Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss? - cronjobma
======
lacker
I miss Google Reader. I used to read ~100 longer-form blogs that didn't
publish daily. After Google Reader went away, I tried other RSS readers but
they just weren't as convenient, and my online reading habits shifted to more
Twitter. At first that seemed fine but over time it has become hard to keep my
Twitter feed free of distracting trivia. Nowadays I just have a much smaller
list of blogs I read regularly.

I also miss the way Slashdot made me feel near the dawn of the internet.
Before I had the internet, I got my tech news from CNN or from newspapers.
Once I got the internet and could read Slashdot, that was just amazing.

~~~
sien
What did you try?

I used Inoreader and it's now better than Google Reader ever was.

~~~
detcader
+1 for Inoreader. After Google Reader shut down there was a lull where no RSS
reader was good enough or similar enough to be satisfactory, but Inoreader is
now the proper replacement for me

~~~
jasonjayr
How is Inoreader sustained? The account is free, but TINSTAFL ... is their an
upcharge for some services? Are they doing in-system advertising?

------
tqwhite
Back in the day, there was something called a personal home page. These were
simple html pages, sometimes with <blink> tags, where a person would present
themselves to the internet. Often there would be a list of bands, or hobbies,
a picture, or whatever.

There was a company that maintained an index of home pages made by women.
Clearly adolescent in intent, it was otherwise completely benign. There was no
leering in the text on the index page, nothing slightly pornographic, nor any
apparent selection criteria except that the person represented was female.

Back then, the internet was dialup and very slow. A page took long enough to
load that one could perceive the elements as they arrived. It was great. There
were hundreds of them. Each page was a little drama of revelation.

The page color would show first (what made her choose vivid purple?). Then
headline (Roxie's Place on the Web - who is she?). Then the first text (back
then, people admitted to some pretty mundane stuff). A picture probably
started loading (duck lips wasn't yet a thing, nor digital cameras). Each
detail revealing a portrait painted by some person who wanted to be seen.
There was an innocence to the stories told in those early days, before porn,
before fake news, even, to some extent, before cynicism.

I think the page might have been maintained by Tucows, now a successful
internet company. I have always felt the need to defend the idea that someone
could be interested in women on the web without any pornographic intention
but, that's what this was. I look back on it fondly and, thanks to whoever did
it.

------
fapjacks
For me it's not so much websites as it is the old BBSes I spent my early teens
calling up, and of course the door games. MajorMUD, LORD, TradeWars 2002,
Usurper, Fazuul. You can still play these games, but playing with the other
nerds in my town was really something special. There was also a MUD I played
called MUME which is actually still up and still has an active playerbase [0].
Then there were the phone conferences which I dialed into when I could. And of
course the old Unix systems I had access to. Probably the most nostalgic and
fun of them all was Telenet. For anyone else that remembers Telenet fondly,
there's actually a pretty true-to-life Telenet simulator with tens of
thousands of systems to explore, and a quite active userbase [1].

[0] [http://mume.org/](http://mume.org/)

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

~~~
trav4225
Yes, Telenet! And Tymnet! <3

------
dewey
What.CD - not because of the free music but because of the community,
recommendations by friends and discovering new music on a daily basis.

Right now I’m just listening to the “For You” section of Apple Music and very
rarely discover something new. I also don’t really have a way to keep things
that I like around as there’s no nice way to put things in your library if you
don’t use iCloud Music library. Streaming services also miss a lot of editions
or different recordings and their meta tags are usually very bad.

~~~
Nadya
A very large portion of the WCD community, especially the more active members
of the forums, have largely moved to [Redacted] or [God of Music]. In case you
never found out and would like to possibly re-unite with some old friends from
WCD.

~~~
dewey
I’m on all of these and it’s not the same and I think it will never be. Mostly
because torrenting in general is getting less popular and with the raise of
streaming services and them getting “good enough” a lot of heavy users
including myself moved on. It was also apparent in the forum activity on What
that went down steadily over the last years. I also experienced that a lot of
my social circle wasn’t that active any more at the end as they got older /
out of university and started to work. I used to be on the site for hours
every day interviewing people but once you start working you just want to do
something that doesn’t involve a screen in the evening, at least in my
experience.

~~~
Nadya
I agree it's not the same - but wanted to put that offer on the table in case
you weren't and wanted to contact people you may have lost touch with because
of the shutdown. Losing touch with friends because you cannot contact them is
terrible.

