7 ms·
Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things
- jaspervanderee 6mo agoI like this project! Would be great if you could add their logos for sentimental value.
- bozdemir 6mo agoadded to the roadmap, ty for the suggestion.
- DimitriBouriez 6mo agoSkype is missing?
- bozdemir 6mo agowill be added soon :) yea that is a major find.
- sgbeal 6mo agoThat big flashing yellow bar near the top makes the page _literally impossible_ for me to read. Human eyes are built to follow the fastest/flashiest thing around, and that bar takes the provierbial cake in terms of eyeball distraction.
- asimovDev 6mo agoThanks for reminding me about RealPlayer. I remember playing flash games on it I had on a USB drive. Felt like a hacker when I downloaded them from a website and played them locally instead of having to be connected to the internet to play them :)
- kaon_2 6mo agoAmazing to read through the list. I had no idea about Orkut. To kill an application with 300m users seems insane. Anyone here knows why MSN was ever killed? The brand was so strong. I am sure usage was still there. You'd think Microsoft could still bring it back somehow. In a similar vein, it was never clear to me why hotmail was killed to make place for "live" mail.
- sev_verso 6mo agoI was still using Skype to talk with my parents when they pulled the plug on it, too. Obviously (and unlucky for Microsoft), that conversation never moved to Teams. Curious how many users they lost with that move.
- disruptiveink 6mo agoKilled for Skype, which was already declining by that time. Microsoft was keen on unifying their IM platforms, but failed to realise that unless the migration path is incredibly smooth, people just won't do it. And the value of any chat service is that the people you want to talk to are on there. Many people didn't bother migrating from MSN to Skype and that was the end of it. The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions. Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams. Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.
- blae 6mo agoMiniDisc "ignored by the world" my ass, ignored by the USA you mean.
- d-lowl 6mo agoNot only I guess. I remember buying a minidisk instead of miniCD __by accident__ in the '00s in Russia. That was literally the only time I saw one in person.
- jbjbjbjb 6mo agoMy parents got me one in 1999 after years of me asking. It was such a disappointment when mp3 players like iRiver came out soon after (that should have a page on the graveyard) and then iPod came out. The iRiver and similar product used flash memory too. Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.
- anthk 6mo agoEuropean there. It was either walkmans or discmans. No one cared about MD's unless you were a poshy kid living in the rich area of the city/town.
- _whiteCaps_ 6mo agoI just put the latest Jamiroquai album on a minidisc through WebUSB!
- aledevv 6mo agoI added 5-inch floppies and floppy disks, very very vintage.
- mlok 6mo agoI love the small web, and this is a nice project. But I won't remember to come back to it. It would be nice to have it pop up in my Mastodon or Lemmy (or Insta, or FB...) for each new addition. Use the new web to bring people back to the old web :) (Or a newsletter ? RSS ?) Thank you for the "dark mode", like the old days. 2 annoyances though : - the flashing bright yellow banner is painful to the eyes - and the fonts are very small on a phone screen — although a 300x zoom "fixed" this.
- flexagoon 6mo agoWhy are "personal homepages" listed as dead? Sure, they're not as ubiquitous as they used to be, but almost every tech-adjacent person I know has one. Webrings and guestbooks are also very much still a thing. I'd say they are far from dead.
- bozdemir 6mo agoI guess mainly because of insta, facebook and other social media platforms, but I am a fan of old days. But our numbers are pretty limited compared to the mass.
- flexagoon 6mo agoSure, but I think it's just that internet is now used by much more non—tech-savvy people, not because people are switching from having a personal homepage to social media. The ones who know how to create a personal site still usually have one. Almost every post you see on HN is from someone's personal website.
- sublinear 6mo agoOf the people I know in tech roles, there are far more who have no online presence at all. Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze. I think that's what they mean.
- myself248 6mo agoThey used to be part of your ISP. You got a usenet server, and a mail server and a web server with a certain amount of space, just as part of signing up. This meant that everyone had one, you didn't have to go sign up somewhere else. You still could if you wanted to have a URL that didn't have your ISP's name in it.
