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Weird
Shared spaces where everyone acts at once. Sometimes it becomes art, usually it becomes a mess, and the mess is the interesting part.
13 sites
Telephone played with drawings: describe a picture, draw a description, and watch the chain derail over twelve steps.
Infinite pixel canvas anybody can paint on live, with no undo, no brief and no moderation queue worth mentioning.
Draw a horse, then watch it gallop off to join the herd of terrible horses drawn by everybody else.
One piano keyboard shared by everybody currently online, producing either a Chopin nocturne or an immediate car crash.
A million checkboxes shared by everyone at once. Ticking them was pointless right up until people started writing messages in binary.
The souped-up fork of the infinite text canvas, with colour, links and long-running territory disputes conducted entirely in ASCII.
Fold a paper plane, throw it, and catch one somebody launched in another country. Nothing else happens, which is the point.
Home of the shared pixel canvas where millions of people fought surprisingly politely over a few million squares.
Archive of the experiment where one button and one click each spawned genuine factions, martyrs and a working theology within days.
A student sold a million pixels of advertising at a dollar each in 2005. The mosaic is still up, and most of the links now go nowhere.
Pixel canvas laid over a world map where you claim a handful of tiles at a time and defend them against the neighbouring country.
Infinite shared canvas of plain text where anyone can type anywhere. Scroll far enough and you find things nobody meant you to read.
Real research that needs human eyes: classify galaxies, transcribe ships' logs or count penguins, and end up in a published paper.
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
13 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
11 of the 13 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
9 of 13 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 13 are safe for work and 12 work with the sound off.
One button, one detour. Press it as often as you like.