~~~
dewey
I figured, thanks for that!

------
lucb1e
Forums in general.

I'd just check them daily(ish) and participate in various conversations. These
days this kind of communication is either in chat groups on Telegram or
ephemeral threads on HN and reddit. Rarely are those threads referred back to,
unlike topics were. I still do things online that last, such as blogging,
pushing to Github and writing stackexchange answers, but none of those are
very informal and include joking around sometimes, like we did on forums.

~~~
Nadya
I used to be the Administrator of several different iPBFree forums before
iPBFree suddenly disappeared.

I really miss the graphics/writing communities that were scattered around
forums - it's actually how I learned how to use Photoshop and do front-end
programming with HTML/CSS/JS!

Messing around with free forums is what landed me my career today - but forums
are all but dead due to social media platforms. Even dedicated forums for
games are either dead or have moved to Reddit.

~~~
Endy
Actually, you might find something on JCInk, a lot of the IPBFree communities
moved there (having abandoned Invisionfree/Zetaboards).

~~~
Nadya
I actually knew John quite well and helped write plenty of tutorials for how
to use their ACP back in the day. Since Vipul (the admin of iPBFree) was
basically M.I.A for 80% of the time I had been on iPBFree I had once thought
of switching over to jcink. Even since not using the forum since 2008 I'm one
of the Top 10 pages of posters on the support forum. :)

------
chubot
I have a lot of fond memories of Harmony Central. It was a guitar / musician /
gear site. It had a bunch of gear reviews.

I pretty much learned to play guitar off that site and off the early web in
general. I took one year of guitar lessons, and then after that it was all
learning on the web. This was 1994-1997 or so.

EDIT: Woah I just checked and they're still around!

[http://www.harmonycentral.com/](http://www.harmonycentral.com/)

But they got acquired a long time ago, and the site changed. IIRC it was
started by an MIT student, and was acquired around 2000.

Oh it appears that Harmony Central used to be owned by Guitar Center, and then
Gibson Guitars in 2015. I had no idea!!!

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

------
CodeTheInternet
OLGA.net : On-Line Guitar Archive. Basically a collection of text files people
submitted of guitar tablature for popular songs. If I remember right, they got
slammed with DMCA and were forced to shut down. Now we have fantastic tools
like Songsterr and anti-user pieces of shit like UltimateGuitar.

I miss OLGA.

~~~
rwnspace
OLGA was heaven. I still have the print-outs of Metallica tabs I made all
those years ago. My first experience of bitterly hating the 'thorities... Iirc
there was a torrent which had hundreds of thousands of tabs saved in plaintext
from OLGA.

------
fasteddie
This was probably around 1995, I was a young kid just starting to be
interested in computers and the internet, and we had a typical slow loading
connection.

I remember at one point my dad and I found this random choose your own
adventure set of webpages staring Paper Bag Head Man (or something similar)
which often left him dead in comical ways. It wasn't a cartoon, just a photo
of (presumably) the creator with a paper bag happy face on his head, with some
descriptive text, that would take far too long to load on our slow connection.

It was one of the first "internet is weird" moments in my life, and it was fun
exploring it with my dad. Ive remembered it in my adult life and have never
been able to find any reference to it.

------
onion2k
fuckedcompany.com - it was full of brilliant stories about the crazy things
dotcom companies were up to. I'm sure a version for current startups would be
equally fun.

~~~
trav4225
I've wondered the same thing: would a site like FC survive these days?

------
joncrane
Homestarrunner.com

------
VelNZ
Not a website, but I miss IRC from the early/mid 90's. I managed to discover
it via mIRC and spent a lot of time chatting with other kids from around the
world (in lieu of face to face communication of course). It exposed me to a
lot of things, from programming to the hacker mentality (both white hat and
black hat) to just talking to people from different cultures. Well, and
seedier things like stolen credit cards, pornography and warez, of course.

It was an interesting place then, as hardly anyone in real life was aware what
IRC was and online communication was virtually non-existent, but here was this
place where people from all over the world could meet in one place and form
groups in channels.

It still exists now, but I haven't found a channel that has the same stable
group feel of like-minded individuals since the mid-2000's. I have less time,
there's more distractions on the internet in general and people tend to
communicate with those they already know.