- malfist 6mo agoDid they? I've been around for ages (I know the dial up tone by heart). My early ISPs at best offered a mailbox (not a mail server), no web server, Usenet was extra. And few people used the ISP mailbox because you couldn't take it with you when you left. Hell, I got my gmail during the invite only era
- chordbug 6mo agoIs the text generated by AI? Are the "eulogies" by real people or AI?
- Scaevolus 6mo agoPangram rates it as 100% AI generated. Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!
- a57721 6mo agoThe text on all pages looks very much LLM-generated, and I think all "user comments" there are fake too. (Edit: I mean "what people said" sections.) I like the idea of the site, but not the execution. It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.
- bozdemir 6mo agothose are there for the placeholder purposes, I am currently removing and substuting them with real user feedbacks, thank you for the feedback, thank you for taking time to share it.
- justsomedudeguy 6mo agoI got the sense that the content is AI assisted, but with an attentive turn of human attention layered on top.
- stanislavb 6mo agoHere's another Product Graveyard https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard. There should be an AI graveyard, too. There are so many AI projects that are dead within an year.
- mkozak 6mo agopebble is listed there, but it's back! https://repebble.com/ https://repebble.com/
- michaelcampbell 6mo agoThe trust is dead, though. Not by all, but not by none either.
- us-merul 6mo agoAwesome site. I wonder how much of this is tied to the pre-mobile, desktop era. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s where a lot of early Web nostalgia comes from.
- bozdemir 6mo agothank you.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hugobeey 6mo agoInteresting Tamagoshi story. I didn't realize how addictive the "keep them alive" narrative was. No wonder streaks work so well nowadays. There is a lot to learn from the past.
- vunderba 6mo agoPersonal story, but depending on when you last fed your pet, a teacher punitively confiscating your Tamagotchi until the end of the school day could mean the difference between life and death for the poor creature.
- parasmadan 6mo ago[dead]
- ElCapitanMarkla 6mo agoI'm not sure I the Tamagotchi deserves a place on here. Did anything really kill it? It was kind of just a fad in the late 90s and its still around, not as popular as its fad stages but still reasonably popular. We just got back from Japan last week, there is a newly opened "Tamagotchi Factory" shop which was packed. The kids each picked up one of the latest versions and have been playing with them every day.
- Waterluvian 6mo agoAnd the concept is still alive and well. My kids each got a Bitzee for Christmas which is basically the same thing.
- prmoustache 6mo agoI saw some brand new tamagotchis in the toy alley of a supermarket while looking for a gift as recently as a few weeks ago. People may be not crazy about it as they used to but they are definitely still a thing.
- andypiper 6mo agoHobbycraft in the local retail park has them by the tills. Definitely still around.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoI can attest to them still existing, I collect them :) they're far more popular in Japan but in the states they limp along on nostalgia with re-issues of the older models and the occasional localisation of japanese ones
- Jtarii 6mo agoMissing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8059 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8059
- bozdemir 6mo agowill be added soon.
- darkwater 6mo agoICQ and 6 digit numbers? Maybe the first million users, but I had an ICQ number from... what? 1998? which was already 7 digits.
- 47282847 6mo agoI had a 5 digit one. Unless my mind is playing tricks on me.
- jottinger 6mo agoMy thought is that this is interesting, but very narrowly scoped. I thought the list would be, um, longer. By a lot. This feels like talking about all of the deaths in pre-Enlightenment Europe and coming up with a list of seven names.
- pxoe 6mo agoMaybe there can be some kinda suggestion box and a voting system for suggestions or existing things? Like an open suggestion box, where people could submit potential entries and vote on whether they belong there and are dead or not. And for existing entries, to vote on whether something is truly dead or not, like 'yep, this is dead', or 'nope, this is still alive' (some things may be less popular, but that's not them being dead/actually completely discontinued and defunct). Not necessarily for ranking or putting it together into one score, but perhaps just showing a number of how many people think either way about something
- pxoe 6mo agoalso, 'Coming up in the graveyard' makes it sound like something's gonna arrive here like it's newly dead, like it's about to be shutdown with a deadline, when it's just anniversaries, which really should be clearer at the top of that box
- bozdemir 6mo agosame, added to the roadmap, thank you.
- bozdemir 6mo agothis is a great suggestion, added to the roadmap.
- shahabebrahimi 6mo agoThis brought a lot of memories to me. Good job.
