Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.

Examples of idiosyncratic communities in which I’ve been trying to increase my participation:

• an offshoot of a online community I was very into back in the early 2000s
• a YouTube series where a guy rewatches old episodes of Monday Night Raw and Monday Nitro and compares them head-to-head, deciding who won each week of the Monday night wars
• a Reddit community who cares deeply about dates being expressed in the ISO-8601 date format
• another Reddit community that posts highlights from a mobile app football game that I am really into

In a lot of ways, this video is boring, useless, and a colossal waste of time.

In many other ways, however, this is compelling to the point of fascination.

A Swedish carpenter discovers giant 13 meter rafter supports inside an 800 year old church. He thinks to himself, “I wonder how they were able to use such beautiful wood in order to create this.”

What does he do? He enlists the help of 3 fellow master carpenters, who in turn locate a suitably similar tree, discuss their hypothesis around the tools and techniques used, and then execute those ideas.

This video is emblematic of a style of YouTube video I’ve been obsessed with lately: how do things work? Not just old tech, but extremely old tech.

I’ve never thought to myself, “how did people used to build big buildings?”, but I’m sure glad somebody else not only had that thought, but decided to document it for others to learn from.