Séamas O'Reilly: These websites show the worldwide web, and the world itself, at its best

Séamas O'Reilly: I’ve taken to the word ‘enshittification’ with the zeal of a convert over the past two years. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

New year, new me. That’s what I’ve been saying all week and I’ll keep doing it until I actually believe it. In my case, that basically means not being fully sedentary, and attempting to counter my debilitating addiction to the screens which blare a constant torrent of awfulness directly into my brain. I am venturing to be more present in the moment, more grateful for the little things, more positive in my outlook on the world and all that’s in it.

Nowhere is this more necessary than in my relationship to the internet, the portal through which I come to know everything about the planet on which I live. For most of the time I’ve been writing this column, I’ve surveyed the ills of this arrangement, whether that be the collapse of Twitter, the decay of the wider
internet, or the deadening churn of scammers, bots, and AI crowding out its every fibre. At times, it might have seemed like I believe the entire tech space is hellbent on destroying our lives. In fairness, this is primarily because the entire tech space IS hellbent on destroying our lives.

Admittedly, I’ve had skin in the game. My own book has been cannibalised by AI and sold on Amazon – most notably to me, when I couldn’t resist the temptation to see what it was like. In February, I pointed out that Elon Musk’s ravaged microblogging platform X had become a porn-bot ravaged hellscape and, four hours later, became the first Irish journalist to have their account crushed for criticising their Free Speech-obsessed dear leader. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me, I said to myself, upon reading that my name had been cited in an Oireachtas committee held with Twitter bosses the following week - thus entering the smallest-scale scandal in human history, into the eternal vaults of Irish parliamentary record. When the Macquarie dictionary named ‘enshittification’ its word of the year in November, I felt quite vindicated for having mentioned it in these very pages as early as February 2023. The term – which they define as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking” – was coined by Cory Doctorow the year before, and I’ve taken to it with the zeal of a convert, citing it several times throughout the past two years.

It’s in the degradation of Google Search, the robotic voices on your bank’s helpline and the maddening circles of navigating any online customer service portal that proffers a bot to answer your queries. It’s the low-cost airline that makes you pay to sit with your family, the websites that prompt you to identify each sector of a grid which doesn’t contain a bus, and the leisure centres, trainlines, museums, and health services that refuse to accept fadas or apostrophes in a country where many people’s names – my own included – feature both.

It’s enough to make you think that everything about our modern world is awful, but this is not the case. For all that I hate about the future we’ve inherited, there are still wonders worth praising. So, in that spirit of self-renewal I’m here to kick off 2025 with some websites that show the worldwide web, and the world itself, at its best.

There are still online wonders worth praising

Forgotify.com showcases tracks from Spotify with only one catch – every single song had zero listens before you came along. The opportunity to tread on virgin territory is welcome, even if the knowledge you’re the first person to listen to someone’s cherished work bestows a crushing sense of ennui. For the more visually minded, VintageObscura.net performs a similar trick with YouTube videos with fewer than 100 views, making you the Captain Kirk of the vlogosphere, boldly going where none have gone before. For a more curated approach, TapeFear.com sorts lesser-known baubles from Spotify or Boomkat by genre, and dispenses nuggets from a 42,000 record catalogue of hidden gems.

The BBC Sound Library went fully online this year, hosting tens of thousands of professional level sound effects, previously sold as LPs, and memorably utilised by Father Ted’s Dougal for the purposes of summoning the beast of Craggy Island. They now sit online, entirely free, in high definition for any use you wish. From party favourites like creaking doors and cheering crowds, to the odd, palatial soundscapes of ruined temples and city streets. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, never fear. Some BBC microphone was likely nearby, so get searching.

For the best possible sense of our wide blue world, earth.nullschool.net provides a movable globe depicting live wind patterns around the planet at any given time, while windy.com offers a similar service on a flattened atlas. Weather watchers can also use the decidedly less pretty, but no less charming, blitzortung.org to watch real-time impacts from lightning strikes anywhere on Earth while Radio.garden turns the planet into one giant dial, allowing you to spin the globe and find local radio from tens of thousands of stations all over the world. For an even more ornate audio experience, I’d end by directing you to one of my all-time favourites,YouAreListening.To, which takes publicly available police radio from around across the world and pairs it with ambient music drawn randomly from Soundcloud. The result is a collage of sounds that’s both disconcerting and profound, with waves of sonourous melody washing together with staccato dispatches from walkie talkies and police scanners. It’s perfect listening to have in the background of your daily labours, if you’re feeling the need to sit back and take stock. 

And especially if you’re avoiding the deadening churn of picking out all the images in a grid which don’t show a bus or a traffic light or a street sign and for the love of God why the hell won’t it just – I’m sorry, I said I’d stop. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day. Our worries are small, and the world is so very large.