10 Websites Better Than Another Hour of Doomscrolling

The obvious objection to this title is that several of the websites below can also consume an hour.

Fair enough.

The difference is what sort of hour they take.

There is an hour spent moving through twenty-second videos selected by a system that remembers exactly what made you hesitate. Then there is an hour spent following the books borrowed by James Joyce, listening to a railway station in rural Japan or reading a London theft trial from 1786.

Both involve staring at a screen. They do not leave the same residue.

Most lists of alternatives to doomscrolling recommend the same small group of websites. Radio Garden. Window Swap. Neal.fun. Atlas Obscura. Wikipedia's random article button. They are good sites, but they no longer feel much like discoveries.

I wanted to go further into the part of the web that Google rarely puts on the first page. University projects, volunteer archives, old interfaces and websites maintained by one or two people because they still believe the subject deserves a place to live.

None requires an account to become interesting. None begins by asking what it can recommend based on my previous behaviour. Most have natural ways in: a map, a name, a year or a button that leads to one object instead of another feed.

These are ten of the best ones I found.

1. OpenBenches

OpenBenches is a crowdsourced map of memorial benches.

That description makes it sound like a very specialised municipal database. Open the random bench feature and it becomes something else.

The collection currently contains more than 43,000 benches photographed around the world. Each entry records its location, a picture and the words fixed to the bench. Some inscriptions are formal. Others contain jokes, nicknames, fragments of poems or one sentence that must have made perfect sense to the people who paid for it.

A park bench is a remarkably modest way to preserve a person. There is no full biography and usually no explanation of what they did. You get a name, two dates and perhaps ten words chosen by someone who knew them.

The missing information is what makes the archive hard to leave.

Who was the person who always said "just look at the colours"? Why did another family choose a line from a song? Was the bench placed where its subject used to walk, or simply wherever the local council had room?

OpenBenches does not answer those questions. It gives you enough to start wondering.

Click "Random bench" instead of beginning with the map. Geography becomes more interesting after the inscription has given the location a human reason to exist.

2. OneZoom

A normal diagram of evolution becomes unreadable after a few dozen branches. OneZoom tries to place the entire tree of life on one zoomable surface.

Its current tree contains more than 2.2 million species and over 100,000 images. Every leaf represents a species. Follow a branch backwards and you move towards shared ancestors. Move forward again and one line splits into mammals, fungi, plants, insects and organisms most of us could not name.

The interface feels closer to navigating a fractal than reading an encyclopaedia. Large branches divide into smaller ones, which divide again until a familiar animal appears at the end of a path that began billions of years earlier.

Start with a human. Zoom out until our leaf becomes difficult to distinguish from the surrounding primates. Then follow the branch towards something that appears unrelated, perhaps an octopus, cactus or mushroom.

The site is especially good at correcting the tidy version of biology learned at school. Evolution does not resemble a ladder with humans waiting at the top. OneZoom makes it look sprawling, uneven and crowded.

The red leaves carry another piece of information: they mark species classified as threatened by the IUCN. Conservation statistics usually arrive as totals. Here the losses occupy visible parts of a family tree.

OneZoom also contains guided tours, but wandering works better. Choose a species you recognise and keep moving outward until you no longer recognise anything.

3. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online

Between 1674 and 1913, accounts of criminal trials held at London's central criminal court were published as the Old Bailey Proceedings.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online turns the surviving material into a searchable archive of 197,745 trials.

You can search by crime, punishment, verdict, date, name or a word appearing in the proceedings. The records include famous murders and serious political cases, but the ordinary entries are often more revealing. Clothing stolen from a room. Counterfeit coins passed in a shop. An argument about the ownership of a horse. Witnesses attempting to describe exactly what happened in an alley two centuries ago.

History books tend to arrive after events have been organised into movements and periods. Court testimony is messier. People interrupt one another, forget details, lie badly and worry about small amounts of money.

The archive also exposes how violent the legal system was. Theft could lead to transportation or death. Verdicts and sentences changed according to the value assigned to an object, the age of the accused and the assumptions of the court.

This is not light entertainment, and some records are grim. It is still one of the most direct ways to hear the voices of people who rarely appear in formal historical accounts.

A good entry point is the advanced search. Choose a ten-year period, select an ordinary offence and leave the name blank. One case usually supplies the words needed to find the next.

4. Radio Aporee

Radio Garden lets you hear what radio stations are broadcasting now. Radio Aporee asks a different question: what did a particular place sound like when someone stopped to record it?

