2022 Apr 24
Why I made tinywhack.com
Some years ago you could come on the internet and find all manner of snake oil, scintillating salacious banners, and silly communities marinating in a fine sauté of salutary neglect. Things like reddit, twitter, for example, are now endless winge-inducing echo chambers, a demos devolved into a swarm of costless upvoting repetitive grey-faced non-entities, whose darkmode back-lit posts and messages are indistinguishable from those of the bots. Instead of building a more conscious robot, the human users have flipped the plot, turning themselves into the NPCs of a nightmare matrix. They have built a reverse turing test and there is no Neo to unplug us. Where are they now our geocities? Where are they now our tumblr-diggs? Our usenet forums, gone, poof! Are we any safer or smarter now that everyone has to plug in their phone number and identity on every website? What happened to anonymity and fun?
Wherefore art thou far gone, internet of old? There are too many reasons why-- too many to go over here.
tinywhack.com is my attempt to recapture the old spirit of a wilder time. It lets you dig up urls from the tinyurl.com link shortening service. These urls have several features:
1- They are old. Because I stick to the 5 character urls, you tend to get older ones from the early/mid-2000s.
2- They are interesting. Someone selected that url, they thought it was interesting enough to plug into the link shortener, and maybe share.
3- They are uncensored. Anyone could plugin any url and shorten it, no wrongthink, no "safe" search, no de-ranking or shadowbanning, just a pure shot of selected human will, beautiful, untamed, raw.
The internet has become a stale corporate moderated machine of bland barkwood sandwiches. I'm not trying to fix that, I just want to add a little barbecue sauce. I want to dedicate this website to someone I met named Yateendra. Let it inspire you, dude. Anyways, have fun, enjoy the spice.