The Nicest Place on the Internet: A Website That Only Hugs You

The Nicest Place on the Internet does one thing. You open it, and a stranger looks into the camera, opens their arms, and hugs you. Then another one. Then another. There is no feed, no reply box, no engagement metric, no way for it to turn against you. It is possibly the only page on the web where nothing bad can happen in the comments, because there are no comments.

It sounds unbearably twee described in a sentence. It is not, and it takes about forty seconds of watching to understand why.

What is The Nicest Place on the Internet?

It launched in 2011, credited to Jeff Lam and Lauren Perlow, as a small side project with a single premise: the internet is a stressful place, so here is a corner of it that only does one nice thing. The original build was nothing but a playlist of user-submitted hug clips. That is still, more or less, what it is today at thenicestplace.net, tidied up, given playback controls, and kept alive long after most projects of that vintage went dark.

The clips are the whole product. Someone in a kitchen. Someone on a sofa with a dog wandering through the shot. A group of coworkers who clearly agreed to do this on a lunch break and are now slightly regretting it. They lean in, arms out, hold for a beat, and the screen cuts to the next one. Nobody says anything.

What makes it land is the amateurism. Everyone is a little too far from the camera or a little too close. The lighting is bad. People break character and laugh. If this had been shot by a brand it would be revolting; because it was shot by strangers on webcams in 2012, it is disarming.

It is also, quietly, one of the last surviving examples of a genre: the small, sincere, single-idea website made by two people for no reason. That whole category mostly got eaten by platforms. This one is still standing.

What can you do with The Nicest Place on the Internet?

• Just let it run. Open the tab and do nothing. The clips advance on their own, which is the intended experience.
• Use the playback controls. There are rewind, play/pause and forward buttons, so you can hold on a hug you liked or skip one that is not landing.
• Hit shuffle. Randomizes the order so you are not walking the same sequence every visit.
• Mute it. Some clips have ambient sound. If you want the pure silent version, the mute toggle is right there.
• Submit your own hug. Record a few seconds of yourself opening your arms and send it in. Your clip joins the rotation for everyone else.
• Send the link to someone. This is the real use case. It is a thing you forward to a friend having a bad week instead of typing “you okay?” for the fourth time.

Tips to get the most out of it

Watch more than three. The first clip feels silly. The fifth one does not. Something about the accumulation of strangers, none of whom know you exist, doing this on purpose, gets past your defenses whether you approve or not.

Put it on full screen. The effect depends on the person being roughly life-size. In a small browser window it reads as a video thumbnail; full screen, it reads as a person in the room.

Don’t send it with a paragraph of explanation. Just send the link. The framing ruins it. Let the other person open a mystery URL and find out.

Try it before a hard conversation, not after. It is a decent thirty-second reset. Used as consolation it can feel patronizing; used as a warm-up, it works.

Record one if you use it twice. The site only exists because people bothered to film themselves being mildly embarrassed. It is a low bar for contributing to something.

If you like The Nicest Place on the Internet, also try…

• Dear Next Visitor: strangers leaving short written notes for whoever loads the page next.
• PostSecret: the darker, more complicated cousin, anonymous confessions mailed in on postcards.
• Window Swap: look out of a stranger’s window somewhere far away, for no reason at all.
• Procatinator: a cat GIF paired with a random song, roughly the same dose of unearned goodwill.

More gentle nonsense in Weird & Wonderful, and the rest of the internet’s better distractions live in Entertainment & Fun.