~~~
lokedhs
I have been using IRC for as long as you, I guess (mid 90's). And I am active
on a large set of channels with very active and stable groups.

They're mostly centred around various technologies on Freenode, so I'd
recommend you check there.

------
eitland
* Personal websites from before blogging become commonplace - often part of web rings where you could visit one after another page.

* My own and my friends silly pages.

* Not a page but a feature: referrers weren't blocked so we could check who sent us traffic and visit their pages.

* searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular.

~~~
errantspark
"searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular"

I wish I could give people these days an idea of what this was like.

~~~
trav4225
ah, you made me remember my visits to google.stanford.edu... :-)

------
notacoward
There used to be a really good comic strip called Angst Technology, hosted at
inktank.com. Then it stopped, and I was sad. The funny thing is that a bit
later the domain got reused by a different group of people I also know - the
company formed to commercialize Ceph, then bought by Red Hat. All cool, but I
still miss the comic strip.

...or missed, I should say. I couldn't remember the exact name of the
fictional company, so I googled, and it turns out there's an archive.

[https://comics.beardedcoffeemonkey.com/chapter/angst-
technol...](https://comics.beardedcoffeemonkey.com/chapter/angst-technology/)

Yay! I'm happy again. So I cheated on answering this question, but if you love
tech then you should check out this strip.

------
Analemma_
I miss the old fandom communities, like pre-strikethru LJ. Currently the bulk
of fandom activity takes place on Tumblr, which is awful for a variety of
reasons (the platform as designed isn’t a good fit for the type of activity,
and the community is terrible)

------
JonnyNova
For people that respond, could you also give reasons to why you miss the site?

------
jkmcf
I don't recall the domain, but circa 1994 "what's new" was a succinct, daily
list of new websites. Like, almost all of them :)

I distinctly remember the original website for the Twinkie torture test...

~~~
reaperducer
I remember when there was a weekly text file listing all web sites. It was
distributed primarily through e-mail (back when we had bang paths), but I
think I picked up mine through Usenet.

Also, a revival of Gopher is certainly in order. Hypertext without the hype.

------
cdancette
Google reader, not really early days but I miss it very much.

When they stopped it I couldn't find a good alternative and my reading habits
changed, now I don't read as many blogs as I did.

------
williamstein
slashdot -- it used to be really useful, interesting, etc. Now HN is much
better.

~~~
white-flame
Yeah, I do like Slashdot's time-linear format better than HN's fluid ranking,
in that you can catch up from where you left off. However, the discussion in
/. has gotten really old and bitter. HN has its own pervasive negative
community aspects from the other direction, but certainly has more meaningful
content in the discussions overall.

The two sites still share a large percentage of links, though, and I read
stories on /. that I didn't happen to catch on HN's ephemeral front page.

~~~
slazaro
If you want a chronological sort of HN, try
[https://hckrnews.com/](https://hckrnews.com/) . I don't go straight to the HN
main page anymore.

~~~
lokedhs
Or just use the RSS feed. It also gives you a chronological views, and your
reader will keep track of which ones you've already seen.

------
mtmail
The Yahoo! directory, especially the editor's picks.

~~~
bungie4
I was a Yahoo site of the day, equivalent to reddit/hn/sd/ph hug now. It was
bonkers. No notification just BLAMMO!

~~~
ce4
excuse me, but what's ph standing for?

~~~
sharmi
Producthunt.com

------
lokedhs
I'd like to mention Geocities. And not in a completely jokingly manner as
others have.

I'm not mentioning them because of the quality of the content on there, which
was mostly terrible. I'm mentioning them because they represent a different
time, they represent all that was particular about the Internet of that time.

Today's Internet is faster, easier to access, with better services and if
really want the weird stuff that used to live on Geocities it's still out
there.

But Geocities represents more than just its content. They represent a time
when the Internet was literally that. A place where you could do anything you
want, and where all content producers were playing on the same playing field.

I believe Geocities is one of the best sites to represent that era.

