Monkeon

Web nostalgia tends to focus on dull corporate sites and design evolution.
I set myself the challenge to excavate just the stupid internet that I actually spent my time browsing.

To do so, I scraped all the links featured in the DMOZ "Humor" category from the year 2000. I then ran a script to make sure that Wayback Machine has something from the 90s in their archive for each one. This left the remains of sites. Mostly awful.

I did the same for all the sites ever mentioned in Select Magazine for a more studenty selection. This database has links. A mix of the indie, the funny and the bizarre.

Although I chose my sources in part because they had editors and thus some quality control, there's a chance of some dodgy stuff in the database. That said, it seems to be mostly Bill Clinton jokes, themed pun collections and irrelevent sites that the editors have mis-categorised. The Select links can be a bit more edgelordy, though are mostly fine. If anything is genuinely nasty, let me know and I'll remove it.

If you like this, please consider donating to the Internet Archive, without whom there'd be nothing of our dial-up past left.
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