
Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss? - pensv0
Repeating the fun question originally posted here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16284918
======
geocrasher
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".

~~~
cambalache
The old Slashdot was orders of magnitude better than HN -I am not going to
even mention Reddit-. For all its lame jokes it was filled with people who
actually loved technology and science and the moderation system was very
solid.

~~~
j45
Anyone curious should go read Slashdot posts from that time.

~~~
easytiger
/. From this day 2005

[https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050326092609/http://slashdot.org/)

------
chrisandchips
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
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
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.

~~~
bsagdiyev
Kaitnieks SCAR right? I was pretty involved in the cheating scene for
RuneScape since around 2001, which I credit with getting me in to tech.

~~~
tylerlh
Ditto. AutoRune and later SCAR, Sleepwalker, et al were huge inspirations to
teenage me. I spent a lot of time bugging Dylock and Kaitnieks for Delphi help
over IRC.

When I had some downtime a year or so ago, it was really interesting to
revisit the reverse-engineered clients (a la RuneBot, PowerBot, etc) and
taking a look at how that was done then and now. Actually made me somewhat
working with Java again.

Very cool to see other folks who found themselves on a similar path thanks to
that community!

------
cure
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...

~~~
abiogenesis
Ah, I remember reading his Soft Ice tutorials and just found out that he
passed away in 2009. Sad news.

------
xrd
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
I never used Napster, but this sounds really interesting. Could you explain
how browsing the filesystem of the user works in more detail??

~~~
alexenko
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
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
As mentioned upthread, install Soulseek and you'll get the experience now!

------
o10449366
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.

~~~
haroldp
"What" replace "Oink", and "Redacted" replaced What. It's all still out there.

~~~
thirdsun
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.

------
vardump
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.

~~~
cmdrtaco
Me too.

~~~
mynegation
Rob, thank you for Slashdot, it was my first tech forum.

~~~
cmdrtaco
Happy to oblige.

~~~
616c
Man I love this site. You're here too, Commander Taco!? The best of my youth
and old age fused together!

------
theonemind
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
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/)

------
topkai22
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
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
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
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.

------
deftnerd
I was quite fond of Kuro5hin.org, a discussion community that just kind of
petered out.

~~~
contingencies
Yes, there was a golden period. After slashdot. Before ... well, nothing.
Maybe reddit?

------
joemi
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
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
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.

------
oppodeldoc
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.

------
j79
Not a specific website, but the concept of web rings that tied Geocities and
Tripod sites together were another a lot of fun.

------
pottertheotter
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
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
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.

------
dlbucci
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
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
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...

------
palehose
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.

------
mech422
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
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
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
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
oh? I'll have to take another look - there was SOOO much good technical
content!

------
ajtjp
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
What about messenger/WhatsApp/insta?

------
hadlock
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
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.

------
bdcravens
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
wunderground. It used to be fast and simple even on a 14.4K modem. Now it's
slow even on broadband.

~~~
EamonnMR
That was our go to radar site. With dark sky off Android, what's good now?

~~~
recursive
Windy?

------
alexmingoia
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
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 :)

------
hanoz
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
I still have one of their t-shirts.

------
thomk
[https://everything2.com/](https://everything2.com/) which, amazingly is still
up and running.

~~~
pensv0
I remember it!

Completely unrelated but somethingaweful.com was really hilarious back then.
back when meme wasn't a thing.

~~~
hprotagonist
SA goons are also still hard at work. Fark, too.

~~~
mekanicalsyncop
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)

------
api
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.

~~~
whoopdedo
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/)

------
duckfruit
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
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)

------
kyriakos
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.

------
jaxn
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.

------
nocman
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
html5zombo.com if your device doesn’t support Flash

~~~
tartoran
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
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.

------
jdkee
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)

~~~
smsm42
Slashdot was fun... But then somehow it stopped to be. Not sure even what
happened.

Posting as user 1XXX :)

~~~
cmdrtaco
I have a few theories... :)

~~~
prepend
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?

------
jtchang
The old astalavista.box.sk. Surprising it is still running.

------
kgin
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
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.

------
hprotagonist
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
[https://html5zombo.com](https://html5zombo.com)

~~~
hprotagonist
ahh life is complete again. the only limit is myself.

~~~
dumbfounder
Try opening 10 tabs at random intervals. It enhances the unknown.

------
Thriptic
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.

------
dumbfounder
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.

------
herval
First wave: Geocities & its “webrings”

Web 2.0: del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon

------
Jemm
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
You can still view cached versions of links.

Click the small down-arrow at the right of a link -> Cached.

------
flatfilefan
Geocities! And the olle Slashdot. Stuff that matters, news for nerds, or some
such.

------
TheOtherHobbes
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.

------
jwjones
Space Jam

Oh wait, it's still there. And still the same as 1996.