~~~
petropolisful
Geocities was my gateway to learning basics of HTML & JavaScript. Didn't take
much to impress friends with coding in those days (high school / early 00's).

------
wink
EZBoard[0], a hosted forums website where you could register a forum for free
and IIRC pay to remove ads. (from 98/99 to ~2004)

For me it was social media before social media. I'm just barely old enough to
have used newsgroups in the late 90s, but I was never a friend of the
interfaces to that medium (which is interesting, I usually prefer CLI over
GUI, just not for communication). The web, on the other hand, was very very
interesting.

Long story short, made a ton of friends on various of the board communities
(mostly digital artists, graphic/screen designers, and web developers (before
that was a term)).

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard)

------
Waterluvian
Zombo.com

It solved all my Web 2.0 concerns but unfortunately was authored in Flash and
not a modern framework. Alas.

~~~
ben11kehoe
[http://html5zombo.com/](http://html5zombo.com/)

~~~
Waterluvian
No mobile audio. I wonder if it works on desktop.

------
with_a_herring
The original del.icio.us

------
secant
It's too long ago for me to remember the site's name but the subscription to
it came when you signed up for a free Hotmail account back in the late 90s.

You would get an email each day that would take you to the site where you had
to solve a reasonably cryptic whodunnit. I've never been good at these sorts
of things but I would spend ages reading the story trying to solve the riddle.
Pretty fun but years later I can't remember its name and I do miss it from
time to time. It was a comfort to know these puzzles were being created and
solved in the background but now is no more.

------
ohazi
cjb.net - I forget if they only allowed http forwarding, or actually gave you
a real DNS entry (might have been either?), but you could get a
hostname.cjb.net for free, as long as you kept your account active.

------
chadgeidel
I really miss the "Q&A sites" like The Conversatron from the late 90's/early
00's
[https://www.everything2.com/title/The+Conversatron](https://www.everything2.com/title/The+Conversatron)

Hours of enjoyment from a very simple concept.

EDIT: Oh, who can forget the Purity Test sites!
[https://everything2.com/title/Purity+Test](https://everything2.com/title/Purity+Test)

------
simonsarris
Geocities, the "Bob Ross" of websites. It taught us we all can create and that
making a website is not something done by professionals somewhere, all it
takes is a motivation and willingness to learn a thing or two.

everything2, which is still around

All the forums of yesteryears. These are the neighborhoods where I grew up and
to which I can never return. There were no "kids on my street." My school
graduating class was 21 people. I met and talked to people and learned online,
instead.

------
tqwhite
There was also a site called "A FISH, A BARREL, AND A SMOKING GUN". (I just
googled it.) It was iconoclastic back when that was unusual. I liked reading
it.

~~~
o4tuna
That site was < suck.com >. It's the first one that came to mind for me.

------
bradonomics
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I spent a lot of time reading these
articles about a guy who'd travel to train martial arts all over the world. It
was hosted on Geocities. I thought the site was gone forever, but because of
this thread I did a search and found that it's now on its own domain.
[http://www.global-training-report.com/](http://www.global-training-
report.com/)

------
zelon88
HotGames. I started on computers playing games, and I remember spending a lot
of time on game review websites downloading demo's, trying out cheat-codes,
and utilizing the walkthroughs to get through tough spots. It was HotGames
that got me into web design by inspiring me to make a website for my own game
reviews. After that it was Joe Cartoon and all the similar Flash animators
that got me interested in Flash.

------
Zelphyr
The one I miss is one that may still be around, but not for long since it was
a Flash page. It was, if I recall, a demo page to highlight the designers
skills. I don't even remember the name. It was an anime style video that ended
with a girl standing on a cliff with flower pedals flowing along the breeze
that was blowing her hair as she stared off in the distance. I would love to
find that site.

~~~
slazaro
Try asking on
[https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/](https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/)

Sometimes they get very obscure stuff from vague descriptions.

------
Rjevski
The old Youtube, before the fake pranks, fake news, stupid kids doing
Minecraft, and no suggestion algorithms that prioritize clickbait.