Its sound map contains thousands of field recordings attached to locations around the world. They come from cities, forests, stations, kitchens, coastlines, workshops and stretches of land where the microphone captures little more than insects and distant machinery.

There is no presenter and usually no music. The recordings preserve the background sound we normally remove from photographs and written descriptions.

A market has its own rhythm before you understand any of the words. A railway platform sounds different according to the country, even when no train is present. Rain striking a metal roof carries more information about a place than a stock photograph labelled "rainy day."

The age of some recordings adds another layer. A sound attached to a familiar street may have been captured before a building disappeared or traffic changed the acoustic character of the area. The map quietly becomes an archive of places that no longer sound the same.

Avoid beginning with a major capital. Zoom into a coastline, island or rural area and choose a recording without trying to guess what it contains. Headphones help.

Radio Aporee also runs a continuous stream built from the sound map, but clicking individual locations is the better rabbit hole. The silence between sounds belongs to the recording instead of being edited out.

5. Photogrammar

The United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information produced around 170,000 photographs between 1935 and 1944.

Many became famous images of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Most did not.

Photogrammar provides several ways to move through the full collection. You can explore it geographically, filter it by photographer, browse themes or narrow the archive to a period on the timeline.

The map is the reason to use Photogrammar instead of searching for individual famous photographs. Select a county and the grand historical subject breaks into porches, petrol stations, kitchens, shop windows, roads and people standing beside things they owned.

Government photography is never a neutral window into reality. Photographers worked within an institutional project, followed assignments and made choices about where to point the camera. Photogrammar makes some of those patterns visible. You can compare how different photographers covered similar subjects or see which parts of the country received far more attention than others.

The colour photographs are particularly strange. The past usually reaches us in black and white, which creates an artificial distance. A red petrol pump or blue dress can collapse eighty years surprisingly quickly.

Search your own surname, a profession or an ordinary object such as "porch." The results are less predictable than starting with a historical event.

6. The Shakespeare and Company Project

Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1919. It was both a bookshop and a lending library used by writers, artists and expatriates living in the city between the world wars.

The Shakespeare and Company Project reconstructs that library from lending cards, address books and financial logbooks preserved at Princeton University.

The famous names provide the easy entrance. You can see books borrowed by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Simone de Beauvoir and Ezra Pound.

The project becomes better when you move away from them.

Thousands of less famous members used the same shelves. Their borrowing histories reveal what circulated beside the books now treated as the official literature of the period. Detective stories, poetry, political writing, banned books and birth control manuals all passed through the library.

An author's biography may say that they were "influenced by" another writer. A lending record shows that they took a particular book home on a particular date. It does not prove they read it, liked it or understood it, but it makes the connection physical.

You can also explore members by address. The literary history of interwar Paris turns into apartment buildings, hotels and streets occupied by people who shared the same library.

Start with a writer you know, open one borrowed book, and then check who else borrowed it. The archive works best sideways.

7. Old Maps Online

Searching a digital map archive normally requires knowing which institution owns the map. That is difficult when the whole point is that you do not yet know what you are looking for.

Old Maps Online indexes more than a million maps held by over seventy libraries, universities and cultural institutions.

Instead of beginning with an archive catalogue, you begin with a place.

Find a town, move the timeline and the site returns maps covering that area during different periods. Some can be placed over the present map with adjustable transparency, which makes old roads, rivers and borders easier to compare with what exists now.

Large cities produce an intimidating number of results. A village, industrial district or part of a city that changed heavily during the twentieth century is more manageable.

I find local maps more absorbing than maps of vanished empires. A nineteenth-century plan may explain why a modern road bends for no visible reason. A railway siding can survive as the edge of a car park. A stream that disappeared underground still dictates the shape of property boundaries.

Old maps also record intentions that were never completed. Planned streets appear where no street was built. Names move. Empty land acquires a purpose and then loses it again.

Search the place where you grew up. Move backwards one map at a time instead of jumping directly to the oldest result. The gradual changes are usually more interesting than the dramatic ones.

8. Cameron's World

GeoCities allowed people to construct personal web pages before web design became a professional language.

Those pages had tiled backgrounds, visitor counters, animated flames, tiny badges and text in colours that should never have met. Many were difficult to read. Almost all of them looked like somebody lived there.

