Was never about the 1,000,000$ idea

Do you guys remember the Million Dollar Homepage back in 2005? A 21-year-old sold one million pixels on a single webpage and somehow turned it into one of those legendary internet moments.

The web felt different back then. Simpler in some ways, but also more playful. Small weird ideas could capture the attention of the whole community.

Today we can build and launch things faster than ever, which is honestly amazing. The tools we have now are insane compared to what people had in 2005. It’s easier, cheaper, and way faster to experiment with ideas.

But at the same time, sometimes it feels like we’re a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of new things appearing every single day. Projects come and go so quickly that it’s harder for those quirky community moments to happen.

That’s actually one of the reasons I like Indie Hackers so much. It still feels like a corner of the internet where people share interesting ideas and experiments just because they’re fun to build.

Lately I’ve been thinking about creating something inspired by those early internet experiments. Not the same idea, but something in a similar spirit. Simple, playful, maybe with a slightly more mathematical or system-driven twist behind it.

For example, imagine a canvas where elements expand outward following a spiral growth pattern, something like a logarithmic spiral.

r = a · e^(bθ)

Each new addition slightly increases the scale and pushes everything outward along the curve. Over time it would create this evolving geometric pattern shaped entirely by the sequence of participants.

No big startup idea. Just a weird little internet experiment to see what happens.

Curious though…
What other weird or fun internet experiments do you remember from the early web?