My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts.

For week 2, Jared chose the prompt:
“What are your favorite places on the internet or favorite things about the internet and why? How do they differ from the parts of the internet that you dislike”

• Sam: “Internet Driven Memories”
• Jared: “”
• Dave: “The Internet is a vast place”

The way I see it, there are three parts to this question: where can I spend my internet time that makes me the happiest, where do I actually spend my time, and where do I dislike? It’s a “stated preference vs. revealed preference” kind of thing.

My screentime¹ says that I spend my time:

• On Xitter, reading the stream of consciousness of AI bros, design engineers, and Japanese people who put peanuts in their Coca-Cola and make cake in their rice cookers.
• On Instagram, fawning over pictures of menswear bros in herringbone tweed sportcoats with the cool ticket pocket.
• On Hacker News, avoiding work keeping up to date in the latest technologies and software practices.
• On YouTube, watching Linus Sebastian drop motherboards.

But I wouldn’t say that any of these “spark joy”. They entertain². They fill time. The reels are probably the highest return of any of these because of the nightly “sharing of the videos” ritual that my wife and I engage in, yet they feel mostly hollow.

What are places with a higher joy-spark-to-noise ratio? My favorite thing of all time is to see someone speak deeply and excitedly about a niche topic. Not like a TED talk³ just something casual. To me, blogs are the most approachable format for consumption. A good niche blogger produces content for the love of the game, not for clout. Other ad-supported platforms lack that organic and authentic appeal, for the most part. Some of my favorite niche blogs are:

• Derek Guy’s Die, Workwear—Cheating, since Derek Guy is the Twitter menswear guy and is very prolific and annoying on that platform, plus he is a full-time menswear writer and journalist, but he started out blogging. I really like his long-form pieces that tell the history of certain pieces of clothing or the way that subcultures have dressed themselves. I recommend reading “American Space Cowboys” about the outfits the astronauts wore to their training expedition to Iceland, leading up to the famous Apollo 11 mission in 1969.
• The LTTLabs blog—Again, cheating a little bit because LTTLabs is obviously connected to the “Linus Tech Tips” YouTube channel, but the blog for their laboratory is a separate thing that aren’t trying nearly as hard to draw eyeballs. Instead, they are a collection of random investigations into topics that the laboratory engineers deem interesting. The articles are all niche, quantitative deep dives on technical topics that are still casual and approachable. I recommend their guest post on the fluid dynamics of computer case fans as well as their analysis on the USB communication habits of the Nintendo Switch 2.
• Dave Rupert’s personal blog—Dave is an engineer at Microsoft on their Fluent Design system as well as a cohost of the fun-and-casual web development podcast Shop Talk Show. His blog posts are always personal and interesting and often focus around small things he’s learnt about CSS or the business of software. My minimalistic heart loves his post “Smaller and dumber”.
• Jennifer Daniel’s “Did Someone Say Emoji?” newsletter—Jennifer is Unicode Emoji Subcommittee-Chair, meaning if there is a new emoji, she was the Caesar, giving the 👍 or 👎. She is also a nerd who loves language and these weird new linguistic artifacts that are now part of daily life. Who else could ever write such a bizarre sentence as this

To whisper “I love you” in the age of skibidi, one must move past the “Frequently Used” tab and into the pantry that is our emoji picker. The Egg (🥚), the Broccoli (🥦), and the Pizza (🍕) can all say “I care about you,” in a way that may be indecipherable to most everyone on the planet but can mean everything to just you and someone you love.

I recommend her article on the many emojis of love and WhY wE MiGhT tAlK lIkE tHiS.

• Simon Willison’s Weblog—Simon is the creator of datasette and a cocreator of the Python web framework Django. Now it is he fills his time as a data journalist, creating tools to help people write about and analyze data. He has also become a prominent voice in the large language model space. I really enjoy his analysis of new models, including how well they create SVGs of pelicans.
• Chris Young’s Youtube channel—look at me, cheating again. Chris Young was a co-author on the cookbook Modernist Cuisine (IFYKYK) and founder of sous-vide company ChefSteps and now, Combustion Inc. His videos are all ads for his company’s product, a wireless thermometer, BUT Chris is a deep fountain on food science and its applications into real-life cooking that make his videos a source of information you are unlikely to find anywhere else. Plus, since there is a company behind it, the production value is very high. I recommend his videos on slurpees at home and homemade baked ribs (because the video goes off the rails in the middle in a way that I, having just finished watching Breaking Bad, really enjoyed.)
• I haven’t read much of her other stuff, but Alexis King is clearly very passionate about Haskell (because you have to be, in order to program in it) and her “Parse, don’t validate” blog post (Internet Archive) change how I feel about types, taking them from “annoying semantics that Java requires” to “early warning systems for logic errors”.

Another way that niche interests shine is in the good ol’ fashion narrative or rant. instead of whipping out the slop cannon when you sit down with your snack, read one of these informative pieces:

• Kelly Conaboy’s “The Vast Bay Leaf Conspiracy” (Internet Archive link, since the original home, The Awl, is now defunct), in which a food journalist talks to famous and accomplished chefs and grills them on the real purpose of bay leaves.
• Geraldine DeRuiters’s review of Bros. in Lecce (Internet Archive) which they call “the worst Michelin star restaurant”.
• J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s bagel rant manifesto (Internet Archive) has ruined bagels for me.

Other than content consumption, I want to use well designed and enjoyable tools. One of them is npmx.dev. It’s a very well designed tool that has a high information density and a quick interface with useful, quick animations. As a developer of a JavaScript SDK, I spend a lot of time thinking about and evaluating npm packages and this tool is very valuable.

Overall, my favorite places on the internet are those that demonstrate passion, effort, and knowledge. Tell me about your favorite places on the internet.