43 ms·

Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

• downshun 6y ago
  Google
• pensv0 6y ago
  I frequented tutorialforums.com around 2004. It was quite big around at that time but sadly the site went down for months when they decided to rewrite their forum from scratch . By the time it was up, most of the regulars already moved on.
• deftnerd 6y ago
  I was quite fond of Kuro5hin.org, a discussion community that just kind of petered out.
  • duxup 6y ago
    It was fun but was a pretty small community.
  • contingencies 6y ago
    Yes, there was a golden period. After slashdot. Before ... well, nothing. Maybe reddit?
• wdavidw 6y ago
  Maybe around 2006-2010, http://ajaxian.com/ http://ajaxian.com/ was an inspiring aggregate of web related articles that I would visit daily.
• leoh 6y ago
  suck.com, stellar.io, yahoo.com's directory
  • jasonv 6y ago
    i came to answer suck.com
  • patchtopic 6y ago
    yes, SUCK.COM was awesome.
• vardump 6y ago
  1996 or so: altavista.digital.com! I loved (and got pretty good at due to daily training, heh) using boolean operations to find whatever I wanted. No Google back then. Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam. Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.
  • osrec 6y ago
    Do you feel the simplification (or perhaps, dumbing down) of search queries is a bad thing?
    • makosdv 6y ago
      I wish they would enable an advanced mode or something.
    • rrmm 6y ago
      I used altavista long after google had become the hip new thing. I liked it, because for certain searches I knew what results I would get back. Which is to say I knew how to look for things I wanted to find. Google was smarter but seemed less intuitive to me to get at what I wanted.
    • mech422 6y ago
      I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....
      • vardump 6y ago
        Seconded. With increasing frequency Google returns pages and pages of totally irrelevant results. It's as if they don't care about search result quality as much anymore.
        • mech422 6y ago
          I think its half 'dumbing down' search, and half greed to push as many ads as possible...
• j79 6y ago
  Not a specific website, but the concept of web rings that tied Geocities and Tripod sites together were another a lot of fun.
• thomk 6y ago
  https://everything2.com/ https://everything2.com/ which, amazingly is still up and running.
  • pensv0 6y ago
    I remember it! Completely unrelated but somethingaweful.com was really hilarious back then. back when meme wasn't a thing.
    • hprotagonist 6y ago
      SA goons are also still hard at work. Fark, too.
      • mekanicalsyncop 6y ago
        Unrelated to your comment here but a while back you mentioned you liked some Space Cadet keycaps I had, but they are usually only available via a group buy. There's another one going on right now for a set that looks the same but comes in a different key profile: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=105375.0 https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=105375.0
    • adingus 6y ago
      Back when memes were just called "image macros". Something Awful is still going but there is nothing remotely funny or new there.
  • cmdrtaco 6y ago
    But do you remember everything1?
    • thomk 6y ago
      No sir, was there such a thing?
      • rival_elf 6y ago
• fowkswe 6y ago
  K10k.net Linkedup.com The link dumps of all the new and exciting shit people were doing with the internet.
• boring_twenties 6y ago
  wiretap.spies.com (originally a Gopher site, but eventually had an http version) gatekeeper.dec.com ... an FTP site, but hey, you did say early days!
• hanoz 6y ago
  Not a website, but I miss a weekly email newsletter called NTK (Need to Know). I'm not sure how many HN readers were NTK readers, but I bet all NTK readers are now HN readers.
  • alistairbayley 6y ago
    I still have one of their t-shirts.
  • dotBen 6y ago
    Yes! Whatever happened to Dave Green?
  • lozf 6y ago
    Yes! The archive still lives at ntk.net if you're craving nostalgia.
• jdkee 6y ago
  Slashdot. The technical discussions, the flamewars, dumping on Jon Katz, William Gibson vs. Neal Stephenson, using the web as a primary source of news on 09-11-2001. Posting as user #41803. https://m.slashdot.org/story/31348 https://m.slashdot.org/story/31348
  • pensv0 6y ago
    Good times. I frequent box.sk for hacker type info too.
  • smsm42 6y ago
    Slashdot was fun... But then somehow it stopped to be. Not sure even what happened. Posting as user 1XXX :)
    • cmdrtaco 6y ago
      I have a few theories... :)
      • cambalache 6y ago
        The man the myth the legend!
      • prepend 6y ago
        What do you think were the two biggest reasons? How do you think it could have turned out differently to still have a site today with the same spirit?
    • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
      When CmdrTaco left the site changed.
  • cmdrtaco 6y ago
    bow
• girmad 6y ago
  I miss the word game Acrophobia (I think it was an IRC game originally, but there was a good webapp version where I wasted more time than I'd like to admit)
  • egfx 6y ago
    Yes! Actually it still exists but this version somehow doesn’t feel the same. The flash dark mode ui of the original was the real deal. https://www.acrofever.com https://www.acrofever.com
• neilsense 6y ago
  kuro5hin
• jamespetercook 6y ago
  Geocities, and all of my friends at school having their own website they’d update at lunchtime in the school library!
• psxuaw 6y ago
  PerlMonks, and WikiWikiWeb.
  • cmdrtaco 6y ago
    Vroom is good people.
• justinzollars 6y ago
  geocities
• kaydub 6y ago
  &Totse
• hnhg 6y ago
  fuckedcompany
  • GaltMidas 6y ago
    I second this. What was your handle?
    • hnhg 6y ago
      I was just a lurker.
  • icedchai 6y ago
    That was an old favorite of mine, too.
• argimenes 6y ago
  Geocities and AngelFire.
• dot 6y ago
  zfilter, it was basically reddit of the early 2000s: https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilter.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilte... Also, Metafilter and Fark. Both still exist to my surprise.
• karmakaze 6y ago
  Any search engine that can return exact matches ranked my match relevance.
• hit8run 6y ago
  audiogalaxy - one was able to find rare remixes that were not available anywhere else and download them as soon as a user with that file came online.
• kobc 6y ago
  It’s been on my mind lately and I’d be surprised if anyone else recognized these: Information Leak SoCal (ProBoards) Too Smart Guys/PSP Hacking 101
• joshfraser 6y ago
  digg.com. still exists, but it's not the same.
• digitalsanctum 6y ago
  circa 1999 I was a big fan of Jakob Nielsen's books and website about web usability. The website he had back then had all sorts of advice around usability which I attribute, in part, to my success early in my career. I often wonder what he thinks of the web today with all of the design systems and frontend frameworks versus the simplicity of the 90s.
  • Scoundreller 6y ago
    His company is still kicking. Dunno how much day to day involvement he has: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-...
• flatfilefan 6y ago
  Geocities! And the olle Slashdot. Stuff that matters, news for nerds, or some such.
• ThinkingGuy 6y ago
  ithell.com As a relatively new IT admin, for a brief time it was a great forum for swapping war stories with others in my position. The site is actually still up, but appears strangely frozen in time at around April of 2001.
• eyeball 6y ago
  Ytmnd.com
  • lgl 6y ago
    Still live and as relevant as ever -> https://picard.ytmnd.com https://picard.ytmnd.com EDIT: Apologies if anybody here had forgotten or still didn't know about this and now can't take this tune out of their head. It's what it does, don't fight it.
    • eyeball 6y ago
      Awesome. It looks like they brought it back!
• hattori 6y ago
  Old school quake 1/2/3 news portals! Those were fun. Classic example today would be https://www.quakeworld.nu/ https://www.quakeworld.nu/
  • rrmm 6y ago
    Old man murray.
  • lgl 6y ago
    Fondly remember planetquake [0] and checking the latest plan updates from id software on quakefinger [1]. 0 - http://web.archive.org/web/19990502092711/http://www.planetquake.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990502092711/http://www.planetq... 1 - http://web.archive.org/web/19991002143618/http://finger.planetquake.com/index.asp http://web.archive.org/web/19991002143618/http://finger.plan...
  • pimlottc 6y ago
    Oh yeah, so many hours spent reading all the original Quake sites back in the day, Joost Schuur's Aftershock, Blue's Quake Rag, sCary's Quakeholio, Redwood's Quake Stomping Grounds... such an exciting time, it seemed like there was something new happening every day.
    • rhblake 6y ago
      Stephen "Blue" Heaslip is still at it, ~24 years later, doing daily updates [0]. Full archives stretching back to 1996. Quite a bit of history in there. [0] https://www.bluesnews.com/ https://www.bluesnews.com/
• pensv0 6y ago
  And obviously maddox.xmission.com
  • doopy1 6y ago
    It's still there and being updated
    • Lammy 6y ago
      I'm not still 14, sadly, so he isn't really that funny to me now. I'd rather not spoil my good memories :)
      • doopy1 6y ago
        Fair enough :)
• gtvwill 6y ago
  &Totse
  • rrival 6y ago
    and the rest of NIRVANAnet
• guerrilla 6y ago
  I miss The Weasel, an old mac warez and crack site from the 90s. It had mp3s and midis too I think. "Eagles may soar but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines" Seems like it wasn't archived, sadly.