- dainank 6mo ago> eBay bought it in 2005 for 2.6 billion dollars. Nobody really understood why eBay wanted it. Then Microsoft bought it from eBay in 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars. Isn't that the reason eBay bought it? It seems a speculative acquisition on the basis that Skype might become even more valuable later and they were right!
- woodydesign 6mo ago[dead]
- peterpommes 6mo agoHow much I miss Path…
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoWas looking for MapQuest. Does it live still?
- ThinkingGuy 6mo agoI still use it regularly.
- p4bl0 6mo agoThis is missing so much things that immediately comes to my mind (such as Voilà, Caramail, Multimania, Mygale, Radio.Blog.Club, Skyblog, Motion Twin's Flash games, etc.). I think those and many others are too local in the real world to be of any significance for a mostly US-centric history (my pov is based in France). Still, this brought up a lot of memories!
- bozdemir 6mo agothnx for the feedback, will be adding them too.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- cookiengineer 6mo agoPretty much every text is slop-generated. I like the idea, not what OP has done with it. Talking about ICQ with zero screenshots is like talking about Hamachi without talking about LAN parties and how games were played at the time. Pretty much all articles are just slop-text. Not even talking about alternatives or what has been done in the meantime. For example, ICQ led to AIM and Trillian, which led to pidgin/libpurple, then to jabber/xmpp etc.
- malfist 6mo agoAi slop with the "I model myself after the AI greats" and most everything except the into is in lowercase
- bozdemir 6mo agoI will be adding the details soon, especially screenshots, thanks for the feedback. Since english is not my mother tongue, had to cheat a bit.
- anthk 6mo agoAIM->GAIM from the libre community, then Pidgin/Libpurple, with NAIM, CenterIM, TMSNC and OFC AMSN. This is what happens when people which didn't live the era try to write an article with LLM slop. I remember loving Freetalk against Mcabber and now Profanity because it could autocomplete anything you entered, not just nicknames.
- cookiengineer 6mo agoOn our LAN parties at the time, everyone started to use Trillian because of their support for the Bonjour protocol which used multicast DNS locally. That way you could easily "group teams" together, because the hostnames / IPs were also visible and you could add them then to the Hamachi groups where the games happened. Hamachi was an amazing tool before they got bought, it made networking so easy for everyone; and you didn't even need to know what an IP was.
- ramblin_ray 6mo agoLOVE this! I also love how concise and readable it is... Only thing I miss (especially for people who never experienced early internet) would be a visual example, or picture of the site, etc... like this: https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/space-jam/ https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/space-jam/
- bozdemir 6mo agowould be a very good addition, thnx for the suggestion, added to road map.
- fazgha 6mo agoDidn't know why, I jumped to check "Google Reader".. Still missing it to that day.
- davidcollantes 6mo agoWhere would Prodigy, CompuServ, eWorld, MSN, and the like would fit in? Together with AOL?
- Edd314159 6mo agoIs there anything out there that is the opposite of this? Like a directory of old things that are, against all odds, still alive
- yreg 6mo agoytmnd, hackernews. Regarding software, perhaps vlc?
- evandrofisico 6mo agoI would suggest slackware as a long lived software project too
- yaky 6mo agoJabber / XMPP is still around and is pretty good for self-hosting a messenger. Email, now with multiple validations and verifications. Gopher protocol has a niche community (probably overlapping with newer Gemini). Doom, still played and modded, and now a semi-meme benchmark for low-spec hardware. Countless *nix tools that originated decades ago and evolved.
- RGamma 6mo agoLike https://gamecopyworld.com https://gamecopyworld.com :>
- mrweasel 6mo agomp3.com should really be listed under "media & music". So much amazing music and creativity was lost when the site closed. You can apparently dig out a massive zip file or something from archive.org, but last I tried it was almost impossible to navigate.
- bozdemir 6mo agowill be added soon.
- andypiper 6mo agoNeeds Twitter on there.
- bozdemir 6mo agoyea very good catch, also might be a good to add categories like "murdered", especially fits to the case of twitter :)
- sinqlo 6mo agoThis is a fascinating project. I’ve noticed a major shift in how we handle digital assets—we moved from hard-coded absolute paths to 'permalinks,' yet the 'perma' part of that word is increasingly a lie. I’m curious, how do you handle the archival of assets that were originally hosted behind auth-walls or CDNs that have since changed their CORS policies?
