Sheer delight is found in the internet of boring things

The Traffic Cone Preservation Society lurks on the “nice” internet.

I’m not sure how I discovered the nice niche of the internet but I’m so glad I did. I may have inadvertently searched for it but I certainly didn’t put in key words like Musk, X, Trump, trad wives, 4Chan or Meghan Markle. Nevertheless, up popped something called the Dull Men’s Club.

Now flagging yourself as dull doesn’t help your search engine optimisation but that’s the point.

This online group is the antithesis of today’s internet and they like it that way. And yet, their enthusiastic and informative posts about the most boring subjects imaginable has made them internet sensations, as they say in SEO land.

Celebrating “the joys of everyday, ordinary and dull things”, the Facebook group has special subject groups like the Cloud Appreciation Society, the Traffic Cone Preservation Society, the Apostrophe Protection Society, post box fanciers, collectors of airline sickness bags and a large group dedicated to documenting roundabouts, including a roundabout with a duck pond in the middle. That last discovery was a little too zingy for some.

Unsurprisingly, the most dedicated dullsters (they don’t like the word dullard) are middle-aged British gentlemen (and I think we can certainly use that form of address here). The British have a long history of tolerance for eccentrics, especially among the leisured class, so witnessing men jump out of cars to photograph a mailbox or run a tape measure along a very long corridor or clock the time as they ride the fastest lift in the city seems unremarkable.

Unremarkable is the modest ambition of our dullsters and while this might have been routine in the 19th century, it is remarkable in an age when their nemesis, the influencers, are rewarded for dare devil acts, narcissistic posing or passing themselves off as traditional wives when they are just bored housewives with rich husbands and have no idea of how to make scones or what homesteading really meant when the west was still wild.

Looking at you, Meghan Markle.

Dull men are not the only ones providing moments of respite from 21st-century exhibitionism.

On my exploration around the nice internet, I came across what was described as the nicest place on the internet – a subreddit called r/bald. This is a place where balding men seek help from other bald men.

Balding men have their own support group in the lesser known niches of the internet.

And from the moment a user presents his pate to the 150,000 followers, he gets empathy, advice and enthusiastic affirmation when he finally reveals what he has done about that patch of embarrassment on his scalp. (One wonders how a certain president might be greeted if he ever admitted the obvious but we want to keep it nice so …)

There are other places on the web where people are decent to each other. If you drill down through main social media, you find neighbourhood groups where residents alert each other to poor dog behaviour, suspicious cars or even stray sheep.

There are special interest groups who share recipes, gardening tips, tool recommendations, meditation sessions or, frankly, any subject that doesn’t have a business model based on likes.

Mostly they go unnoticed – happily so – but sometimes, well just look at Celeste Barber. The influencer who gained a following by parodying the beauty industry now has more followers than many of the celebrities she mocked.

Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen to Kevin, the president of the Roundabout Preservation Society or Peter of the Letter Box Study Group but they’ll have a special place in the hearts of everyone who appreciates JOMO (the joy of missing out) and doesn’t want to see another g-stringed model in a yoga pose offering her wisdom learnings.

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