  • donut 6y ago
    I remember Silicon Toad's page. Lots of cracking software, docs, etc.
    • hoistbypetard 6y ago
      I should dig around and see if I still have my archive of that one. I'm sure I saved everything there in 1998 or 1999.
  • jwjones 6y ago
    Yes, I loved the Weasel!
• donut 6y ago
  The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace.... Inspired a lot of learning about graphics.
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  zombo.com. it kind of sort of still exists, but I haven't had flash installed on any of my devices since about 2015. I was also around on Slashdot when Rob proposed. I was I think a sophomore or junior in high school, sprinting into the library between periods to refresh the page and see if she'd said yes or not.
  • poops 6y ago
    https://html5zombo.com https://html5zombo.com
    • hprotagonist 6y ago
      ahh life is complete again. the only limit is myself.
      • dumbfounder 6y ago
        Try opening 10 tabs at random intervals. It enhances the unknown.
  • cmdrtaco 6y ago
    :)
    • hprotagonist 6y ago
      i shall treasure this moment forever, with hot grits.
      • cmdrtaco 6y ago
        Gross.
        • hprotagonist 6y ago
          more seriously, thanks for the excellent and formative good times. You made something great.
• nope96 6y ago
  Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom weblog
• palehose 6y ago
  usenet, especially rec.music.phish It's still there but not the same. Also I want to give a bit more info about why rec.music.phish was special. Phish, like the Grateful Dead, allow people to record and distribute concert recordings as long as they didn't profit from it. So people would offer free "blanks and postage" deals to other people on rec.music.phish who would mail cassette tapes with return envelopes and get recordings of live concerts back in the mail a month later. That whole process is completely irrelevant now but it was a unifying fan experience that had real meaning to everyone involved. Going on a bittorrent site (bt.etree.org) doesn't compare in the development of meaningful relationships with total strangers even though it is far more efficient.
• jimnotgym 6y ago
  I miss a site called ebay.com that was full of people selling second-hand goods. It was replaced by a site selling Chinese knockoffs of the thing you want to buy. Then there was this other site that sold books and CDs called Amazon, they did a similar thing. I really enjoyed browsing suggestions back then. Finally froogle, superficially similar to google shopping that replaced it, but it actually helped you find things at a good price. That is the internet I miss, the one where the products provided a better experience than the high street.
  • WWLink 6y ago
    Ahh I miss froogle. But I also really liked yahoo shopping. It had a similar global search, if I recall, but you could still buy directly from tons of stores. Same with using pricewatch to get cheap computer parts. It feels like a lot of the competition is gone now.
  • Lammy 6y ago
    Those sellers never left eBay. It just got harder to find them among the noise. I still frequently have that great "old eBay" experience today when buying from sub-100-feedback sellers.
    • q084yn39cptyth 6y ago
      I've found that if you restrict purchases to goods in "preowned" condition for a lot of things you basically get the same Ebay as before. The tricky part is that there's a lot of people selling preowned goods as "new", usually they're items they purchased or received as a gift they never used. I think they're trying to emphasize the unused nature of the items, but nowadays they just get lost in the noise of direct-from-the-factory items.
• arghblarg 6y ago
  warehouse23.com/basement and its higher levels was a great timesink... SJgames put a minimal version back online recently, but it no longer allows new box submissions and seems to have lost a lot of the old content.
• api 6y ago
  Yahoo in the mid to late 90s. I've wondered if there might not be a renewed niche for a curated site directory, preferably as a non profit and with no comments. I miss the web then in general. It was full of basically honest information rich stuff.
  • ksec 6y ago
    >I miss the web then in general. It was full of basically honest information rich stuff. Completely Agree. People use to share honest information, no conflict of interest, and doing so purely because of passion. Now that got me thinking. Did the introduction of Web Ads in large, generating vast amount of profits leading to SEO, page spam, content farm and generally lower quality of information? So in good intention, we hope the web to have a sustainable ad business model, has actually lead to the fall on quality of the web? Or would the web still have been like today even if we had no ads. I am not sure if this is true, but this could be another example of good intention leads to bad outcome.
  • whoopdedo 6y ago
    Dmoz[1] was supposed to be that. Sadly it withered on the vine as well. The thing a directory does well that search doesn't is being able to eliminate the things you don't want to find. Let's say I want to find information about operating a whatchamacallit. While I can ask Google it may tell me that, but I'm also going to see a lot of information by people trying to sell me a whatchamacallit. In a directory I can find the category that covers the information domain I'm interested in then search only within that subtree for what I want to find. [1] currently archived at https://www.dmoz-odp.org/ https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
• RandomBacon 6y ago
  Consumerist.com before some as*le hacked the commenting system. After that, they closed the comments which was usually more valuable than the articles.
• pensv0 6y ago
  And animelayer.com. I stumbled upon the small site and while I was not a big anime guy, the people there were good fun
• chrisandchips 6y ago
  Old school runescape. I played it as a kid and have never otherwise had such a wonderful and memorable experience playing a video game. Im quite young (23) so when I was playing it back in 2006-2008, I learned a LOT about life. Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward in the game, etc. Most of my friends who used to play agree. You can still play, they brought it back a few years ago, but the community and popularity - as well as the feeling of discovery I used to get while playing - won’t ever come back
  • usmannk 6y ago
    So true. My first thought was this as well. I'm about the same age as you and played RS at much the same time. Personally the experience was greatest due to the huge black market community. Hell, I even first learned to code in order to bot RS. Learned a lot of the exact same lessons (Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward) but in real life and with real money. I still haven't gotten over suddenly getting banned from PayPal for selling virtual goods when I was 14. The ~$1000 USD I had made, pretty much all the money to my name, was held hostage for 6 months!
    • kylecazar 6y ago
      My first language was a Pascal-like DSL, learned for the sole purpose of mining ores while I was at school. I think I should credit my salary to Jagex.
      • chrisandchips 6y ago
        Thats too funny. And honestly, the fact that the game translates to the real world directly like that just blows my mind. I met a guy at a hackthon during uni who ran Sals realm of runescape. He told me that the selling the website basically payed his (canadian) tuition in full
        • Drip33 6y ago
          My Runescape money making adventures paid for most of my life, even to this day.
• herval 6y ago
  First wave: Geocities & its “webrings” Web 2.0: del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon
• tootie 6y ago
  Some classic comedy websites like Brunching Shuttlecocks and the Modern Humorist.
• bchip 6y ago
  Myspace
• scythe 6y ago
  I miss forumer.com probably more than anything. Sure, the messageboard software was atrocious. And maybe I have the usual rosy retrospection. But I remember a much more colloquial and friendly atmosphere when discussion forums weren't gamified with likes and pings. Newgrounds pre-YouTube was also a lot of fun.
• whoisjuan 6y ago
  Yahoo Pipes
• iobase 6y ago
  hardocp.com - Kyle Bennet, amongst others, did a good job with computer hardware reviews & news. He and the site have moved on and only the forum remains.
  • beamatronic 6y ago
    They were the number one team for Folding@Home for a long time: [H]ard OCP is how they styled their name.
• geocrasher 6y ago
  The old slashdot.org The old digg.com Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? My ealiest memories were pre-net, on Prodigy and AOL, long before they were 'net connected and could email each other. I learned what connectivity was at 2400 baud. I didn't discover BBS's until much later, around 1993-4,and was at 14.4k at that point. I never really understood fidonet, but played some of the BBS games and downloaded some warez from a "31337" BBS with a backdoor whose login was "elite". At least the sysop didn't call himself "Crash Override".
  • Lammy 6y ago
    The old SomethingAwful for me. > Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.
    • technofiend 6y ago
      Fark/Totalfark was fun for a while but descended into an echo chamber of cliques and in-jokes. It was a good preview of what reddit would eventually become.
      • tinus_hn 6y ago
        They also had a redesign fiasco.
    • pensv0 6y ago
      Photoshop Friday was kinda hit or miss, for for the funny ones they were really funny
    • xenihn 6y ago
      2000-2003 Something Awful was my favorite internet community/site ever. It's too bad about what happened with Ozma and Fistgrrl. Oh well.
  • lukejduncan 6y ago
• csense 6y ago
  Yahoo Games.
  • gremlinsinc 6y ago
    yeah, I miss this too. Esp. Pool and Euchre.
  • partisan 6y ago
    Prior to that, there was WebSpades which was free to play and tons of fun. They were bought out by one of the bigger sites and things went downhill as they often do. I played a lot of spades and backgammon on Yahoo as well. Is there a replacement for these types of sites nowadays?
• smcameron 6y ago
  myvirtualband.com (2005 or so). It was essentially a forum plus an ftp server. The idea was people would record some tracks, upload to the ftp server, and start a thread, then other people would add on to the track and build up a song or several songs. Everything was by default CC-BY-SA licensed. Also everything was very open, you could see all the threads and all the parts, there weren't any private threads. There are other things kind of like it still (it got sold and became kompoz.com, but that's very very different and not at all the same -- it's much more focused on "bands" and not on freewheeling collaboration, or at least was like that last time I looked.)
