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    Restore Your Faith in Humanity at the Nicest Place on the Internet

    You catch glimpses of sunny parks, busy street corners and various home dwellings as smiling faces step up to offer friendly hugs and a lullaby voice sings lightly. Sound nice? It is. And you might be surprised to learn that it exists, of all places, on the Internet.

    "It doesn’t ask any questions," explains Jeff Lam, one of the creators behind the nicest place on the Internet. "It doesn’t want to know why you’re sad or why you need a hug. I think that’s the nice thing about it."

    Lam and his co-creator Lauren Perlow had the idea for the site after a rough day at their ad agency jobs. They spent that weekend collecting about 30 video hugs from the streets of San Francisco -- a process that strangers were surprisingly willing to participate in -- and posted the site in November. About 300,000 people have visited it since.

    Some of those visitors have contributed their own hugs to the project. There are about 200 on the site, which is the most videos Lam and Perlow can put on its YouTube playlist. They get about 10 new video hug submissions a day. And miraculously, all of them have been nice. Lam says there hasn't been a negative comment yet.

    "When we uploaded the videos onto YouTube, we thought we should disable the comments because we don’t want people to write mean things," he says. "But we forgot to turn off the comments. A couple of days later we realized, but it was quite the opposite. People couldn't say a bad thing about it."

    As someone who regularly reads about cyber-bullying and is required to attach an open comment thread to everything I produce during the weekday, I tend to think of the anonymous Internet as a terrible, soulless place. But the nicest place on the Internet has leveraged that same anonymity for an eloquent group hug. It's an oddly comforting project.

    This story originally published on Mashable here.

     

    13 comments

    • Spot  •  4 mths ago
      Nothing will restore my faith in humanity.
      • Page 4 mths ago
        Im sorry. There really are Honest, peace-loving people out there. I would make it a matter of sincere prayer. "He (God) is not far off from each one of us." Page887.
    • E Z  •  4 mths ago
      It's sweet,and it's fake.People still suck.
    • Ken  •  Dallas, Texas  •  4 mths ago
      Maybe if I watch it enough it'll help me to stop eating babies.
    • ahmadv  •  4 mths ago
      LOL what a weird site. someone should make the opposite of this site. umm idk a punch to the face or for guys a kick in the balls
    • Celeste  •  4 mths ago
      I love it...thank goodness for a site like this!
    • Rick l  •  4 mths ago
      Dr. Gregg House is one of the 1st people you see.
    • Hugh Jasol  •  4 mths ago
      4
    • Unbiased American  •  4 mths ago
      I can't wait to get on the site and create entropy!
    • the great husky  •  Baltimore, Maryland  •  4 mths ago
      I'm sorry but i think it was dumb
    • Gma  •  Elmhurst, Illinois  •  4 mths ago
      The site is really cute! It's really nice to see so many people that will share themselves. I felt like I had been hugged!
    • Miba  •  4 mths ago
      It won't be the nicest place for long now that there's a story about it on here the trolls will come out in force most like! I think a big reason why the youtube people are posting nice comments are because they probably felt bad and wanted to be cheered up so typed "hug" or some such into the search box. That kind of person obviously wouldn't post a negative comment. Only other thing I can think of is they have comments set to moderate and they only publish the good ones and are lying about all the comments being good.
    • Bugbear the Barbarian  •  4 mths ago
      Nothing will ever restore my faith in humanity or any other DNA-having creature.
      • race guy 4 mths ago
        you should just end it all now...
    • Steve  •  4 mths ago
      meh
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