odd, a few are classics, and a few are new and exciting. Hex Frvr is my favorite puzzle game on the site.
I love the mystery of Cicada 3301 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada_3301
An anonymous group posted puzzles that required some interesting techniques and then stopped posting with no explanation.
Some contestants have detailed what it was like interacting with the other contestants and the group.
Some of the puzzles have never been solved.
One of their puzzles that is yet to be decoded is the liber primus https://uncovering-cicada.fandom.com/wiki/Liber_Primus which is cool because it’s like the intersection of hacker puzzles and occult shit.
First thing that came to mind was Denpa Shonen Nasubi Prize Life. It's tough to describe without watching it, but essentially it's a messed up reality show from Japan in the early 2000's where a guy has to survive only on prize winnings from magazines. He's shut in to a small, empty apartment with nothing but a pen, a table, and a bunch of magazines. They go so far as to strip him naked, and live stream him 24/7 for over a year, where he can't leave until he earns a certain amount of winnings from magazines.
Part 1
Part 2
You see the complete disintegration of a humans mental and physical well being over the course of the show. It's nuts. Certainly worth a watch if you wanna see a "psychological study" on the scale of the stanford prison experiment in a semi modern age, fully documented on film.
You son of a of a.... It's pretty gnarly... But enthralling and dark .at first it's like yeah, haha this is kind of funny, but then you see his fingernails grow out and you see all of his weird coping behaviors start to crop up .
Then the producers show up in the middle of the night like going to take him somewhere, anywhere different, but then they just put him in a car and ship all his shit to a different dingy room somewhere else in town.
It's crushing.
That was horrifying, depressing, weird, and sometimes totally funny. Also, he was nude the entire time. Excellent recommendation!
This blog has some amazing, obscure music, y'all. I've never heard anyone in the wild talk about it, so I assume it is lesser known. It certainly is a rabbit hole, and since it deals with ripping vinyl lps and uploading the music online to share with others, I guess it's tech.
The whistleblower from the Pentagon, David Grusch, states we have an agreement with non human intelligence (aliens) and we have intact alien aircraft. He is in classified briefings with the White House to disclose the information he has.
https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/
I read the entire article. As far as I can tell, please correct me if I'm wrong, it says that we have pieces and a single, partially intact vehicle that is not from Earth. I didn't see any claims that we have agreements with extraterrestrials. Did I miss that?
Also, is there really a university pathologist who has developed technologies to assess novel or non-earth origin materials? He sounds like a really interesting scientist.
Is this a thing that is actually on-going?
It is real, but it is heavily stigmatized. I found he did not say we have agreements but that he may have suspicions of them. https://youtu.be/atMDICIOizE
You can watch the whole interview on NewsNation https://www.newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-are-not-alone-the-ufo-whistleblower-speaks/
Everything has been off-the-rails crazy since 2012. Of course it's aliens! Thank you for the links. :)
My local library growing up had a fairly decent selection of computer and tech books from the "Hacker Folklore" era, including a hard copy of the Jargon File (as The New Hackers Dictionary) and several others of that ilk. Because of that, my tech knowledge skews slightly older than when I've actually been around - and that's also where is took my username from.
There's been a few I've found over the years. Here's one that I stumbled upon years ago that popped into my head after someone mentioned the Death Valley Germans: The death of Canadian hockey player Duncan MacPherson. Warning, that link includes photos of his remains. Though you can barely recognize it as such.
The details: in 1989, MacPherson disappeared while skiing in the Stubai Alps, and his remains were found in 2003 inside a glacier. Initially it was claimed that he must have fallen into the crevasse and his body was crushed by the glacier shifting, but instead the article posits he was accidentally run over by a machine called a snow groomer, which... Well, have you seen a tiller on a farm? Yeah. His remains were subsequently thrown into the crevasse to cover up that it happened. The article uses several photos of his remains to highlight points of damage that would line up with the teeth of a groomer.
I stumbled across it years ago, and it hasn't quite haunted me, but it's stuck in my head for sure. It's not one I see mentioned very often in discussions of true crime and mysterious deaths.
A lighter rabbit hole as a palate cleanser: The Bell Witch. I first read about it on Wikipedia in seventh grade. The wiki article has since been immensely edited and changed from the dramatic version I remember (it was practically a full-fledged story), so I linked the Atlas Obscura article.