Yahoo closed the American GeoCities service in 2009. Cameron's World is a collage assembled from material recovered from archived GeoCities neighbourhoods created between 1994 and 2009.

It is loud, dense and initially confusing. That is part of the point.

Modern websites usually begin with a design system. GeoCities pages began with a person deciding that a spinning skull, a photograph of their cat and a paragraph about model trains should occupy the same screen.

Cameron's World does not pretend the old web was more usable. It remembers that it was more personal.

The project is also a useful reminder that preservation changes an object. The original pages were separate and surrounded by dead links. Here their fragments have been arranged into a new work. It is archaeology, but the excavation has music and animated GIFs.

Use a desktop browser and turn the sound on. Do not try to read everything. Follow whichever badly compressed image looks as though it should lead somewhere.

9. Low-tech Magazine

Low-tech Magazine publishes articles about older technologies, energy, transport, heating, agriculture and systems that became unfashionable before they stopped being useful.

The website follows the same argument as the writing.

It is static, self-hosted and powered by a solar panel on founder Kris De Decker's balcony in Barcelona. Images are compressed and dithered. The site uses default typefaces and exposes information about its current power supply.

During a long period of poor weather, it may go offline.

That last detail makes the infrastructure visible. Most websites present availability as something abstract and permanent. Low-tech Magazine connects each page view to the weather, battery capacity and a physical machine in a particular location.

The articles are the main reason to stay. The archive questions the assumption that a more complicated technology must be an improvement. Subjects include cargo bicycles, mechanical energy storage, communal heating, sailing ships and ways of keeping warm without heating an entire building.

The conclusions are not always convenient. Some older systems required more labour or imposed limits that modern users would reject. The magazine does not need every forgotten technology to become a solution. It is interested in what was lost when efficiency came to mean only speed, automation or scale.

Begin with the explanation of how the solar website works. After that, choose an article about an object you already understand. The familiar subjects reveal the oddest assumptions.

10. ooh.directory

The first nine websites are destinations. ooh.directory is a way out into the rest of the independent web.

It is a human-curated directory of blogs with RSS or Atom feeds, organised into categories such as art, history, technology, food, books and personal writing.

The important word is "blogs."

These are not publication platforms where every writer has been placed inside the same recommendation system. They are individual websites with their own archives, typography, obsessions and sometimes very old HTML.

Some are carefully designed. Others look like they were last redesigned when Firefox still had a search box separate from the address bar. That difference is useful. It means the directory is sorting by the existence of interesting writing, not by whether the site adopted the current visual language of online publishing.

The random blog button is the best feature. It does not promise that every result will suit you. A disappointing click is allowed to remain disappointing.

That sounds like a weakness until you compare it with recommendations trained to remove every surprise that might cause you to leave. The occasional wrong site makes the right one feel found.

Once you discover a blog worth returning to, copy its RSS feed into a reader. That changes the relationship immediately. New posts arrive because you chose the writer, not because a platform decided the post might hold your attention.

Do not bookmark all ten

A folder containing 200 "interesting things to read later" is another archive, except this time nothing inside it has been catalogued.

Pick two sites.

Choose one that works in five minutes and one that deserves a longer visit. OpenBenches and Old Maps Online make a good pair. So do OneZoom and the Old Bailey archive. Put them somewhere visible rather than burying them in a bookmarks hierarchy called "Miscellaneous."

The point is not to make every idle minute educational. That would be exhausting. Wasting time can be pleasant and completely defensible.

I only want the wasted time to feel chosen.

The next time I catch myself opening a feed without remembering why, I would rather press "Random bench," inspect a map of my childhood neighbourhood or hear what wind sounded like beside an abandoned building in Estonia.

I may still lose half an hour.

At least I will know where it went.

Sources and links

1. OpenBenches, a crowdsourced map and searchable archive of memorial benches.
2. OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer, an interactive tree covering more than 2.2 million species.
3. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, a searchable edition of 197,745 trials held between 1674 and 1913.
4. Radio Aporee, a global map of contributed field and location recordings.
5. Photogrammar, a visualisation platform for the FSA and OWI photographic archive.
6. The Shakespeare and Company Project, based on Sylvia Beach's lending records, logbooks and address books.
7. Old Maps Online, a geographical search platform for historical map collections.
8. Cameron's World, a collage made from archived GeoCities pages.
9. Low-tech Magazine, including an explanation of its solar-powered server and low-energy design.
10. ooh.directory, a human-curated directory of independent blogs and their feeds.