• foobarbecue 6y ago
  slyck.com , the filesharing news site.
• temptemptemp111 6y ago
  tot.se
• arrty88 6y ago
  not a website, but the old battle.net, and irc in general
  • markholmes 6y ago
    IRC is still alive and well
  • EamonnMR 6y ago
    Also the StarCraft role-playing scene.
• johndavid9991 6y ago
  friendster.com!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bovermyer 6y ago
  The Yahoo Web Directory.
• ollerac 6y ago
  lowbrow.org, started by one of the editors of suck.com, collected anonymous stories about the lowest points in people's lives. it helped me get through some low points of my own in high school. i helped fund it by mailing in cash when i was 16. i received a few branded match boxes in return. within a year, it went down for good. there are still some archives online, but nothing quite compares. i tried to revive it by building storylog.com. that 2 year endeavor managed to jumpstart my passion for web development, got me to learn HTML, CSS, and eventually Python, and landed me my first job at a startup.
• jetti 6y ago
  blackcode.com I remember it fondly and I found it after looking for hacking resources after seeing the movie Hacker but never had the proper motivation to actually dig in and learn. There are other sites for hacking/cyber security now but it was the first one I had found back in the day
• jtchang 6y ago
  The old astalavista.box.sk. Surprising it is still running.
• JadoJodo 6y ago
  TradeGamesNow.com - Community was awesome and trading video games via the postal service was a lot of fun.
• bdcravens 6y ago
  So many sites that technically still exist but have changed slashdot shoutcast pricewatch anandtech - now it has such a sterile, corporate feel - back in the day in addition to reviews they'd do write-ups on their own infrastructure - not in the nebulous sense, but actually step by step, detailing what they were running (ColdFusion at the time as I recall) allaire.com (no longer exists) - before Github or any of the modern package managers were a thing, and before anything conceived of frontend components, ColdFusion's custom tags seem to encompass a lot of great ideas that today seem obvious, but not so much in the late 90s. I'd spend hours browsing through their custom tag directory Not a website, but I miss the heyday of IRC.
  • ken 6y ago
    wunderground. It used to be fast and simple even on a 14.4K modem. Now it's slow even on broadband.
    • EamonnMR 6y ago
      That was our go to radar site. With dark sky off Android, what's good now?
      • recursive 6y ago
        Windy?
  • anongraddebt 6y ago
    Pricewatch! So many memories as a kid in the late 90's/early 2000's scoping parts for my desktop on that site.
  • zzo38computer 6y ago
    I still use IRC. At least Freenode seems to be still in use, although many other IRC services they don't have much these days it seems.
• pchander 6y ago
  http://bash.org http://bash.org
  • nemo1618 6y ago
    Oh shit, I totally forgot about bash.org. hunter2, DISREGARD THAT, "I put on my robe and wizard hat"... a lotta old memes came from IRC.
    • dnh44 6y ago
      I’m not sure which BBS system had this, I think it was Wildcat or WWIV, but if you typed something like %pw in a post other users would see their own password leading to a situation like hunter2.
• brightsize 6y ago
  galaxy.com - a late-90s+ curated internet directory. Example capture from 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061436/http://www.galaxy.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061436/http://www.galaxy... It still exists, sort of, as https://www.einet.net/ https://www.einet.net/ .
• cure 6y ago
  Fravia's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia) old site on geocities in the second half of the 90's. Some of the content lives on in the wayback machine under the 'www.searchlores.org' domain, but the period before he launched that site was magical to me. For several years there, he kept his identity deliberately secret (there was a bit of a mystery around it). The sort of reverse engineering techniques he described were fascinating, and frequently applied to real life. It was fun to load his site, download a bunch of pages, and then hang up the metered dial-up internet connection and spend the next few hours reading...
  • alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    Damn, now there’s a name I haven’t heard in years! +1
  • abiogenesis 6y ago
    Ah, I remember reading his Soft Ice tutorials and just found out that he passed away in 2009. Sad news.
  • jconcilio 6y ago
    I had TOTALLY forgotten him/his sites but holy crap. Looking that up on the Wayback Machine is a rabbit hole I don't have time to fall down today but I really want to. If I remember right, I found him in a link roulette-type thing from someone else's Geocities page. Let me be real: I loved Geocities and Angelfire. I liked seeing what people could build (and there were some pretty crazy-good personal sites). But I think even more, I liked that everyone was there because they were either really into the web, or really into some particular topic. I miss the concept of deep dives. Being able to take them myself, and being able to tag along on other people's, and knowing that there were a vast number of topics where I could be pretty confident that I understood about 85-90% of what could be understood about them at the time. My golden era was the brief period where I could do ALL of the following well: - Hardware-build a computer - Fully program said computer to do anything I wanted it to - Network my various devices however I wanted - Access the internet - Build webpages - Play arcade, desktop and console games that, in theory, I understood well enough that I could have coded them - And, let me be really honest, engage in some minor phone phreaking because I was a teenager and that seemed REALLY COOL And I felt like I understood the totality of most of those things. Which, again, maybe was just due to being a teenager and not knowing what I didn't know, but the size of the domain spaces seemed more manageable. Now, I spend all day building websites. It's a good job. I can't complain. But I can only build websites. A couple of years ago, for fun, I tried to take a Coursera networking course and I about lost my mind because of how complex I realized it had gotten. My wife is about to start the second year of her Master of Software Engineering degree and I have realized watching her learn Java that there's a whole domain there that I will never be able to understand. Forget understanding how my phone works, and forget the idea of taking apart a Nintendo Switch and putting it back together with mods like I did that classic NES. I probably wouldn't even recognize most of the components. I sound like I'm sitting in my rocking chair getting ready to yell at the whippersnappers to get off my lawn, don't I? I'm 37. Please tell me I'm not the only person to feel this way at this age? (Edited to add: I am, at least, reassured that I'm not completely alone in this by the quote attributed to physicist Eugene Wigner: "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." Poor Eugene died in 1995 and I feel like he'd have hated the 2000s.)
• jachee 6y ago
  It wasn't particularly early, but I miss turntable.fm. Crowd-sourced music discovery/sharing/listening and some great interactions.
• newx 6y ago
  I miss verge-rpg.com. While it still exists it's not the same it used to be back in the day, I picked it up when Verge2 was just out of the oven. It was such a nice community. We hosted Hours of Verge (HoV!) events from time to time, usually from 24 to 72 hours long, to team up and build games around a theme, and voted for the best afterwards. It was so fun to play the other games created. Yes, there are other sites and communities that still do that but Verge was dear to me and what really got me started into development. I met some awesome people that turned out to be brilliant devs in AAA games and composers that made songs for many cool games such as Unreal. Edit: Fixed "HoV" casing, very important :-)
• shripadk 6y ago
  1. orkut.com This was the first social network I ever signed up for. Was in it for 3 years. Google later shut it down in 2014. 2. Yahoo Messenger Not really a website but yeah this was the de facto messenger app on every PC in India. All browsing centers had Yahoo Messenger installed.
• hnta123 6y ago
  fuckedcompany.com - I would check this site daily as a young 'un who just started working right at the beginning dotcom bubble burst rotten.com - If you ya know, ya know
• starpilot 6y ago
  You don't miss the websites, you miss being young.
  • DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I always wonder how much of each factor is true. Just as we were once young, so was "the (internet) world"/the websites. It's maybe kind of like missing flying before 9/11 changed security procedures permanently across the globe. There's nothing invalid at all about saying that was an overall better quality of experience and I'm sad that there seems to be no means to bring it back. I read some article about back when train travel was new and borders weren't secured and passports weren't a thing. IIRC, "wander lust" was a bonafide mental health diagnosis applied to people who would just up and leave and go elsewhere for a time, abandoning their lives and families and claiming to forget they existed. That mental health diagnosis ceased to exist once that more of travel ceased to exist. Trains still exist, but you can't just up and go somewhere on a whim without a passport in the same way. The world actually does, in fact, change in important ways. It's not really fair to dismiss that entirely on the idea that you just miss being young. Though I certainly do miss being young in some ways. I miss being young and naive and just talking with people without wondering what their agenda is and whether or not it will be a serious problem for me because I've seen too much of that. In some sense, worrying about that doesn't seem to do a great job of protecting me from a certain type of person, but it does kill a lot of spontaneity and my online relationships just aren't the same. And I wonder at what I've gained and at what I've lost and if it's worth it. But like with post 9/11 plane flight, there's no going back and I'm stuck with it, for better or worse, like it or not.