Also, for some rabbit holes in general: the What Lies Beyond forums, which covers a whole range of topics ranging from true crime to cryptzoology to the supernatural. I've only browsed it briefly, but it's an interesting site for sure!
Not sure whether it qualifies as a rabbit hole, but I enjoyed this blog by a person working at two research stations (McMurdo Station and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station) in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi
An Internet, but mostly not web-based, rabbit hole is SDF.org. It is likely the oldest running public access unix system online (since 1987). You can request a free (or donation-based) shell account on SDF and interact with other users via many different command line social tools. Your account also gives you web and gopher hosting space as well as email and access to innumerable command line tools. SDF is a long time champion of the non-commercial internet, taking pride in offering alternatives to the big, exploitative, privacy-invasive corporate giants on the net. A Lemmy instance is one of their new offerings, for example.
I go with theawesomer.com sometimes. You get some pretty good under the radar YouTube videos featured every so often.
I used to love using stumbleupon back in the day.
I think StumbleUpon is what brought me to reddit in the first place. What a game changer it was.
It's not so niche but you can lose quite a while on Scarfolk.
I've come across some rather strange things on Neocities simply browsing the Recent Activity page. One that stuck in my mind was a series of pages of what seemed to be a man (I think, this was all first person) documenting his interactions with and experience with some kind of cult of ancient British witchcraft. It was very reasonable and academic, in a way, detailing what he did and didn't believe to be true, discussing various individuals involved and his own bloodline which he believed connected him to the original powerful witches.
I have a whole collection of little internet rabbitholes that I'm trying to decide on a good format to cover. Maybe a blog, maybe an Odysee/Youtube channel. Unironically the thing I'll miss most about Reddit once it goes down in flames is the just straight up weird posts you'd find sometimes, though that's already kind of tapered off in recent years. Anyway, here's a couple:
The Korraflir/TRSA/Heatherwesthill/00000p rabbithole- This post mostly covers a later half of the... whatever this was. Before that there were a lot of other weird posts by Korra and Heather. Hard to tell if it's a troll, a crazy person, someone trying to start and ARG or all three.
SierraGolf5, Zulutango4, Cynthiafortune- Twitter accounts themed after number stations that... post numbers. You know, like a number station, but on twitter. They go inactive on and off and only Zulu seems to be active right now.
DemeterofNew- guy discovers creepy recording of a woman crying/screaming in the depths of his voicemail inbox. Huge argument over whether it's legit or not. The audio itself is now lost, with only a snippet available from a video covering the story.
This might not be interesting to everyone, but I love finding niche communities on the internet, especially when they involve people creating things.
I posted a topic about them a while back and have been simping for them since, but Battle of the Bits is a come-and-go kind of community built around niche music composition competitions. They've got memes that are so baffling to outsiders that they become interesting mysteries in and of themselves (why does every competition have an "--- in pants" category?).
And then there is the Megazeux community. It's kind of amazing that there are enough people interested in this decades-old video game creation toolkit that's only slightly less old than ZZT. They have not only kept supporting the system, so it runs on everything now, including browsers, but they have had a slow but steady stream of interesting games made with it that feature things that are impressive only insofar as they accomplished within the confines of the limitations of the engine they chose to use. Though of course there are also some interesting gems to be found. They seem to be a pretty tightly-knit community as well, so it's interesting to learn about the major contributors.
I won't single out any specific names, but each MUD that is still around is full of interesting characters who have been around forever, and because it's a realtime social environment you can just go up and have a conversation with them. I honestly haven't found a single boring person yet. At least if you discount the noobs. It's a bit far from what OP was asking for, though.
IDK if this is tech related but I've been watching Simon Whistler on YouTube a lot mainly his decoding the unknown series that have lead me down some rabbit holes. Also donut media has some weird build series that have lead me to watch other vehicle YouTube content.
cat-v
I believe this site was built by Rob Pike et al from Bell Labs. Lots of interesting stuff on there. The page of quotes is probably my favorite.
I think OP is referring to “Lake City Quiet Pills”
Sorry for not getting back earlier, was on vacation. It definitely wasn't that, i remember watching Nexpos whole video on the topic. It was a pretty unknown sub (100 members i think), there was a video about it but it didn't have even 1000 views.