[https://spacejam.com/](https://spacejam.com/)

~~~
Kye
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.

------
shripadk
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.

------
pan69
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
Was hoping someone here mentioned flipcode. I was in the irc channel daily.

~~~
pensv0
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.

------
elihu
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.

------
fumar
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
Soulseek is still pretty active these days

------
karmakaze
Any search engine that can return exact matches ranked my match relevance.

------
plibither8
Surprised no one mentioned StumbleUpon! I discovered many new, interesting
things even though it was basically an web advertisement company.

~~~
mrtobo
I met my wife through Stumbleupon!

------
hestefisk
Kuro5hin.org. It was the best of internet culture and discussion before apps
and 24/7 connectivity.

~~~
mech422
Oh yeah! Koro5hin rocked!

------
pchander
[http://bash.org](http://bash.org)

~~~
nemo1618
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
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.

------
Pxtl
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.

------
jimnotgym
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.

~~~
Lammy
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
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.

------
jamespetercook
Geocities, and all of my friends at school having their own website they’d
update at lunchtime in the school library!

------
blankface
\- 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

------
Lammy
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"

------
ollerac
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.

------
wdavidw
Maybe around 2006-2010, [http://ajaxian.com/](http://ajaxian.com/) was an
inspiring aggregate of web related articles that I would visit daily.

------
iobase
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
They were the number one team for Folding@Home for a long time: [H]ard OCP is
how they styled their name.

------
taborj
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

------
seneca
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
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.

------
pensv0
And obviously maddox.xmission.com

~~~
doopy1
It's still there and being updated

~~~
Lammy
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
Fair enough :)

------
Emore
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
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)

------
throwawaysea
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.

------
RandomBacon
Consumerist.com before some as __*le hacked the commenting system. After that,
they closed the comments which was usually more valuable than the articles.

------
epc
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
suck.com was great!

~~~
jholman
I still carry a torch for Polly Esther.

------
hit8run
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.

------
jerglingu
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.

------
stevekemp
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
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/) .

------
acomjean
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.worldn...](https://web.archive.org/web/19991129051036/http://www.worldnewyork.com/about.shtml)

Memepool. Another curated story site. Silly but fun.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepool.com/)

------
afpx
The original del.icio.us

------
hattori
Old school quake 1/2/3 news portals! Those were fun. Classic example today
would be [https://www.quakeworld.nu/](https://www.quakeworld.nu/)

~~~
pimlottc
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
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/)

------
reaperducer
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.

------
clouddrover
I don't miss a particular website. I miss the absence of intensive and
pervasive user surveillance.

------
hnta123
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

------
girmad
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
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)

------
gwern
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)

------
syphilis2
The Applet Arcade
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020604024000/http://theshadowl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020604024000/http://theshadowlands.net/arcade.htm)
[https://web.archive.org/web/19981201063456/http://members.ao...](https://web.archive.org/web/19981201063456/http://members.aol.com/Shadows125/arcade.htm)
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961222221629/http://www.serve....](https://web.archive.org/web/19961222221629/http://www.serve.com/shadows/arcade.htm)

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.

------
bmn__
TMOL/True Meaning Of Life

[https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.com/)

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.

------
vortico
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombo.com)

~~~
geofft
Fortunately for you there's [https://html5zombo.com/](https://html5zombo.com/)
!

~~~
vortico
All of my childhood memories have been restored!

------
hombre_fatal
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.

------
egfx
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

------
personlurking
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
Was is programming focused?

[https://projecteuler.net/](https://projecteuler.net/)

~~~
personlurking
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.

------
f00zz
Advogato, an early social network blog site for open source developers. The
site itself was implemented as an Apache module written in C.

~~~
stevekemp
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)

------
digitalsanctum
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
His company is still kicking. Dunno how much day to day involvement he has:

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-
to-usability/)

------
psxuaw
PerlMonks, and WikiWikiWeb.

~~~
cmdrtaco
Vroom is good people.

------
exabrial
This necessarily might not count as a website but, playing CyberStrike on AOL
during their free trial period years was awesome

------
jarrell_mark
Surprised no one mentioned askjeeves.com I really liked that site

------
a5seo
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
WebMonkey was right up there with w3schools in terms of teaching myself how to
code for web in ~2000

------
wmnwmn
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.

~~~
partisan
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/)).

------
olingern
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.kuro5h...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/3/19/133129/548)

------
hbarka
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
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)

------
alasdair_
Fravia.org when he was still alive. Absolutely fantastic reverse engineering
resource. RIP +Fravia.

------
Le0C
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
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.

------
newx
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 :-)

------
dvtrn
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

------
Kye
LanphEs's Useful Page, among others lost to memory.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.v...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.vghq.com/)

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.

------
arghblarg
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.