  • cambalache 6y ago
    I dont buy that. I dont miss 9600 Bauds modems, Windows 95 or monochromatic monitors. But some things were better before. Not every current thing is better, give me the Godfather 1,2 and Silence of the Lambs versus all movies made in the last 10 years. Compare the kind of discussions you could have in Usenet (cranks included) or the first blogs to the things you see in Twitter or -shudders- Facebook.No contest there.
    • 6y ago
• brandonmenc 6y ago
  fray.com - still around, but the old site is archived, not active theschwacorporation.com - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_(art) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_(art) kuro5hin.org scottland (can't remember if it actually had a .com) - website of Scott Thompson, of Kids In The Hall
  • jsrcout 6y ago
    Schwa - thanks for reminding me! Absolute genius.
• f0ok 6y ago
  Digital's search engine. I miss Veronica very much too (to early I guess to count). Also, do you recall something like paranoia.net or similar?
• hombre_fatal 6y ago
  All the Ezboard and Proboards communities I used to post in. Would love to browse the posts I made in that ten year period of my most formative years on the internet.
• Lammy 6y ago
  The web comic Leisure Town (1996~2003), particularly the comic "Q.A. Confidential", was one of my first major exposures to Bay Area software industry humor when I was still a young bedroom programmer. It's certainly from an earlier time with regard to its language and many unfortunate -isms to the point that I almost hesitate to post it on HN at all, but it's still a gem that some times feels like it hasn't aged a day in two decades: http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/index.html http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/index.html "Well, they grow up. And they spend that time implementing every possible hideous idea in some form or another for someone:" "What's up this time? Another tired 3-D maze game? Maybe a new way to help people share and care and collaborate? A JAVA MCDOODLE? GREAT! HOW MUCH $$$." "i'll spell it MICRO$LOTH WINBLOWS in a DELICIOUS TWIST"
• crabasa 6y ago
  suck.com
• epc 6y ago
  suck.com, kvetch.org, four11.com, Cool Site of the Day. Used to lurk on slashdot since my employer barred me from posting anywhere publicly. There were many fun, experimental, one–off sites in the early days that barely lasted a few months, let alone long enough to be archived by archive.org.
  • jwjones 6y ago
    suck.com was great!
    • jholman 6y ago
      I still carry a torch for Polly Esther.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  yerf.org and more recently, webcomicunderdogs.com, all the webcomics discussion has vanished into private discords or facebook groups or forums run by the comics-on-your-phone companies and I just do not vibe with any of those methods of communicating...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• jwjones 6y ago
  Space Jam Oh wait, it's still there. And still the same as 1996. https://spacejam.com/ https://spacejam.com/
  • Kye 6y ago
    It’s cool how Warner Brothers added a “we updated our terms of service” thing to it but otherwise left it alone. Even a soulless corporation respects a legendary website. That answers the “did someone forget to turn off the server?” question.
• Le0C 6y ago
  Deoxy.org, it's been offline for years now. There was a mirror running at Reoxy.org but that too has gone down. I comment here because there was a wonderful IRC community there that I lost contact with when Deoxy went down, and I'd love to find it again. edit: sp
  • alexmingoia 6y ago
    The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension! The Deoxyribonucleic Autonomous Zone! Like me, I know the first thing that popped into your mind when you saw this thread is Deoxy. It was a special place and an amazing website. A work of art. It was everything awesome about the old web in a nutshell.
• berbec 6y ago
  Inktomi kuro5hin digg
• SteveNuts 6y ago
  Candystand games and shockwave.com
• thomk 6y ago
  https://ilovebacon.com/ https://ilovebacon.com/
• takeda 6y ago
  not websites but I miss IRC and Usenet
• cbolat 6y ago
  Might sound weird but I do really miss that old msn.com homepage, that super weird home page always made me excited back in the days. Also Friendfeed, shame to Facebook that they dissolved my first and best social media web site.
• jhymn 6y ago
  The old Slashdot. I also had a website called hardcorelinux.com where I evangelized Linux, and I miss that too.
• psim1 6y ago
  Jennicam I’m not a perv; it was novel.
• kgin 6y ago
  Fark, Plastic, Metafilter Metafilter still exists, but the culture changed to the point where most discussions became a meta-discussion about how the discussion should be allowed to be discussed. And it just wore me out.
  • at_a_remove 6y ago
    Yes. And some time ago. It was like watching a completely preventable car crash happen in slow motion, even as people are denying it is happening. As the bumper crumples, then come the people saying how perfectly acceptable it is that this is happening.
  • justinator 6y ago
    memepool.com! bud.com!
• pan69 6y ago
  Back in the late '90 I was into game development I used to visit flipcode.com [1] daily for image of the day, tutorials and the forum. [1] https://flipcode.com/ https://flipcode.com/
  • postalrat 6y ago
    Was hoping someone here mentioned flipcode. I was in the irc channel daily.
    • pensv0 6y ago
      Flipcode! The good old days of me trying to render a BSP map. There's a tutorial about it there which I tried to follow. Obviously it didn't work out. Shortly after it was closed down.
• personlurking 6y ago
  There was one site that had something like 100(?) brain teaser exercises - I suppose you could also call them puzzles - which became successively more difficult as you moved on (ie, hours to figure out just one of them). Each was distinct and challenged you in a different way. I only used the site once, around the early 2000s, but I forgot its name and never found it again.
  • fian 6y ago
    Was is programming focused? https://projecteuler.net/ https://projecteuler.net/
    • personlurking 6y ago
      When I look at the Archives on Project Euler, the same general idea is there but the site I miss wasn't programming focused. I seem to recall a giant red, blue or green background and the puzzles weren't just text-based, but visual.
  • fuwaishi 6y ago
    You might be talking about notpron/notpr0n? I found it both unsettling and fascinating at the time.
• jrossi94 6y ago
  proper slashdot, freshmeat, kuro5hin, digg and aicn
  • milquetoastaf 6y ago
    you might like https://freshcode.club/ https://freshcode.club/
• egfx 6y ago
  Web Crawler and Acrophobia (AcroFever just isn’t as good) the first few years of MySpace and my old AOL inbox. More recently BitMe and criticue
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ipnon 6y ago
  4chan was never good.
• dlbucci 6y ago
  Anyone remember Joystiq? For a long time, I kept up with video game news through them, but I basically stopped caring about when they went down. Never found a site to scratch that same itch. Still instinctively went there as soon as I opened the browser for about a week. From my early days, probably flash portals, like addicting games. Kongregate wasn't the same after GameStop bought them. I know Newgrounds is still alive and I still go there, but it's sad to see the traffic dwindle like it has (especially since Tom Full is one of my internet heros).
  • dicknuckle 6y ago
    I believe Cartoon Network still has a bunch of games up. I can remember playing Ed Edd n Eddy snow fort. just played it maybe 2 years ago
    • dlbucci 6y ago
      Nice! I remember a Halloween game I really liked. I think it was Kids Next Door? You had to pay to play more levels at a certain point though... On that note, I think Nickelodeon actually owns (or bought) Addicting Games, but I don't think it's the same these days...
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  Deoxy.org - The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension It was a personal wiki of sorts about psychedelics, new age mysticism, anarchy, subversive philosophy, environmentalism, and obscure information. It was still up until a few years ago. I haven’t found a complete archive. The archive here is fairly outdated: https://jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/index.html https://jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/index.html (click the small links for “hi-res” or “low-res” framesets.) Before it shut down the amount of content was huge, and everything was personally curated by the creator Dimitry Novus. Supposedly when Google Video shut down and lots of the YouTube links broke he got upset and stopped updating. After a while it disappeared.
  • ccvannorman 6y ago
    check www.erowid.org and my friend's site, www.highexistence.com Maybe not as good as days of old, but you may enjoy it :)
• prepend 6y ago
  Riddler.com - it was a site in 96 through 99 or so that would have different puzzles and quizzes every day. It was artificial but without offensive ads.
• adav 6y ago
  ff0000 It was a stylised little world you could explore. Looked like kind of Victorian style and you could float around and chat to other visitors. I discovered it when I was a kid learning about web design from magazines like .Net and Computer Arts (UK). I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so interactive in a web browser until that point.
• silverreads 6y ago
  lissaexplains.com got me started on the innerwebs in the 90s. It's still around but not really the same.
• seneca 6y ago
  Not a website, and for me mostly in the era before websites became as prolific, but MUDs are what I miss about the old internet. I'm not much of a gamer anymore, but I used to be able to spend countless hours in the old terminal based games. Some of them were far more exhilarating than any video game I've ever played.
  • freediver 6y ago
    I rediscovered MUDs thanks to the lockdown. My buddies and I play the same MUD we played 1995-1998. 25 years ago! So much fun.
• topkai22 6y ago
  GameSpy and the planet network, especially thier hosting / match making systems. Maybe it was just being able to know a couple servers and run into the same people over and over, but I remember liking that a lot. The Happy Puppy games site. Not really the web, but the original RealPlayer surfaced some amazing content for the time. I was able to watch Russian news, which while I didn't understand a single word was pretty amazing for a cold war obsessed kid
  • topkai22 6y ago
    And not really web at all, but I miss buying a gaming magazine at the grocery store and getting a cd full of demos included with it. That was fun
    • lostgame 6y ago
      Why is this just so much more fun than trying things online? I bought so many games because I became addicted to the demos, particularly a few Sierra games.
