
Ask HN: What sites did you invest significant time in only to have it shut down? - everdev
Either:<p>A) creating the site yourself<p>or<p>B) creating user generated content or building a reputation<p>When it closed, what was it&#x27;s impact on you?
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ecesena
I co-built/run Theneeds [1] for about 5y. We shut it down during the
acquisition. In our case, we weren't sad or anything because the website was
"just a frontend" to the recommendation engine, that was in fact the IP that
we sold.

As a counter strategy to avoid shut down, I'm building most of my projects on
free hosting/api. Of course very limited functionality. Examples: Has Gluten
[2], personal dashboard for cryptos [3].

Despite this, I had a project [4] shutting down due to Runkeeper suddenly
turning off their API access. I still run on avg 1mi/day, and I had to go back
to manual/spreadsheet counting in 2018.

[1] [http://theneeds.com](http://theneeds.com)

[2] [http://hasgluten.com](http://hasgluten.com)

[3] [http://priceeth.github.io](http://priceeth.github.io)

[4]
[https://github.com/runwithmark/runwithmark.github.io](https://github.com/runwithmark/runwithmark.github.io)

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csa
BetThePot in the aughts.

It was sort of an early thinking man's poker site -- it was quite a bit more
civil and exploratory than 2p2 at the time. Eventually the quality of analysis
at 2p2 surpassed BtP, and then the training sites came along.

This was sort of the heyday of online poker, so the community was a lot of
fun. I really miss it.

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zapperdapper
I spent about 8 years running my own Thailand-related web site. I had a lot of
photos, a lot of content, interviews, articles, a blog. I had people write me
saying the site had changed their lives, or they moved to Thailand because of
my site, or my site helped them when they decided to relocate. It just didn't
seem to be going anywhere in terms of traffic so I canned it. When I closed it
down I had mixed feelings - it was a labour of love, but closing it freed up
time to work on other things.

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stevekemp
[https://debian-administration.org/](https://debian-administration.org/) was a
site I setup to document my learning, and I wrote a lot of code for it over
the years, as well as a lot of articles.

Mostly the experience was positive, but I'm still a little grumpy at the
people who would copy posts I'd written into linkedin groups, and similar
places, pretending they'd written them. I issued takedown notices against some
of the biggest offenders, but it soured my experience of writing
documentation, tutorials and guides.

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sergiotapia
tech.pro - Hands down the easiest site to write programming articles in.
Leagues better than Medium is today.

It shut down for some reason.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130805065735/http://tech.pro/](https://web.archive.org/web/20130805065735/http://tech.pro/)

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muzani
I build a lot of sites and apps for clients. A good number of them tried to
cash in on the e-commerce craze, then realized that logistics and competing
with Amazon is difficult. So practically all of them have shut down by now.

I've become hardened to it by now. It's sort of like having a goldfish; they
all die eventually.

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dagw
Does usenet count?

(yes I know usenet hasn't really 'shut down', but it's just a pale shadow of
its former self)

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ryanchants
Not really a site, but plenty of MUDs back in the day. Can't find an MMORPG
that quite scratches the same itch.

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krasicki
Geocities went Yahoo rancid before shutting down and was abandoned after being
fenced with a ten foot perimeter.

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DrScump
Usenet newsgroups, if that counts as a "site".

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bigiain
Twitter.

(Still waiting/hoping for that trashfire to shut down...)

