Bored Hoard

Bored Hoard started during lockdown, when the official hobbies were apparently making bread, learning a language and slowly losing the ability to recognise what day it was.

I already knew how to make bread and I already spoke three languages, so I needed a different way to survive the boredom without becoming one of those people who suddenly has very strong opinions about sourdough hydration.

The idea was simple: build a place full of websites that could make the internet feel interesting again.

Not the obvious stuff. Not Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Twitter or the other giant nuggets everyone had already found. You would have to be spectacularly committed to missing the point not to know those exist.

Bored Hoard was for the smaller gold flakes still floating around: fun sites, useful tools, weird corners, creative projects, games, references, experiments and occasionally things so useless they loop back around into being useful.

We get rid of the crap and leave the shiny bits.

That was the whole point. A sieve for internet boredom.

What it does

The site collects internet finds into weekly boxes. People can open a box, rummage around and discover something they probably would not have found through normal search or social feeds.

Every box contains a handful of websites. The whole thing is designed to feel low-friction, direct and slightly nostalgic: open, browse, click, get lost somewhere mildly interesting.

No account. No grand platform vision. No algorithm pretending to understand your soul because you clicked on a mushroom simulator once.

Why I made it

I have always liked the web more when it feels like a place built by people rather than a set of engagement funnels wearing different fonts.

Search is good when you know what you want. Social feeds are good when the algorithm is not having a nervous breakdown. But discovery is a different thing. Discovery needs curation, taste, accidents and someone willing to say, “this is worth five minutes of your life.”

Bored Hoard was my small attempt to do that.

What I learned

Curation sounds easy until you actually have to do it repeatedly.

The hard part is not finding links. The hard part is deciding what belongs, what is too obvious, what is actually useful, what is just novelty wearing a hat, and how to make the whole thing feel coherent without sanding off the weirdness.

It also taught me that even a tiny project needs operations:

• Where do finds get saved?
• How are they tagged?
• What makes something good enough?
• How do you avoid repeating yourself?
• How does the thing stay alive when the original burst of lockdown energy is gone?

Annoyingly, even silly internet boxes need a system. Very rude of reality.

Current state

Bored Hoard still exists as a side project and archive of finds. It is not a startup, a media company or the next great discovery engine. It is a small curated project with a clear taste: useful, fun, strange, sometimes pointless, ideally shiny.

That is enough.