      • topkai22 6y ago
        I suspect the constraints made it better. You’d already dropped a small amount of money on the magazine, built up the anticipation of getting it home, and now you were definitely going to give the demo a good whirl. Also, demos /shareware were an important marketing mechanism back then, companies took them seriously.
• f00zz 6y ago
  Advogato, an early social network blog site for open source developers. The site itself was implemented as an Apache module written in C.
  • stevekemp 6y ago
    Advogato was a great site! I had a couple of accounts as my first was lost in a disk/server crash. There was even an XSS-based worm that hit the site at one point, but the bookmarked link I have for it is gone. I know I reported a couple of similar issues later: https://steve.fi/security/xss/advogato https://steve.fi/security/xss/advogato https://steve.fi/security/xss/advogato2 https://steve.fi/security/xss/advogato2
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• kwikiel 6y ago
  Simple purple website: purple.com // Now it's unfortunately taken by mattress company
  • dicknuckle 6y ago
    ew
  • deepdotweb 6y ago
    https://darkweblink.com/ https://darkweblink.com/
• wesammikhail 6y ago
  Gangsterhood.net Boys those were the days. Getting up at 4AM to coordinate an attack against Amello. Man I miss the internet!
• Nelkins 6y ago
  http://omgwtf.superlime.com/ http://omgwtf.superlime.com/ Doesn't seem to be around anymore unfortunately.
• a5seo 6y ago
  Wired’s WebMonkey. It was right up there with my hard copy of Lynda Weinman’s web design book I picked up at Computer Literacy.
  • conductr 6y ago
    WebMonkey was right up there with w3schools in terms of teaching myself how to code for web in ~2000
• yumraj 6y ago
  ICQ Old, not evil Google Absence of FB Geocities Cricinfo Slashdot Codeguru/Codeproject
  • Pxtl 6y ago
    ICQ makes me miss old software in general. In particular, programs that didn't roll their own GUI framework and just used vanilla UI widgets. Stuff that didn't bring in massive frameworks, just simple MFC/winforms apps that were peppy and seamlessly fit into the OS UI.
• a5seo 6y ago
  Red Rock Eater news. Technically an email, but such a great curation of tech news by a very erudite UCLA professor.
• Kye 6y ago
  LanphEs's Useful Page, among others lost to memory. https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.vghq.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.v... It barely works in 2020, but it had things that interested me, like silly videos. Those would go on YouTube today. Google barely existed at the time, so everything/nothing sites were early aggregators that filled the gaps in search engines and directories. They were full of one person's idea of interesting and/or useful.
• innocentoldguy 6y ago
  Bonsai Kittens. The site was clever and the reactions from animal-rights groups were even better.
• rankun203 6y ago
  baidu.com Back in 2005, I used think that an MTK phone can browse baidu.com flawlessly is a very powerful phone, until I had a Nokia 6120c with S60 system that opens any website flawlessly.
• xrd 6y ago
  It's not a website but I loved Napster. When you were downloading a song and then could browse the filesystem of that user to see what they had. It was like opening a cave with treasure inside and finding all these songs that might not have been available online at all at that point.
  • o10449366 6y ago
    I never used Napster, but this sounds really interesting. Could you explain how browsing the filesystem of the user works in more detail??
    • alexenko 6y ago
      If I recall right, you used to pick a music directory, and whatever you had there would be indexed and made available to all for downloading. Everything you downloaded would go into that directory as well. Once you find a file you wanted to download, you didn’t download from a pool of people like with bittorrent, but from that one specific user. If you click on a username, either while searching or while downloading, you could browse everything Napster had indexed. If people didn’t configure Napster right, you could browse their whole C:\ drive. Good times.
      • o10449366 6y ago
        Wow, that sounds awesome. Now I'm sad I missed out on this! Admittedly, what I like about Spotify is how easy it is to share music with other people and discover music from my friends just by looking at their profiles or what they're currently listening to. There are even certain livestreamers I follow specifically for their taste in the music that they play in the background.
        • crtasm 6y ago
          As mentioned upthread, install Soulseek and you'll get the experience now!
    • pier25 6y ago
• _Mark 6y ago
  Stile Project
• dillonmckay 6y ago
  adcritic.com
• colinbartlett 6y ago
  jodi.org was a delightful rabbit hole of pure art
• mattcanhack 6y ago
  wastedyouth.org - a fun community with art and programming tutorials. I think the creator also made DeviantArt. https://web.archive.org/web/20010206203747/http://www.wastedyouth.org/index2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010206203747/http://www.wasted...
• lihaciudaniel 6y ago
  The gams on gamevial.com They had an early MMORPG old religiously style to it.
• Finnucane 6y ago
  Timmybighands, a sadly short lived humor site from the mst3000 guys.
• dingo_bat 6y ago
  New grounds. So many games and toys and shorts just lost. Even now I haven't found comparable games on Android.
• veesahni 6y ago
  i did finally stop randomly trying to go to google reader
  • fphhotchips 6y ago
    Still once every couple of months for me
• oppodeldoc 6y ago
  Some of the great old Flash stuff, homestarrunner.com was like an endless fount of content and I remember there being some really fun one-off games at the original Macromedia site.
• Pxtl 6y ago
  I miss the meticulously tagged and categorized databases of mod content for old games. Polycount for Quake models. Modsquad for Unreal Tournament mutators. That stuff. A million phpbb boards.
• fumar 6y ago
  I miss the original Audiogalaxy and Soulseek. I was broke lower income kid who liked music and discovered songs that forever changed my life. I have never experienced the same open exchange of music since then.
  • oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    Soulseek is still pretty active these days
  • renatoakamur 6y ago
    Audiogalaxy was great to discover new music.
• qiguai 6y ago
  Stumbleupon
• pixelperfect 6y ago
  - old GameFAQs (before the GameSpot merger) - Homestar Runner - YTMND - Newgrounds - ieatcrayons.com (a webcomic that 11-year-old me found very amusing) finally, not a website, but Ragnarok Online was the first MMO I played and the one I have the best memories from
  • philistine 6y ago
    You'll have to be more specific about GameFAQs. I use it extensively to track Game Boy game credits and release dates and it never fails to amaze me how much information is on there.
    • pixelperfect 6y ago
      I meant the GameFAQs message boards
• beautifulfreak 6y ago
  worth1000.com, for the daily dose of amazing photoshop art.
• nocman 6y ago
  I was going to say I missed http://zombo.com/ http://zombo.com/ (because at some point I had checked, and it no longer worked). But I just tried it, and it's working again. Hurray! -- "you can do anything at zombo com!" :-D
  • krallja 6y ago
    html5zombo.com if your device doesn’t support Flash
    • tartoran 6y ago
      Is this supposed to be a joke? The spinners spinning to no avail and zombocom funny message keeps on repeating. That is it, right?
      • nocman 6y ago
        Yeah. It's supposed to be a joke. It's poking fun at how many early "dotcom"-ish type companies promised the world on their landing pages, but in the end they failed to deliver anything of value.
• beamatronic 6y ago
  Echo.com - steaming audio Sidewalk.com - social events
• Emore 6y ago
  Oink's Pink Palace. Yes it was a torrent tracker so arguably illegal, but the breadth and depth of music it cataloged (not to speak of the community) is still unmatched.
  • Lammy 6y ago
    Here's a bit of history that might get lost: OiNK's rules specified minimum bitrate of 192k for MP3 uploads. OiNK was a British tracker, and Radiohead's "pay what you want" MP3 release of _In Rainbows_ (2007) was purposefully 160k to be under that limit. I don't remember if the upload was allowed or not :p https://www.nme.com/news/music/radiohead-579-1352475 https://www.nme.com/news/music/radiohead-579-1352475
• theonemind 6y ago
  Another not-a-website submission, but Usenet with actual discussions. Web forums still annoy me compared to the elegance of Usenet, with hierarchical categories and sophisticated client software that can do things like score and filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September the whole Internet feels like the Eternal September to me. It all got dumbed down.
  • pwg 6y ago
    A few diehards are still discussing things on Usenet. comp.misc was brought back to life as part of the slashdot beta exit. Other groups have some traffic as well. Nothing like the heyday's however. And there is a free, text only, news server named Eternal September: https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/
  • zzo38computer 6y ago
    I agree; NNTP is much better. I just started using Usenet last year, actually (with client software I wrote myself, because I wanted a command-line interface and support for SQLite, and other programs don't do those two things).
