47 People Reveal The Strangest Corners Of The Internet They’ve Ever Discovered: “It Got Very Dark Very Quickly”

Nürnberger Trials. So many bad people that lead to so many more bad people that lead to even more bad people.

Do not go and read any article -- any at all -- on TV Tropes. I have spent hours clicking "Open in new tab" and only stopped because I got hungry.

Man when i was a teenager i got so into research chemicals but without any real access to them aside from clonazepam and dxm until uni.

I would stay up all night reading about stimulants, psychedelics, opioids, benzos, dissociatives, etc. and because i didnt have access, i’d just imagine what it was like to be on them.

Really got it into my head that using them would make me a better person. Only years later and after i finally was able to get my hands on a variety of them did i realise they were an escape, a sort of performative way to be cool and above others (yeah right).

It did teach me i was good at reading and summarising research though. And i now am a psychologist/cbt therapist. Go figure. 🤷🏻‍♂️.

I started to wonder why the human body treats food like a disease and what histamines are. 4 hours later I realized I know less now.

A woman once got into an Uber with me, we chatted and when she left, she told me her first name and her place of work, and said "come find me". Looking her up felt like stalking her since she didn't have much of an internet presence. Found out why pretty soon: turns out she was a Columbine survivor. Her name was in their journal. I even ran across a cached copy of a deleted Tumblr blog that had been tracking all of the girls in that journal. Were they married, how many kids, where they lived. Truly some of the creepiest [thing] I've seen on the internet about real people. Worst part is, I could never tell her I knew all of this.

I tripped into this weird collection of stories about strange staircases in the woods that you should never ever touch or step on, weird sightings and strange deaths in the wilderness. It was captivating. I haven’t seen it in so long.

About 8 years ago, I read about how Chinese immigrants started and transformed the way Americans ate (these were in essence the first "fast food" establishments) during the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad. It turned into such an interest that I've almost perfected the techniques, cookware and the ingredients used to make the most popular Chinese take-out items.

Read an article 8 years ago on quantum mechanics, which led me to QED, which led me to learning about Dr. Feynman safe cracking ability. Not to brag but I can now solve both time-dependent and independent Schrödinger Equations and break into pretty much anything.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I followed this girl that claimed to have it, and was amazed by the human mind, how it could shelter you from childhood trauma.
Turned out she was faking it though 🥲 I guess it was too good to be true, that kids can imagine an entire community, when there is a lack of that in their real lives.

Hermit crabs.

I don't own or desire to own a hermit crab, but one day I stumbled across hermit crab care information by accident and couldn't stop reading. I spent the entire day on this. I eventually ended up on some blog detailing what happened when a guy apparently well-known in the hermit crab keeping hobby forums passed away, and how they handled finding care for his massive amount of pet hermit crabs after.

The most interesting thing I learned is that you have to be careful with a hermit crab that has just molted, if they're in a tank with multiple hermit crabs. Hermit crabs eat their shed skin to regain the nutrients. If the newly molted crab runs into others while the smell of shed skin is still on it, the others will go "Oh yay, tasty shed skin!" and eat it. They actually make a special scent remover you can wash your crab in to remedy this.

Jonbenet Ramsay.

The more you read, the more questions you have.

Rabies, just a horrific and fascinating disease.

The Mandela effect gets me looped in.

On the brink of a religious psychosis was reading and studying hours and hours every day for weeks trying to figure out whether God exists and I'm going to hell.

I came across this legend about “The Green Children of Woolpit” and starting looking into how they had came to New England in the 12th century speaking an unknown language from a mysterious hidden village. Crazy stuff.

I was giving a speech at work and sat down on a chair that collapsed. It really embarrassed me. Spent the next month on the internet researching the company that made the chair to let them know about their faulty chairs. Long story short, it consumed my life.

Cicada 3301. Someone, or some group, posted a string of highly complex puzzles to scout people with the intelligence to solve them. Really interesting stuff.

AClockworkBird:

Cicada 3301. Got interested in 2020, joined the community, and two years later I was giving a talk at the world’s largest hacking conference about it.

I tell people cicada is different than most rabbit holes because you end up finding a wonderland where you can engage with so many different aspects and elements.

A few years ago I ended up (somehow) on a Wikipedia list of all US federal prisons. That ended up with me going to every individual site for each prison and seeing who the famous people who had ever been there were. Then...reading up on each individual. It was a huge rabbit hole, but very interesting.

Note: There are ALOT of US federal prisons. And each one has numerous people listed... it took awhile.

The real history of the Mormon church. Le sigh.

Arctic expeditions, man. It's a hell of a fascinating rabbit hole.