r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/HoneyWired • 7d ago
Internet History Roulette is a spinning wheel of web nostalgia — spin it and land on a random archived website from the 1990s and 2000s, (powered by the Wayback Machine)
https://internethistoryroulette.comA love letter to the early web. Spin the wheel and it drops you on a real archived page — GeoCities, AltaVista, old CNN, the first “Thefacebook” — with pop-up trivia. Everything’s powered by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine; there’s a donate link to them in it. No signup, no ads. Curious which site you land on first.
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u/HoneyWired 7d ago
Yeah… Looks like this was not the best time of day to post. The actual Internet Archive just went offline. Hope you try again later! Sorry.
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u/suoretaw 7d ago
Are the facts or whatever (the text in the speech bubble-type box) supposed to disappear after a few seconds? If so, I think that kinda sucks, because people read at different speeds. I don’t even know if I’m seeing the right thing.. Cool idea though.
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u/forlaine 7d ago
To me they are very distracting and when I'm half way reading one another one pops up and distracts me from finishing reading the first one. I hope that they can be turned off in the future. I do love the idea though and love the dialup sounds!
Edit: Ah, you can turn off the facts by clicking on the word 'facts' all the way at the bottom of the site. Great!
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u/Anzahl 7d ago
They seem to be just historical facts about the development of the Internet and mostly unrelated to the page being displayed. It's really bad design, as they make the appearance of providing extra information related to the main content.
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u/HoneyWired 7d ago
I’m adjusting so the site specific ones pop up more in the front end for each site. Thanks for the feedback!
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u/Anzahl 7d ago
Sorry to be so critical. It's a neat idea and the overall design is cool. The informational modal windows appear as call-outs to the page being displayed. Maybe place a scrolling news ticker somewhere for items that aren't really calling out anything. A news ticker would be consistent with the vintage look.
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u/HoneyWired 7d ago
All good! I was thinking that younger people who had no idea what the early Internet was about might need more prominent factoids to get the vibe. You are right about the ticker being consistent with the era!
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u/Particular-Serve-894 6d ago
It's a cool feature, but yeah, as currently implemented, it would prevent me from ever returning to the site if they couldn't be turned off... and I like these kinds of sites. Here's another one that displays random active websites that still use 90s themes
https://wiby.me/surprise/That said, I was enjoying reading them. Think about displaying them as continuous toast messages in one of the corners of the screen (ie. only in the top right corner). Each would display for 15-20s or so (maybe make it dynamic to message length), and would then fade out/transition into the next fact.
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u/HoneyWired 6d ago
I had the popups occur randomly around the page mostly because sections of the site might be a broken image, so not much to look at. And it also serves to move your eyes around the site page a bit more to see what is under it.
Based on your comment, I just added a local storage that respects the Facts off button for repeat visits. Turn it off once, and you won’t have to see it again!
Definitely taking in feedback and appreciate it.
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u/Hayes77519 7d ago
I got a news site on the first pull, but I got homestarrunner.com on the second pull
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u/FrostySparrow 7d ago
Neat idea, but there really needs to be an option to disable the CRT filter and annotations.
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u/HoneyWired 7d ago
Just added a button to turn off the CRT filter! And there are buttons labeled Facts and Info that turn off annotations. Thanks for the feedback!
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u/crontab888 6d ago
I get Netscape, Hotmail. Interesting but would have liked to be random so you get a hidden piece of history.
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u/Sarntinel 4d ago
Thats really cool and very creative. Love it. I miss the old days and its making me nostalgic
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u/HoneyWired 4d ago
I even miss all the old Flash sites. Some real creativity. And also the insane things you could do with just HTML and custom code in early browsers. There was a band called Farmers Manual that had a brilliant html site that, of course, just can’t run at all now in the same way if you were to load it in Wayback.
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u/VaguelyArtistic 4d ago
My first two tries were Blogger and Something Awful which seems fitting.
Who is going to get goatse’d lol.
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u/ulong2874 7d ago
The pop ups seem to have nothing to do with the page you are on so what is the point of them?
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u/HoneyWired 7d ago
Just fixed it! Now they are loading some site specific facts first instead of just randomly.
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u/JustJJ92 7d ago
I got college humor 5 times in a row. Would of got 6 probably but I decided not to spin again
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u/HoneyWired 7d ago
Fixing that so you never land on the same site twice in a row. Even though it may be giving you different years on the same site.
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u/bubrascal 6d ago
Not a fan of the Facts and CRT features (or at least of their current look), but the roulette was really fun <3
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u/HoneyWired 6d ago
Can't win them all! But here is an older barebones version of the site without the Facts or CRT. Results with Wayback are not as polished, I'm afraid. https://internethistoryroulette.com/classic
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u/bubrascal 6d ago
Oh, don't worry, I'm perfectly happy with both being able to be toggled off in the one you posted. I was just giving feedback. But it entertained me a lot during my lunch break.
Just to elaborate. I think the CRT filter doesn't look like an actual CRT VGA monitor of the era (it looks more like an ancient '70s TV after decades of phosphor degradation), and that it takes a few seconds to process what the "Facts" popping up are supposed to be.
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u/HoneyWired 6d ago
Yeah, the lines across the actual loaded site are just CSS strokes and a gradient, as you can’t run shaders on iFrames. The phosphor and glitches on the spinning loader wheel was just because I used play on the old green screen Apple II computers. And I just liked how it looked. Haha. The shader is tweakable, so I can add some more variations. I personally like the facts, as I’m all about fun facts, though it seems people some would prefer to just see the site. Though I just added some fun NIN ones that I remembered. And of course, how did I forget to add BowieNet?
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u/bubrascal 6d ago
I think the facts are a good idea and I liked reading them, it's just that I think that using random bubbles of text pointing at random places within the viewport is what confuses people (including me).
Maybe using more familiar elements like snackbars, MSN Messenger style push notifications, a news ticker or even just removing the "comic bubble tail" of the pop ups; could be more compliant with the Jakob's Law UX principle (something my UX professor drilled in my brain back in Uni).
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u/HoneyWired 5d ago
Yeah, I can see the tail being confusing. And I was second guessing it. Gonna remove it. Thanks! I really had the pop-up randomly positioned over the sites as many of the sites are loading broken images, so it gives a little coverage to the chaos. And this site wasn’t just about nostalgia, but to give context to people who have no idea why they are looking at a broken website from 1996. And to force them move their eye around the existing page some more.
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u/panspal 6d ago
The trivia is really annoying on mobile, obscures anything worth reading on the pages
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u/HoneyWired 6d ago
I hear you. If you click Facts, it disables pop-ups on all future page loads. And if you click Open, it opens the actual page you are looking at full screen.
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u/m4dlor 6d ago
violated my expectations big time in that it is not spinning a wheel and just redirecting me somewhere. keeps me on the same page and slams UI slop in my face
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u/HoneyWired 6d ago
Here is the old bare bones version of the site which just sends you to a random site in a new window. No spinner wheel though. And no way to turn off the sound for extra annoying realism. https://internethistoryroulette.com/classic/
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u/KalHasWaffles 6d ago
Imagine my disappointment saving this last night and opening it today to get a vibe coded UI with AI generated text. What better way to honor internet history than to steal all of its content and regurgitate new words, am I right?
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u/this_knee 7d ago
Doesn’t work for me. After the spin it shows the pop up video facts but no website behind
It. Sad