• blankface 6y ago
  - 2008 - 2010 /g/ when Bitcoin was pennies on the dollar - GBATemp.net during the height of Wii Homebrew - [Wii/DS/Nintendo]-Play.com - first online community for Nintendo Friendcodes *edit one more - The community surrounding Half-Life 2 and specifically Team Fortress 2 circa 2007-2009
• jarrell_mark 6y ago
  Surprised no one mentioned askjeeves.com I really liked that site
• pot8n 6y ago
  Demonoid and Mininova :D.
• afpx 6y ago
  The original del.icio.us
• Thriptic 6y ago
  Not a site per say but a big piece of infrastructure. Before there was Steam there was Sierra's website which hosted half life updates, and World Opponent Network, a matchmaking service from Sierra who eventually got acquired by Valve. You would access WON through the half life game. Using it for online play was downright hilarious, especially because everyone was playing on dedicated servers with manual patching. A new version of the HL server / client would drop on Sierra and you would have to get in line and wait for hours at File Planet or Major Geeks or another mirror in order to download it. For like two weeks you would be getting version conflict errors because 50% of servers / clients would patch quickly and the other 50% wouldn't. Searching for a server was pretty much like using grep, there was no friends list or chat, it was amazing hahaha.
• psurooster 6y ago
  VoodooExtreme, RIP Billy Wilson
• o10449366 6y ago
  what.cd It was truly the Library of Alexandria of music. Cataloging standards were high and you could find even obscure releases in perfect quality in multiple formats (CD rips, multiple vinyl rips). Now I use Spotify and it frustrates me that songs will disappear without notice because their license expired and that I can't find most foreign music I previously listened to. The audio quality isn't comparable, either.
  • weisser 6y ago
    The library + the community were unparalleled. I spent more time on those forums than anywhere else.
  • peterlk 6y ago
    This was such a huge missed opportunity by the music industry. A massive network of volunteers dedicated to curating and meticulously tagging music. I might have payed a lot of money for access to such a network. The largest collection of music in human history... Wiped out because there wasn't a business model in time
  • xzel 6y ago
    I truly miss what.cd. I spent so many hours listening to music, finding old, new and eclectic music, chatting in the forums and debating on the individual torrent comments. I think I actually shed a tear when I saw it was closed. Thankfully there has been a real attempt to replace what we lost.
  • haroldp 6y ago
    "What" replace "Oink", and "Redacted" replaced What. It's all still out there.
    • thirdsun 6y ago
      It is, but there's a lot of gatekeeping going on. As a music collector and former what.cd member I'd love to join and contribute to Redacted, but I won't go through that interview process.
• dumbfounder 6y ago
  It seems clear we all miss websites. There aren’t any websites anymore, just companies and YouTube channels and Instagrammers and Twitter and all that other new crap I am too old for.
• weisser 6y ago
  What.cd
• Jack000 6y ago
  stylegala, cssbeauty and the other css-oriented design sites and attached communities
• gregsadetsky 6y ago
  Hotline servers.
• joemi 6y ago
  I miss Google from when it first started getting popular and overtaking Alta Vista and the other search engines. It feels weird to say now, but it truly felt like magic how it provided such better search results than its competitors. I wasn't tied to any one search engine then, and many of my searches were done on multiple search engines, with lots of wading through results to _attempt_ to find relevance. But with Google, almost every time, its results were almost exactly what I was looking for. Though I guess it's not so much the site itself I miss, but the feeling of witnessing magic, for a little while, until I just got used to and expected such good search results.
  • mech422 6y ago
    I'm the opposite - I miss alta vista... I miss a search engine with a real _search_ language that gave me the results I actually _asked_ for rather then just randomly picking stuff that matches half the query and stuffing the page with paid results.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      Do you want to work on one? I've got a secret searcher project I've been doing for about 12 years I'm finally ready to do something with. It works on about a 1.7TB corpus right now, returns results in a few seconds on a single 3rd generation i5. I'm thinking of putting real work and money behind it now Contact me if interested.
  • savrajsingh 6y ago
    Yes, at the time the magic was also clean and uncorrupted by SEO — Google’s algorithm sidestepped the SEO targeted at simpler search engines. And then the arms race began to get to the top of google’s search results, which probably encumbers the algorithm today.
• kyriakos 6y ago
  I miss the fact that you could build a fun site that could get popular just by word of mouth without SEO, social media campaigns, influencer endorsements and the other hoops we need to jump through now.
• dfsegoat 6y ago
  Overgrow.net
• DelayedChoice 6y ago
  What I miss... Amdzone Firingsquad Anandtech Tomshardware Hardocop Bunch of other sites that I can't remember. The pc/mac chat room on AOL.
• DelayedChoice 6y ago
  Old versions of the current if still alive.. Amdzone.com Tomshardware 3dnow Hardocop Firingsquad Pc/mac chat room on aol chat.
• carldaddy 6y ago
  GameWinners.com. Great source for video game cheats. But the best part for me was the chat room. I would say crazy things to people. Good times. Also GeoCities. I wouldn't gone into web development without it.
• hestefisk 6y ago
  Kuro5hin.org. It was the best of internet culture and discussion before apps and 24/7 connectivity.
  • mech422 6y ago
    Oh yeah! Koro5hin rocked!
• qserasera 6y ago
  Wimp.com slashdot homestar runner albino blacksheep newgrounds ebaumsworld slime flash games
• smallbeans 6y ago
  Mirsky’s Worst of the Web was great.
• smallbeans 6y ago
  Mirsky’s Worst of the Web!!
• aloukissas 6y ago
  ThePirateBay
• exabrial 6y ago
  The original versions of g+ was actually great, and they steadily made it worse and more confusing as time went on.
• exabrial 6y ago
  This necessarily might not count as a website but, playing CyberStrike on AOL during their free trial period years was awesome
• mech422 6y ago
  I miss the feeling of 'exploring' I got everytime I found a new .edu gopher server... Tracking down all the nooks and crannies looking for documents related to tech. How awesome it felt went you found some lecture notes/thesis that was just _gold_ and you could curl up and read it ... Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come up with.
  • taborj 6y ago
    Fun fact: gopher is still alive! It's not the same as back in the early 90s, but the protocol and some servers are alive and kicking.
    • mech422 6y ago
      Yeah? I haven't looked in years... Though I think I've probably lost some of the feeling of wonder exploring those servers 20 years ago engendered. For a young coder, from a small town with basically zero tech resources - they seemed like the library of Alexandria :-)
      • ajtjp 6y ago
        It's still there! I'd recommend gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ as a starting page these days, it has links to SDF, Veronica 2, and a lot of other Gopher resources. It's pretty easy to spin up your own Gopher hole with pygopherd these days as well - I re-hosted mine a few weeks ago and could't have been happier with the ease of setting it up. There are are lot of defunct Gopher holes, but a couple times a year I still get lost browsing through a mix of old and new ones. Install OverbiteWX in Firefox and take it for a spin sometime!
        • mech422 6y ago
          oh? I'll have to take another look - there was SOOO much good technical content!
      • taborj 6y ago
• duckfruit 6y ago
  I miss JibJab. They're sort of still around, but they seem to have long since stopped making satirical flash animations they used to be famous for. Their Year in Review videos were hilarious and awesome back in the Bush & Obama eras. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmEP93NVTaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmEP93NVTaw)
  • elihu 6y ago
    I miss that quality of political satire. This is the one I remember most: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adc3MSS5Ydc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adc3MSS5Ydc
• reaperducer 6y ago
  The Keepers of Lists. Each day a topic was presented and visitors could suggest additions to the that day's list that would then be voted up and down. Things like Top Items You'd Take To The Moon, or Worst Things To Find In Your Shoe In The Morning. It was crowdsourced Letterman-quality humor. Very clever and super funny. But this was back before you had to log in to web sites to use them. The internet worked on the honor system. So after the Eternal September, it started to get targeted by spammers and angry losers and eventually became useless and went away.
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  Fravia.org when he was still alive. Absolutely fantastic reverse engineering resource. RIP +Fravia.
• dpcan 6y ago
  I loved Digg.com before the redesign fiasco. And Diggnation was fun. Rev3 was cool too.
• pottertheotter 6y ago
  Many have already mentioned Slashdot. Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience. I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back memories of LAN parties. I'm not sure if there's a modern game that has a similar style of gameplay? I hardly play any games so am out of the loop.
  • aaron-lebo 6y ago
    The first game I ever played online was R6. Kids these days don't know the joy of finding a cable host so you could do 2v2 with tolerable lag, nor what it was like to fill someone up with a mag and for them to fall over dead 10 seconds later. I think part of the joy of that was the imagination of how cool it would be if it all worked right vs the actual experience, but yeah, I'll never forget it. I dunno why but I'll never forget one time playing with this guy isoplus. I don't know we even communicated, nor if we played more than a single game together, but isoplus, wherever you are, be well. You ever play Tribes? UO. Wow. It's really another experience that can't be recreated. So incredibly magical. EverQuest and Asheron's Call were similarly formative experiences. I never could have thought at the time that massively multiplayer games would seem boring and even lame (what, I've gotta play with people?) now. My parents would make sure I wasn't sneaking on EQ late at night by picking up the phone next to their bed to make sure I wasn't on the phone line.