- bozdemir 6mo agoI use .md files for the content, and generate static html files with a python script, soon I ll open source the engine behind to github, thank you for the positive comment.
- bjord 6mo agoit's missing google buzz
- 6031769 6mo agoThat's in the dedicated google list at https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- nottorp 6mo agoThe top of the page starts great, but then it goes to grey on grey on the item descriptions for that low contrast Apple like feeling. Firefox/mac os, dark mode on. Edit: no, dark/light doesn't seem to matter. Edit 2: Time to go on a tangent. I opened the site experimentally on my oled phone and while the grey on grey is still too low contrast, it's significantly more readable than on either my desktop or laptop monitor. Is all this grey on grey fad a consequence of "designers" switching to 4k oleds even on the desktop?
- bozdemir 6mo agoI was trying to capture the essence of the dead/grave concept, that's why I chose that type of pallet, I am really open to suggestios, what can I do better, what would you recommend? thnx for the taking the time, appreciate it so much.
- nottorp 6mo agoWell I asked an "AI" and it pointed me to a bunch of accessibility guidelines including how to pick pairs of colours that are contrasting enough. I'm no designer so that's where I'd start at :)
- nurettin 6mo agoThis is hallucinated Symbian OS 1998 - 2014 nokia ran the world on it. then the iphone came out. nokia kept shipping symbian phones for 6 more years out of denial. eventually everybody noticed. ---- No, Microsoft bought Nokia phone division, killed the brand and the OS (they published two updates called Anna and Bella and bricked my N8), published Lumia, some guy kept saying "devs devs devs" but nobody bought it. Fsck microslop.
- rovr138 6mo agoICQ being first hurts Thanks to people I met there, I started tinkering more with computers. I had a lot of fun there when everyone else went to sleep. > "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed Be around me when I get a text... I have gotten some really wild looks when people recognize it. It's a bit of wtf which shifts to woah when it clicks in their head. Fun chat with CEO last week ...now, the typewriter when you turned on the keyboard sound. Maybe that has to do with why I like mechanical keyboards.
- brk 6mo agoCuecat? Though I'm not sure if that ever really got big enough to warrant a spot, but it was a thing for a hot minute. HomeRF - The wifi contender that was supposed to unify wireless networks across multiple device types. Tivo - technically still around, but pretty much a zombie version of their former selves. (Maybe make an "I'm not dead yet!" section). Gateway 2000 PCs -Their support line had a DJ, and they were everywhere until all of a sudden they were nowhere. Optical Drives Zip Drives - 100MB on a floppy! OMFG!!!11 Slashdot - Digg and Reddit's funky uncle.
- zorked 6mo agoInteresting Cuecat story: LibraryThing bought a massive stock of Cuecats and, 20 years later, they still sell them, repurposed to scan ISBNs from books for cataloging purposes: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/CueCat_Guide https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/CueCat_Guide
- cestith 6mo agoSlashdot is still online and updating. Some of us still use optical drives from time to time (especially those of us with an existing stock of M-Disc media for long-term archiving). Gateway was purchased by Acer, so it’s not like they just disappeared. Not any more than DEC, SBC, or Studebaker anyway. They were just absorbed.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoThere's revivals of a few of the services here. Off the top of my head, myspace has spacehey which is moderately popular. AIM and MSN messengers have revivals out there but I forget the details. Neocities certainly isn't geocities but it has a similar vibe and name. They mention winamps resurrections, and at least in the unix world we have a few players compatible with the skins (which lets be honest here, why else would you want to use winamp today). Pebble came back recently. Dial up exists as well, but is mostly relegated to the extremely rural and will probably die out when satelite internet like starlink gets more popular. And of course, homepages never died for anyone moderately interested in computers Minidisk is technically dead, but it still occasionally gets new releases, particularly from the vaporwave/y2k scene and needlejuice (they have Lemon Demon and the Friday night Funkin' soundtrack)
- Xiaoher-C 6mo agoThis is fun, but I think the site needs a clearer distinction between “dead”, “declined”, and “still alive but culturally moved on”. Tamagotchi is a good example: it’s no longer the late-90s phenomenon, but it’s definitely not dead. A small status tag could help: - shut down - zombie / technically alive - niche but active - spiritual successor exists That would make the debates part of the site instead of just corrections in the comments.