------
arrty88
not a website, but the old battle.net, and irc in general

~~~
markholmes
IRC is still alive and well

------
copperx
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.

------
psim1
Jennicam

I’m not a perv; it was novel.

------
yumraj
ICQ

 _Old, not evil_ Google

 _Absence of_ FB

Geocities

Cricinfo

Slashdot

Codeguru/Codeproject

~~~
Pxtl
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.

------
DrNuke
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.

------
buboard
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

------
BerislavLopac
It's not a website, but I'm missing the old Usenet.

------
trengrj
43 Things
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things)

------
ssvt
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.

------
Jack000
stylegala, cssbeauty and the other css-oriented design sites and attached
communities

------
jachee
It wasn't particularly early, but I miss turntable.fm.

Crowd-sourced music discovery/sharing/listening and some great interactions.

------
mattcanhack
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.wasted...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010206203747/http://www.wastedyouth.org/index2.html)

------
j45
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.

------
jeromescuggs
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

------
donut
The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/)

Inspired a lot of learning about graphics.

------
todd3834
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.

------
pensv0
And animelayer.com. I stumbled upon the small site and while I was not a big
anime guy, the people there were good fun

------
gregsadetsky
Hotline servers.

------
exabrial
The original versions of g+ was actually great, and they steadily made it
worse and more confusing as time went on.

------
brandonmenc
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
Schwa - thanks for reminding me! Absolute genius.

------
jsrcout
Bianca's Smut Shack. What a great community; really felt like home. And of
course, early Slashdot (hi Rob!).

------
adav
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.

------
scythe
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.

------
ornornor
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.

------
veesahni
i did finally stop randomly trying to go to google reader

~~~
fphhotchips
Still once every couple of months for me

------
gtvwill
&Totse

~~~
rrival
and the rest of NIRVANAnet

------
alasdair_
Fuckedcompany.com

Exurbannation.com (a site that was full of people in 2007 calling out the
looming mortgage crisis)

------
smcameron
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.)

------
EdwardCoffin
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).

------
jconcilio
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.

------
deerpig
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.

------
fowkswe
K10k.net Linkedup.com

The link dumps of all the new and exciting shit people were doing with the
internet.

------
csense
Yahoo Games.

~~~
partisan
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?

------
nicwolff
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
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.

------
gdubs
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)

------
kwikiel
Simple purple website: purple.com

// Now it's unfortunately taken by mattress company

~~~
dicknuckle
ew

------
hopesthoughts
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.

------
guerrilla
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
I remember Silicon Toad's page. Lots of cracking software, docs, etc.

~~~
hoistbypetard
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.

------
pensv0
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.

------
cbolat
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.

------
tannhaeuser
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

------
carldaddy
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.

------
gasull
Blogdex

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogdex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogdex)

------
lexcom
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.

------
Finnucane
Timmybighands, a sadly short lived humor site from the mst3000 guys.

------
takeda
not websites but I miss IRC and Usenet

------
pixelperfect
\- 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
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
I meant the GameFAQs message boards

------
lcall
The "reverse acronym generator". You could put in a few letters and it would
return an important- and/or technical-sounding meaning for it.

------
brightsize
galaxy.com - a late-90s+ curated internet directory. Example capture from
2000:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061436/http://www.galaxy...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061436/http://www.galaxy.com/)

It still exists, sort of, as [https://www.einet.net/](https://www.einet.net/)
.

------
beautifulfreak
worth1000.com, for the daily dose of amazing photoshop art.

------
Nelkins
[http://omgwtf.superlime.com/](http://omgwtf.superlime.com/)

Doesn't seem to be around anymore unfortunately.

------
prepend
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.

------
csmiller
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

------
f0ok
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?

------
jrossi94
proper slashdot, freshmeat, kuro5hin, digg and aicn

------
djohnston
Not necessarily early, but about 10 years back, there was a site called
stereomood that introduced me to a ton new artists and genres.

------
joshfraser
digg.com. still exists, but it's not the same.

------
DelayedChoice
What I miss...

Amdzone Firingsquad Anandtech Tomshardware Hardocop Bunch of other sites that
I can't remember. The pc/mac chat room on AOL.

------
boring_twenties
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!

------
hnhg
fuckedcompany

~~~
GaltMidas
I second this. What was your handle?

~~~
hnhg
I was just a lurker.

------
leoh
suck.com, stellar.io, yahoo.com's directory

~~~
patchtopic
yes, SUCK.COM was awesome.

------
monooso
The Show, by Ze Frank. I hated weekends, because it meant no new episodes.
Dirty space news has never been the same since.

------
ralphbad
The old thinkgeek.com -- though shipping to Canada was atrociously expensive
and you would always get hit with customs.

------
a5seo
Red Rock Eater news. Technically an email, but such a great curation of tech
news by a very erudite UCLA professor.

