Mirsky's Worst of the Web

» see turnpike.net/metro/mirsky/Worst.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

mirsky's worst of the web sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. in january 1995 i was 11 in ankara, several years away from a first dial-up session. the site lived on turnpike.net inside a metro user account in massachusetts. the audience was the small slice of '95 web users who were curious enough about the medium to read mockery of bad pages on it. that audience was almost entirely us-based, college-network english-speaking and reachable through the cool site of the day blogroll. i was not in any of those circles. i learned about mirsky's the way most people learn about pre-1998 web artifacts, through later wikipedia and through anthologies of early-web humor.

david mirsky was a former harvard lampoon writer who put up his first batch of picks in january '95. the format was simple. three times a week he posted links to bad homepages with a one-line comment under each link. the comments were short and brutal in the lampoon style. mirsky was deliberately the inverse of glenn davis's cool site of the day. davis crowned one good site per day, mirsky mocked three bad ones every other day. the press loved the contrast. magazines covering the early web ran mirsky and davis as a pair through 1995-'96.

the picks themselves are now mostly lost. the original site lived as plain html on a personal university-affiliate account at turnpike.net and most of the linked targets disappeared in the first round of geocities purges. archive.org preserved a few snapshots from late '95 onward. what survives is the format rather than the content. one short editorial verdict per link, three picks per cycle, no comment threading, no community. mirsky himself was the only writer, the audience could only laugh along.

mirsky had assumed in '95 that web ad revenue would arrive in time to pay for his cycles. by mid-'96 that assumption had not borne out. on november 1 1996 he posted a short note saying he was stopping. the site had not generated any income to make the work sustainable, his interest had faded. the html turnpike pages stayed up for another few years as a frozen artifact before the account itself was reclaimed. the brand never came back. mirsky moved into other work and let the worst-of-the-web name fall into the public-domain folklore of early-web criticism.

~ the dossier ~

~ the format ~

mirsky's was the original public-mockery site for bad design. before this point the early web had cool site of the day on one side and yahoo directory on the other side. neither one of them carried any negative-curation register. mirsky's introduced the editorial voice that says some pages are simply ugly and someone should say so out loud. that move pre-dated suck.com by several months and arguably set the tone that suck.com took further into long-form criticism. the lineage from mirsky's runs through web pages must die and forward into somethingawful.com's early webmaster sneer essays.

~ the lampoon voice ~

mirsky carried the harvard lampoon school of short comedic prose into web criticism. the comments under each pick were one sentence long, calibrated to land a joke without explaining itself. that compression was the actual product. a longer write-up would have made the format slower to scan and less repeatable. the three-times-a-week cadence depended on the one-line ceiling. for most '96 readers the appeal was the one-line verdict under each picked link, the click-through to the bad page was secondary. some 1996 html-design books name-checked mirsky's as a warning to web designers about getting featured in his column.

~ how it ended ~

the november 1 1996 note was short. mirsky said he had expected the site to generate revenue and it had not. without a way to pay for the time he could no longer keep up the schedule. for some reason he did not try to hand off the site to a successor. the worst-of-the-web brand belonged to one writer's voice and a different writer could not have continued it under the same name. the archive copies of the late-'95 and '96 entries still circulate in early-web preservation projects, the original turnpike url stopped resolving by the end of the decade.

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