- ghaff 6mo agoThere are a lot of things that aren't dead exactly but are certainly at some small percentage of their peak popularity. Not Internet, but I like to give rollerblading/in-line skating as example. Yes, you may see someone doing it every few months but it used to be a pretty common activity at some point in the 90s. Bowling was very big at one point. There are still alleys but when was the last time you thought of being in a bowling league.
- vunderba 6mo agoYeah, I was thinking about pagers. They’re still used in some limited settings, like hospitals, but there are probably entire landfills composed entirely of old beepers.
- prmoustache 6mo agoBut that is probably because peak popularity was the abnormal state and these thinhs came back to their normal and warranted popularity.
- croisillon 6mo agoZenbe ~ 2008-2010 :(
- andypants 6mo agoThis would be great if it had screenshots of each dead thing
- elephantstripes 6mo agoOne question, quoting the site: https://rip.so/tamagotchi.html https://rip.so/tamagotchi.html "Banned from: Most schools (1997-1999), some commercial flights, the Pope's car" Pope's car?? I need a wiki to that information.
- rakeshd 6mo agoThis is weirdly charming and a little sad in the best way. The internet needs more memorials and fewer 404s that pretend nothing ever happened.
- submeta 6mo agoPalm Pilot is mentioned, but not Amiga Computers? For me it defined an era. Warez, games, hacking in assembly and Aztec C compiler. Too bad I migrated to MS DOS (yet Turbo Pascal was great), as Macs were unaffordable in Germany. Edit: A good list anyway. AOL dial tone and AOL CDs. Lol. Spent countless hours chatting to strangers on aol.
- bozdemir 6mo agowill be adding them soon. ty for the feedback.
- rideontime 6mo agoHow does one "pour a 56k modem out"? This is the sort of nonsensical turn of phrase that AI writes.
- RiverCrochet 6mo ago- the 56k modem must be liquid or ground up into a fine powder. the liquid route will be safer. - the liquid or fine powder must be inside of a can or bottle for alcoholic beverages. - for best results secure 1 or more homie(s) to occupy the immediate vincinity. - it is the reader's responsibility to comply with any applicable environmental or littering laws. pouring a 56k modem out to one's homie(s) near a sewer drain or natural water source could lead to contanimation.
- ck45 6mo agoDo Nabaztags qualify to be added? There seems to be a workaround to make them work again.
- bitwize 6mo agoI love how it has an under construction banner, a guestbook, a webring, and a page visit counter. This is what the internet is all about. Though it's still missing the Amiga, and macOS <10...
- DeathArrow 6mo agoYou should add Minitel on the list.
- bozdemir 6mo agodone. added. thank you for the feedback
- amastra 6mo ago[dead]
- touseefbuilds 6mo ago[dead]
- eieiyo 6mo agovibe coded and all the content is LLM generated
- firebot 6mo agoAnyone remember The Palace? 1996 to uhm. Early 2000s they went bankrupt. Some people made their own clients to various degrees. The two popular ones being PalaceChat(still around, barely) and Phalanx(dead.)
- PaulBunch 6mo ago[flagged]
- bentesla 6mo agoThis is oddly nostalgic. Is there any plan to let users contribute entries or memories?
- photonair 6mo agoIt's a good start. Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin brought back the good old days playing as a kid. Honestly, I thought they were still around.
- kofd 6mo agoIs it a sign that I am old that I look back on many of these with fondness and a tinge of melancholy? I had a blinky GeoCities site, participating in a webring with others who made Klik n Play games ...
- justsomedudeguy 6mo agoMy glory days were at age 14 when the era of AOL discs was at it's peak. That being said most internet nostalgia I encounter online makes my eyes roll or even cringe inside. This, however, I had a genuine blast reading, thank you! I loved the craigslist entry the most. P.S. I still use winamp religiously. (edit) P.P.S. Please, please make an entry for Optical Media. I am so glad that era is over!
- minvariance 6mo agoGotta add Google Inbox, later renamed "Google Inbox by Gmail" then killed. Still miss that.