    • pottertheotter 6y ago
      I think a lot of it was how "magical" it all was. All of it was so new. Same with all these websites being mentioned. I don't want to go back to the technologies we had then, but it was all paradigm changing then. My mom would threaten to hide my keyboard. I was lucky that we got a DSL line really early (we lived in Silicon Valley and my dad was a software engineer) so taking my keyboard was the only way she knew I would be up still.
  • s0l1dsnak3123 6y ago
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  Fuckedcompany.com Exurbannation.com (a site that was full of people in 2007 calling out the looming mortgage crisis)
• alasdair_ 6y ago
  #hack on efnet Old-school MUDs.
• vortico 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com
  • geofft 6y ago
    Fortunately for you there's https://html5zombo.com/ https://html5zombo.com/ !
    • vortico 6y ago
      All of my childhood memories have been restored!
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• elihu 6y ago
  I miss kuro5hin, which had a very interesting way of submitting content for peer review. Unfortunately it was overrun by trolls and eventually closed. I miss Jyte, which was a weird side project by the company janrain, where you just make random statements and people vote whether or not they agree with the statement, and can post comments.
• acomjean 6y ago
  World New York, long gone, but hand curated interesting stories :till about 2000. I still miss it. https://web.archive.org/web/19991129051036/http://www.worldnewyork.com/about.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/19991129051036/http://www.worldn... Memepool. Another curated story site. Silly but fun. https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepool.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepo...
• joncp 6y ago
  Zombo.com Hands down
• jsrcout 6y ago
  Bianca's Smut Shack. What a great community; really felt like home. And of course, early Slashdot (hi Rob!).
• villgax 6y ago
  Pokemoncrater
• syphilis2 6y ago
  The Applet Arcade https://web.archive.org/web/20020604024000/http://theshadowlands.net/arcade.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20020604024000/http://theshadowl... https://web.archive.org/web/19981201063456/http://members.aol.com/Shadows125/arcade.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19981201063456/http://members.ao... https://web.archive.org/web/19961222221629/http://www.serve.com/shadows/arcade.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19961222221629/http://www.serve.... Sometime in the mid to late 90s I came across the Applet Arcade. It's just a collection of Java applets maintained by a person who also runs a paranormal website (The Shadowlands http://theshadowlands.net/ http://theshadowlands.net/ ). I have yet to find its successor: The Javascript Arcade.
• nicwolff 6y ago
  Not really from my earliest days on the net, but the early 2000s feels like early days now: Television Without Pity and Fametracker, in particular the "2 Stars 1 Slot" and "Hey, It's That Guy!" columns.
  • partisan 6y ago
    I came across TWOP kinda late in the game, but in the era before streaming and fragmented forums (fora?), it was a good way to catch up on Project Runway and get other viewers perspectives. I wonder if a site like that could reach critical mass nowadays.
• nwmcsween 6y ago
  Anything circa 2000-2010ish where some sites were very unique in their designs (usually using flash).
• wmnwmn 6y ago
  Garageband.com Silicon Investor Groovetech And let's not forget how exciting it was to explore around in the original Yahoo! Although the web doesn't seem to be thing we all dreamed about anymore, it's still amazing. Remember how hard it used to be to learn about anything? Now it's so easy...but the amount of knowledge itself is oppressive.
  • znep 6y ago
    Ahh Silicon Investor. Powered by MS SQL Server stored procedures that essentially returned the entire HTML page. Real fast. Real hard to maintain.
  • partisan 6y ago
    When I started using the Internet in 1997, Yahoo had a feature where it let users upload their favorite sites. I would browse through those sites puzzled and delighted by the seemingly endless, random content. That was how I came across Peep Research (http://peepresearch.org/ http://peepresearch.org/).
• clouddrover 6y ago
  I don't miss a particular website. I miss the absence of intensive and pervasive user surveillance.
• me551ah 6y ago
  Excite chat. And the general demise of chatrooms.
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  google.com (when it was still useful), dejanews (and Usenet in general) before Google bought it and took a whole generation's output of tech discussions, formal announcements, and so on with it
• copperx 6y ago
  Pixelsight.com It was a site that created web graphics and logos (great looking ones, too). You just had to enter the text, select styles and parameters, and a gif came out. Amazing for 1994. It was one of the few non-static sites of the time. The creator, Keith Ohlfs, passed away in 2016 of a heart attack. The saddest thing is that there is no code left behind to recreate it. I believe the site used the NeXTSTEP API, so it had to run on a NeXT server. There are no screenshots showing you how the site worked. Maybe the only thing left are the graphics created by it on archive.org.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  As others have pointed out, many websites have evolved away from their old ways from the old days. Or maybe their audience changed as the web became mainstream. Apart from these websites that still exist, I miss the sense of discovery from the old web, which felt more democratized then today’s web, where it feels most of the online experience is monopolized by a few big platforms. I liked chancing upon some roughly designed personal website and finding the gems therein, which was more special than the manicured template of platforms like Medium. I don’t have an explanation for what the gap or difference is. I just know it exists. Another example is how AIM away messages felt special and personal, in a way that Facebook statuses have never matched. What changed? Maybe it’s just that we have.
• taborj 6y ago
  Yet another not a website one: MUDs and talkers. MUDs are still around, but the talkers like Foothills are long gone. The Burbs was still around a few years ago, but there were only about 5 people on. Nothing like the heyday when there would be hundreds on. Edit: Well, a bit of searching and I find Burbs and a few others still alive. Gonna have to check them out
• gorgoiler 6y ago
  Doodie.com It’s not exactly XKCD, but the regular (daily?) update felt like something new and special. More so than the new content posted on slashdot, though that was just as popular.
• deerpig 6y ago
  Yahoo, when it was a single page with a couple of dozen links. I think that was before there was a browser for Windows -- I was using the Omniweb browser on a NeXT Color workstation. I still miss the original Wired and later Wired News.
• todd3834 6y ago
  This site is still online but I have no idea if it is the same. https://www.ca-zeb.com https://www.ca-zeb.com originally called zebulun… It started as a hacking challenge and they created something called CyberArmy with ranks etc… It was a really great time as a kid.
• nickysielicki 6y ago
  Some of these are still around, but none are in the form I remember them: NSider Nintendo forums slashdot somethingawful facepunch reddit freenode digitalgangster
• hadlock 6y ago
  Weather Underground.... classic Up until 2015 Weather Underground was the top weather website, had huge amounts of information density, easy to navigate... fast I'm not sure what the current incarnation of Weather Underground is, but it is nothing like it's former self. Wunderground was sold off to... IBM? and then later... The Weather Channel? At some point the "classic" website was finally turned off for good. It was a sad day. Ever since ~2015 there hasn't been a good, "go to" weather website. Dark Sky came out not long after wunderground classic, and it looks like recently Apple bought them. Dark Sky is no Wunderground Classic, but it's a good attempt.
  • postalrat 6y ago
    For most things I prefer dark sky over classic wunderground. The one thing I do miss with wunderground is the nice graphics showing history high/low compared to the past days.
  • psim1 6y ago
    I used to like uswx.com but eventually it became run down and unmaintained. Today there is a tombstone page.
• dvtrn 6y ago
  3dfightclub - timed 3D modeling battles where you had short (or sometimes long) periods to make a render of whatever the given prompt was. Community votes on the winner, winner got to pick the next prompt. Made some lifelong friends there. Also the original yourethemannowdog.com
• markpapadakis 6y ago
  kuro5hin, slashdot as it existed back when, dejanews, and s bunch of video gaming sites that went extinct
• j45 6y ago
  One? There was a something new that left you in awe and wonder pretty regularly. - Message forums run on pbpbb that taught users to not to feed the trolls - AltaVista's search parameters Search that wasn't for presenting ads on 80% of the screen. - Friendster as a way to interact beyond IM - Digg as original reddit frontpage.. Slashdot too. - Napster as the first internet disruption to an established industry.
• jaxn 6y ago
  Blogs. Lots of them. And RSS readers. It was a special point in time from 2002-2007 when blogging was dominated by individuals and personality. There was no access to restrict sine anyone willing to post could have a voice. And the internet wasn't so huge, so individual voices could easily amplify with compelling writing. Then Twitter happened and it all changed.
• zacharycohn 6y ago
  Unixpunx
• ralphbad 6y ago
  The old thinkgeek.com -- though shipping to Canada was atrociously expensive and you would always get hit with customs.
