Things to do when you are bored online

Most lists of things to do online are the same forty links copied between eleven sites, half of them dead, none of them opened by whoever posted them. This one is sorted by the thing that actually decides what you want: how much time you have, and whether you want to think.

Times are how long each one held attention in testing, not how long the site can technically run.

If you have two minutes

You are between things. You want a single hit and then you want to leave.

• Press one button and go somewhere random. The Useless Web throws you at a site with no explanation. Our own boredom roulette does the same thing but tells you what you are about to open and roughly how long it lasts, which matters when you have two minutes and not twenty.
• Slap a man with an eel. Eel Slap is one photo sequence and one interaction. It is over quickly and it is funnier than it should be.
• Unroll toilet paper forever. Paper Toilet makes the sound. That is the whole feature and it is enough.
• Scroll a horse until you doubt yourself. Endless Horse has no bottom. People have tried.
• Watch a number go up that you control. Burn one credit on RIPMoney and read what you unlocked. It takes about nine seconds and the message is different every time.

If you have ten minutes

Long enough to get absorbed, short enough that you will not miss anything.

• Find a photo of someone pointing at your cursor. Pointer Pointer has a photo for every position. Move the mouse to a corner and watch it still work.
• Listen to somewhere else. Rainy Mood or a live airport tower feed. Ambient sound from a place you are not in does something specific to a bored brain.
• Read one long Wikipedia article about a disaster. Not a rabbit hole, one article. Pick something with a timeline section. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Vasa, Kessler syndrome.
• Draw badly on purpose. Open any browser drawing toy and give yourself sixty seconds per subject. Bad drawing under time pressure is a completely different activity from drawing.
• Play a game with no download. We keep a separate list of click games that run in the tab, because that is its own kind of boredom.

If you have an hour and no plans

This is the dangerous category. Everything here can take the afternoon.

• Explore a place on a map at street level. Pick a country you cannot picture, drop into a road, and follow it. Roads out of small towns in Iceland, Japan, or Chile are the good ones.
• Learn one keyboard shortcut set properly. Twenty minutes of drilling shortcuts in the thing you use most is the highest return per bored hour on this whole list, which is why nobody does it.
• Build a collection of something worthless. Ours is collectible messages, sorted by rarity, worth nothing. Collecting scratches an itch that consuming does not.
• Read the changelog of software you use. Sounds like a joke. It is not. You find out what you have been doing the slow way for years.
• Work out what your subscriptions have actually cost you. The money waste calculator does the arithmetic. It takes four minutes and it is the least relaxing item on this page.

If you want to feel something other than boredom

Boredom is often the version of restlessness that is easiest to sit in. These push it somewhere else.

• Message one person you have been meaning to message. One line. The reply rate on out-of-nowhere messages is much higher than people expect.
• Do the small chore you keep stepping over. The physical one, near you, that takes six minutes. Boredom clears out fast on the other side of it.
• Cancel something. A subscription, a plan, a commitment you already resent. It is the only item here that pays.
• Waste money on purpose, at zero cost. The reason this site exists. Spending is the impulse, burning a credit is the version that leaves your bank alone.

Why the sorting matters more than the list

Every one of these lists eventually gets copied, sorted by nothing, and posted with forty links. That version is useless, because "bored" is not one state. Two minutes of dead time between meetings and an empty Sunday afternoon are different problems, and a link that solves one is an irritation in the other.

So the useful question is never "what is fun on the internet". It is "how long do I have, and do I want to think right now". Answer those two and the list picks itself.

Ours gets checked, not copied. Links die quietly, and a dead link on a boredom list is the most annoying possible outcome, so anything that stopped loading gets cut on the next pass rather than left there to rot.