29 Comments

Addictive Websites
Sometimes I burn through hours just clicking deeper into rabbit holes on the internet. At what point do they take away my keyboard and jack me into a pod with a USB cable at the back of my neck?

Here they are, the 15 Most Addictive Websites Ever as determined by Urlesque -- a list comprising of wikis, blogs, gaming sites and more. We tried to focus more on individual sites providing unique content, but we just couldn't leave out a few aggregators that allow us to cherry pick fun stuff from millions of places throughout the web.
It's not hard to find soul-crushing video content on the web. But you won't find a single source that so carefully curates hilariously bad video clips that you haven't already seen a hundred times on Everything Is Terrible. I am consistently amazed at how many infomercial weirdos and bizarre Christian kids shows they're able to dig up every week.

Why it's addictive: The so-bad-they're-good videos bleed together for marathon rubbernecking sessions.
Ffffound is an image hosting platform like Flickr but cooler. It dynamically recommends photos you'll like as you browse. It's invite-only, which prevents a bunch of social media dorks dorking it up with stupid photos of what they ate for dinner that day.

Why it's addictive: Hey look, it's a picture of a man wearing a wearing a bird's nest on his head. And look over there, a mosaic made out of candy corn. And so on.
Content aggregators like Reddit or Digg make it easy for you to find the stuff that everyone's talking about. These communities have developed distinct personalities, going beyond just recommending stuff and actually help each other out and engage in weird collective pranks.

Why it's addictive: The content is so rapidly refreshed that you could easily just read interesting new stories indefinitely. Plus, you'll want to argue with or rally the community.
Will we, as a society, ever get tired of watching each other fail? People falling! Bad parenting! Bad spelling in signage! It's always the same dumb crap, but we can't get enough of it.

Why it's addictive: Just look at those YouTube screenshots as you scroll down the page. The teaser images will entice you till you're pages deep.
FML & MLIA
FML (or F*** My Life) is a site made up of user-submitted disappointments such as
Today, I daringly tried that fish bath thingy (the one where all the fish come to you and eat all of your skin's dead cells). I submerged into it and after 15 minutes of being a human buffet, 20 of the fish died. FML
And then, MLIA (My Life Is Average), which celebrates life's mundane moments:
Today, I renamed my iPod "This ship" just for the pleasure of seeing the phrase "This ship is syncing" MLIA


Why it's addictive: Sort the responses by popularity and spend hours marveling at other people's problems.
Bloggers and forum dwellers have revived animated GIFs in a huge way over the last few years. Gifsoup allows users to create their own gifs from existing YouTube footage, and also hosts a huge gallery of embeddable GIFs.

Why it's addictive: If scrolling through endless galleries of twitching, squirming animations wasn't enough, it's easy to make your own.
Know Your Meme is a wiki for memes. Anyone can submit information about a particular meme, and the good stuff rises to the top. It's also carefully curated and peppered with insightful videos explaining some of the more complex memes. You can easily burn a few hours tumbling down a rabbit hole of interrelated memes.

Why it's addictive: Each entry contains links to other memes, so even if you've found your explanation of the meme about which you were curious, you'll inevitably learn about a ton more.
Because it's so comprehensively cross-referenced, it's inevitable that looking up a quick data point on Wikipedia turns into an hours-long aimless graze of information. If that's not addictive enough, there's a game for iPhones and iPads called Wikihunt that challenges players to navigate from one random Wikipedia page to another in as few clicks as possible.

Why it's addictive: Look at all those underlined words that are waiting to be clicked. Even if you came here for a specific reason, it's guaranteed you won't be able to leave without learning about something else worth sharing at the water cooler.
If you have any interest in pop culture or creative writing, you WILL spend hours absorbing the storytelling cliches at TV Tropes. Every plot element or characterization is documented exhaustively, with as much weight given to some dumb Anime as to Citizen Kane.

Why it's addictive: Because a lot of the tropes are built on top of several other tropes, you end up having to dive four or five pages deep to figure out what anything means.
There are many browser-based gaming sites, but this one's the best. On top of hundreds of games offered, there's also a meta-game, wherein you win points and earn badges for accomplishing certain in-game goals.

Why it's addictive: The impulse to make numbers go up is rarely so cleverly manipulated.
Who among us hasn't found ourselves awake at 3:00 AM staring slack-jawed at an ex's Facebook wall or flipping through photos of people you don't know? According to Mashable, one third of women between the ages of 18-34 check Facebook first thing in the morning.

Why it's addictive: Facebook is explicitly engineered to keep you clicking, from its annoying games to its lure of keeping tabs on crush objects.
YMNTD, or You're The Man Now Dog (A Sean Connery quote from Finding Forrester) is a simple site that allows users to upload an image or animated GIF, a caption and a sound file. What results is a fertile meme farm that churns out hundreds of ridiculous intertextual pages each week. (See: Some of the most classic examples)

Why it's addictive: Each entry is an easily digestible chunk of a pop culture artifact. So they're perfect for consuming in huge, irresponsible amounts.
Oh No They Didn't is one of the only thriving blogs on Livejournal because it's one of the smartest celebrity gossip blogs out there, and its use of user-generated content allows it to scoop a lot of big gossip sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton.

Why it's addictive: It's alluring in the same way that all gossip rags are, but this one does it the best. Not to mention the endless hilarity encompassed in the members' avatars and use of animated gifs in the comments.

More from our friends around the web...

The 'Work of Art' Drinking Game [Flavorwire]


Girl Gets Launched Into Lake [Comedy.com]


Nintendo Loving Gorilla Swipes DS [MentalFloss]


Total Job Meltdowns [Esquire]