• ajtjp 6y ago
  It's not really one website per se, but finding someone's old website that they'd built up over the years in the '90s with all sorts of interesting, detailed, yet approachable content. Sometimes academics, sometimes just people with interesting hobbies. There's a certain je ne sais quoi about them that most blogs these days just don't have, and I could get lost in some of those sites. Every so often I still find one, and every so often I find a site of more recent provenance but with the same quality, but overall they're a rare breed. One of the most recent such sites I've found is actually someone's Angelfire site, rather than their own domain: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/cherlinks.html http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/cherlinks.html . I went down the rabbit hole of her Chernobyl content way too late at night one day in February. All sorts of interesting content based first-hand experience. The other thing I miss is desktop-focused instant messaging that focuses on the text experience. I had so many great text conversations on AIM, and GChat when it was new, sometimes over the course of hours. Just this week I had my first AIM conversation in at least a couple years, and it still had the same magic. Probably the closest thing to it we have today is Slack, but the ubiquity of all your friends having AIM (or at least Yahoo! Messenger or MSN) just isn't there.
  • jblarneyforward 6y ago
    What about messenger/WhatsApp/insta?
• ornornor 6y ago
  No one here has heard of it probably but I hung out so much on kazibao.net (a francophone website that was moderated for kids to chat and discuss stuff) as a kid. That and the old icq. I can still hear the obnoxious “UHOH!” tone in my head from receiving a message. Oh and hotline on the Mac.
• csmiller 6y ago
  Newgrounds, Homestar Runner, Kongregate. Way back I used to watch a web series called Pure Pwnage, it was the coolest thing in the world to a young me. I miss C&C
• jerglingu 6y ago
  As many others have stated, geocities/angelfire/tripod and those raw, personal and ugly websites. But also www.insidetheweb.com , one of the more popular forum (they were called "message boards" back in the day) hosts of the late 90's. It was my first exposure to active, online communities and the peculiarities of Internet community culture (flame wars, online "e-relationships," memes before they were called memes), and I'll remember them and many of the usernames forever. They were all shut down abruptly around the turn of the millennium. Every now and then I wonder what happened to all those people and how they're doing.
• trengrj 6y ago
  43 Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things
• plibither8 6y ago
  Surprised no one mentioned StumbleUpon! I discovered many new, interesting things even though it was basically an web advertisement company.
  • Xenozan 6y ago
    i met so incredible people all over the world because of stumbleupon. it was like a randomize effect artifact of late 2000's for me. :(
  • mrtobo 6y ago
    I met my wife through Stumbleupon!
• BerislavLopac 6y ago
  It's not a website, but I'm missing the old Usenet.
• TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I miss the Internet 1.0 culture which inspired a lot of classic sites. Before the corporates moved in it was nerdy, eccentric, intelligent, creative, hilarious, and sometimes literally insane. Then e-commerce and adtech happened and it became a lot more homogenised and a lot less fun. Usenet was a distillation of the culture and a crucible of madness. Yahoo Groups were (sometimes) a more grown up version.
• hbarka 6y ago
  Flash-based websites. There were some really good ones. I think to this day the fluidity of Flash-based sites can’t be matched. I’m still not sure why the security of Flash couldn’t be addressed. It was a conspiracy to destroy Flash and the HTML-only camp succeeded.
  • efreak 6y ago
    It annoys me even more that Mozilla ended development on Shumway, their browser extension with the javascript flash runtime. Sure, it would never be perfect, but it'd be so nice to be able to play simple games and animations. In the same vein, IIRC there's at least one incomplete Java VM written in javascript, but I never managed to get it working for javagameplay.com. On the other hand, the death of browser plugins means it's that much harder to escape the browser now; it was quite simple for any Java or flash applet to browse the local filesystem (I bypassed the local library's restrictions with a Java file manager in order to save files to my flash drive)
• austinjp 6y ago
  freshmeat.net
• olingern 6y ago
  Kuro5hin[1] was great. The blog “A coder in courier land” [2] led me to become a bike messenger for a few years during the housing market crisis (or be laid off). It put life in perspective and eventually made me a better developer (after returning) by virtue of realizing the more work you put in, the more reward you receive. I wish I could thank that guy for writing. 1 -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin 2 -https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/3/19/133129/548 https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5h...
• hubbabubbarex 6y ago
  Slashdot did not sensure like YC these days. Sad YC. You just follow YouTube and Google agenda. Nothing new.
• djohnston 6y ago
  Not necessarily early, but about 10 years back, there was a site called stereomood that introduced me to a ton new artists and genres.
• deepdotweb 6y ago
  Get top darknet news from dark web link https://darkweblink.com/ https://darkweblink.com/
• deepdotweb 6y ago
  practically missing deep dot web finally got an alternative https://darkweblink.com/ https://darkweblink.com/
• buboard 6y ago
  Not a website specifically. Here's what i miss: - Forums without upvotes/downvotes - Not having to tell people what they wanted to hear - Short laconic statements without fear of being taken out of context - hierarchical navigation
• Jemm 6y ago
  The old Google. You could see a cached version of links. A search for a technical issue generally brought up the answer on the first page. Spam and click bait websites were effectively filtered out.
  • antoineMoPa 6y ago
    You can still view cached versions of links. Click the small down-arrow at the right of a link -> Cached.
• Giorgi 6y ago
  Anyone remember early days of Totse? that and Yahoo Messenger
• DrNuke 6y ago
  My first website was hosted for free on geocities in the late 90s... just a folder containing a few basic .html files and .jpg images... good enough for short stories and poems ehehe.
• jeffrallen 6y ago
  Kuro5hin
• gdubs 6y ago
  HotWired — sibling to “Wired”, and was a fertile ground of invention for the early web. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired
• gwern 6y ago
  I noticed Rotten.com died a few years ago; I enjoyed the snark as a kid, so I found a mirror on Github and rehosted (and have been cleaning up all its internal broken links and other problems ever since...) it at https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/index.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/index.html
• EdwardCoffin 6y ago
  Dejanews, with all the search functionality that google groups did not keep. Google video, mainly because there was a bunch of content that never got transferred to YouTube and seems lost now (I'm thinking here of various CS panel discussions and tech talks).
• raddevon 6y ago
  Illucia: The town of Final Fantasy This was the first site I knew of that had server-side clickable image maps. Pretty cool stuff! Pointless Audio Kevin Pereira’s Internet audio show way before he was on G4 and way before the dawn of podcasts.
• jeromescuggs 6y ago
  mingthemerciless i cant even explain it but https://imgur.com/a/WszvRT5 https://imgur.com/a/WszvRT5 just a front page that endlessly looped random static or animated images that had a perfect mix of absurd, funny, and oddly enough aesthetic qualities these screenshots are of images that have to be over a decade old, maybe 12-15 years? i managed to grab them from waybackmachine which was crazy because never knew anything about the site and when it disappeared i would google around and couldn't find anything about it for years. low-key started to wonder if it was even real, if i was losing my mind, heh. i miss sites like that which existed just to exist or whatever, there wasn't any (obvious) point or information, not really even something like a copyright notice. just someone armed with photoshop, font packs, flash, and a weird sense of humor and the resources to host it online
• stevekemp 6y ago
  Freshmeat is another site that I recall with fondness, seeing new programs/projects on a daily-basis was pretty awesome as a new Linux user in the mid nineties. I'm surprised that hasn't been mentioned by anybody else yet!
• parenthesis 6y ago
  There was a site called something like mydeardiary.com which allowed anonymous users to keep a diary in public. It's not the site I miss as such, but one particular diarist. His style of writing and unfolding life had me hooked. A while later when I wanted to reread and see if he had continued his diary, the site was gone. Thankfully, there are still some `old-school' websites around which I love. For example, this site dedicated to t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶s̶t̶ my favourite TV show of all time: http://www.wwwentworth.co.uk/ http://www.wwwentworth.co.uk/ .
• parentheses 6y ago
  ebaumsworld - hours of wonderful entertainment and time wasted
• lexcom 6y ago
  There was a website where you could download and play free games called gamehippo. I don't know if they still exist, but it was one of the best sites to discover free games.
• bmn__ 6y ago
  TMOL/True Meaning Of Life https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.co... It's an oracle Web site. Questions are supplied anonymously by the users, answers are provided by avatars themed around video games, pop culture and Buddhism.
• monooso 6y ago
  The Show, by Ze Frank. I hated weekends, because it meant no new episodes. Dirty space news has never been the same since.
• lcall 6y ago
  The "reverse acronym generator". You could put in a few letters and it would return an important- and/or technical-sounding meaning for it.
• CawCawCaw 6y ago
  Chess-related: FICS, ICC, US Chess Live, World Chess Network.
• ssvt 6y ago
  Global Network Navigator: https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/ https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/ O'Reilly at the time was my go-to for anything tech. Loved the look of their books. I was a CompuServe moderator at the time - pre-AOL even, and ran a small BBS.
• jconcilio 6y ago
  Not directly a website, but I never get a chance to talk about these so: I miss old AOL text-based games. There was an early RPG called Modus Operandi that I loved beyond words.
• gasull 6y ago
  Blogdex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogdex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogdex
• hopesthoughts 6y ago
  My early days of the web were in the early 2000's. As a result I remember linkfilter.net circa 2004-2005, and 43things.com. Also blogrolls.