------
dot
zfilter, it was basically reddit of the early 2000s:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilte...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilter.com/)

Also, Metafilter and Fark. Both still exist to my surprise.

------
jhymn
The old Slashdot. I also had a website called hardcorelinux.com where I
evangelized Linux, and I miss that too.

------
jetti
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

------
wesammikhail
Gangsterhood.net

Boys those were the days. Getting up at 4AM to coordinate an attack against
Amello. Man I miss the internet!

------
thomk
[https://ilovebacon.com/](https://ilovebacon.com/)

------
JadoJodo
TradeGamesNow.com - Community was awesome and trading video games via the
postal service was a lot of fun.

------
foobarbecue
slyck.com , the filesharing news site.

------
nwmcsween
Anything circa 2000-2010ish where some sites were very unique in their designs
(usually using flash).

------
kobc
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

------
innocentoldguy
Bonsai Kittens. The site was clever and the reactions from animal-rights
groups were even better.

------
DelayedChoice
Old versions of the current if still alive..

Amdzone.com Tomshardware 3dnow Hardocop Firingsquad

Pc/mac chat room on aol chat.

------
SteveNuts
Candystand games and shockwave.com

------
egypturnash
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...

------
psurooster
VoodooExtreme, RIP Billy Wilson

------
tootie
Some classic comedy websites like Brunching Shuttlecocks and the Modern
Humorist.

------
whoisjuan
Yahoo Pipes

------
CawCawCaw
Chess-related: FICS, ICC, US Chess Live, World Chess Network.

------
eyeball
Ytmnd.com

~~~
lgl
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
Awesome. It looks like they brought it back!

------
dpcan
I loved Digg.com before the redesign fiasco. And Diggnation was fun.

Rev3 was cool too.

------
ThinkingGuy
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.

------
bovermyer
The Yahoo Web Directory.

------
argimenes
Geocities and AngelFire.

------
rankun203
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.

------
Giorgi
Anyone remember early days of Totse? that and Yahoo Messenger

------
lihaciudaniel
The gams on gamevial.com

They had an early MMORPG old religiously style to it.

------
ipnon
4chan was never good.

------
silverreads
lissaexplains.com got me started on the innerwebs in the 90s. It's still
around but not really the same.

------
markpapadakis
kuro5hin, slashdot as it existed back when, dejanews, and s bunch of video
gaming sites that went extinct

------
nope96
Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom weblog

------
nickysielicki
Some of these are still around, but none are in the form I remember them:

NSider Nintendo forums

slashdot

somethingawful

facepunch

reddit

freenode

digitalgangster

------
smallbeans
Mirsky’s Worst of the Web was great.

------
beamatronic
Echo.com - steaming audio

Sidewalk.com - social events

------
aloukissas
ThePirateBay

------
me551ah
Excite chat.

And the general demise of chatrooms.

------
smallbeans
Mirsky’s Worst of the Web!!

------
kaydub
&Totse

------
parentheses
ebaumsworld - hours of wonderful entertainment and time wasted

------
berbec
Inktomi kuro5hin digg

------
colinbartlett
jodi.org was a delightful rabbit hole of pure art

------
johndavid9991
friendster.com!

------
villgax
Pokemoncrater

------
alasdair_
#hack on efnet

Old-school MUDs.

------
_Mark
Stile Project

------
gorgoiler
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.

------
dfsegoat
Overgrow.net

------
qiguai
Stumbleupon

------
jeffrallen
Kuro5hin

------
zacharycohn
Unixpunx

------
joncp
Zombo.com

Hands down

------
qserasera
Wimp.com

slashdot

homestar runner

albino blacksheep

newgrounds

ebaumsworld

slime flash games

------
weisser
What.cd

------
bchip
Myspace

------
neilsense
kuro5hin

------
downshun
Google

------
austinjp
freshmeat.net

------
dillonmckay
adcritic.com

------
crabasa
suck.com

------
justinzollars
geocities

------
starpilot
You don't miss the websites, you miss being young.

~~~
cambalache
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.

~~~
efreak
I personally miss Windows 98. I'm aware of bugs and the boot time it took
being longer than current boot times on decent machines. I miss the
responsiveness of well-behaved applications. I miss having native
applications. I miss having themes and fine control over colors and fonts that
allowed me to change the look of almost every application installed due to
everything being built with the same toolkit and inheriting the same settings.
I miss being able to make pixel art in paintbrush (why did MS have to add
antialiasing to paint?). I miss WEP games (Chip's Challenge is on steam, but
I've never found a good Jezzball clone).

Also, I miss ZoneAlarm firewall. Windows firewall is sufficient for my needs,
but I really wish there was a way to make _windows_ pop up a prompt the first
time an application tried to go online, and white/blacklist _specific
destinations_ from the prompt.

I miss browsing with less styling and images and such nonsense.

