Some of our best sites to kill time on the Internet – words Alan Woods

The internet is the greatest invention for procrastinators since the games console. Never has it been so easy to just waste 2 hours when you’re supposed to be doing homework or a work assignment, by watching silly cat videos online.

These websites serve little purpose really, other than to entertain us and make us laugh and in this world of uncertainty, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Here’s some of our best sites to kill time on the web.

Buzzfeed

In the last year or so, Buzzfeed has been trying to take itself more seriously and be treated as a serious journalism site with their cutting edge, breaking news (which is always behind the actual news so there’s no point) to their ‘opinion pieces’ which is just an article that shares a bunch of videos of other people’s opinions. Buzzfeed need to stop this and get back to solely doing stupid quizzes and lists. It’s what they’re good at and they should stick to it. How else am I going to find out which European capital I should live in based off of my favourite flower or if I should eat pasta or pizza for dinner based off of my fondness for marzipan … I sometimes feel they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel but nevertheless they have absorbed hours of my life already.

YouTube

Thanks to their usually spot on, ‘what else you might like’ suggested video on the right hand side of the screen, people end up being sucked into a vortex of cat videos, people breaking their bones, trailers of upcoming movies and games, Parkinson interviews from the 70s, women tapping on plastic lids for no apparent reason (it’s called ASMR and is actually brilliant, by the way), or watching Pokémon championship tournaments that are much more exciting that any game of football or tennis. Where else are you going to see a bespectacled Japanese kid scream because his Charizard was just taken out by a high stats Mega-Kangaskhan … what a world we live in.

The Chive

The internet is filled with funny picture and video sites, however none offer quite such a wide collection as The Chive. With so many categories, you get stuck in a YouTube style loop, looking at gallery after gallery until you stop and the world seems a slightly better place. How can a world be evil when it has plumbers that think this is a job well done:

Tickld

Tickld is a wonderful site where people make memes and then post them for other people to either like or dislike. It’s a simple premise, but over the years clans have started to form and it’s like a microcosm of society. If you keep up to date with it, you’ll see trends rise and fall. The site produces some hilarious content, just don’t go on to the comments section, it has all the bitterness of YouTube comments without the humour.

Those are the sites I find myself lost on and never able to return to the work day. They may be largely pointless, but I think the world is a better place for having them in. God save procrastination!