------
bitwize
Sunsite (and FTP sites in general). Hitoshi Doi's anime page (which is
actually still up). MIDI Farm. Maz Sound. Damaged Cybernetics. HappyPuppy back
before Jennifer Diane Reitz really lost the plot. FreshMeat. The GIA. I miss
webrings. I miss hand-crufted HTML. I miss <BODY BACKGROUND="....">. I miss
Gopher and Archie.

------
gfosco
Old games forums like BluesNews and TheShack.

~~~
wink
[https://www.bluesnews.com](https://www.bluesnews.com) is still running, which
I learned like 1-2 years ago. But I (like you, I suppose) stopped reading a
very long time ago. Can't comment if it's the same team, though.

------
emingo
geocities and OG digg.com

------
ballenf
fark.com even though its demise was relatively recent. I missed the early days
when the site wasn't sanitized (and that content, or easy access to it, still
felt novel). Felt like one of many "wild west" sites of that time. Before our
advertising overlords had come into power.

------
reaperducer
The Keepers of Lists.

Each day there would be a list title, and the public would add funny items to
the list.

Things like "Top xx reasons a grilled cheese is better than a taco."

People could vote entries up and down, helping bury the spam.

I'm not sure when it went away, but I don't think it survived past about 1999.

------
DoreenMichele
A site with free handwriting lessons. It taught Italic as a solution for
people with serious handwriting problems who could not learn cursive
effectively.

They took all the free stuff down and became a consultant. They would still
teach you the same thing, but for a fee.

------
sevensor
About 2e-1 centuries ago, there was this website called ars-technica.com. Had
a pretty good forum, if sometimes kind of rowdy in that early-days-of-the-
internet way. East Coast financiers built a suburb in its place, after the
closing of the frontier.

------
bluesmoon
webmonkey.com because that's where I learnt a lot of my craft, and TalkCity
(which probably still exists) because of the community I discovered when I was
going through a rough personal patch, and that community no longer exists.

~~~
menor
Was going to say webmonkey too, internet connections at that time were dial up
and pretty expensive at the time in Spain (you were charged by the minute)

So I downloaded the entire archive using a shareware scraper , and learned a
lot from that offline copy.

------
tatersolid
menwholooklikekennyrogers.com

That was the sort of site that made the early Internet such a majestic time
waster. I used to stay up all night in the university CS lab on a Sun
SPARCstation surfing with Mosaic.

Yes, kids, there was a web browser before Netscape.

------
Acen
Hmm, I'd say CheatEngine Forums used to be a pretty great place in terms of a
bunch of geeks, finding various exploits in video games. It's what got me
interested in computing in the first place.

------
BrandoElFollito
I am on Internet since 1992 and I do miss absolutely nothing. Websites were
horrible, with limited usability and you then had to send a cheque or call.

Today internet life is simply better, with much much more choice.

------
yyycombo
the original myspace.com

it was a colorful and public social media platform, not this monochromous
closed bullshit called facebook. as a user 'you were allowed' (keep that in
mind in todays world of restricted fb!) to customize the entire look of your
page with strange css/html/javascript hacks. that was really fun to do! things
started to get odd when they regularly changed website mechanisms like
location based services to invite people to a concert/party. that's how this
web service got unreliable and frustrating

------
anonyx69
I'm still traumatized from the time I would spend on rotten.com

------
hachesilva
Astalavista.com - Was a site for hackers and script kiddies. Loved it because
I wanted to be a "hacker". Google Reader. Best free, web based RSS reader
ever.

------
bsenftner
fatbabies.com was a dotcom era gossip site for people working .com startups to
spill the beans on the outrageous behavior at their companies. Often times the
person trying to spill beans is turned inside out for being wrong in their
position. Very sarcastic and stress relieving. And as side entertainment, you
and your coworkers try figure out which posts are about your company.

------
medion
kuro5hin & MetaFilter ...

------
TaylorGood
SK8CHAT.com. It was a very 1.0 chat room. It was so pure. Early days for me
meant 8-9 years old. My first real instances of the internet.

------
menor
I miss gigposters.com a lot, the community there was awesome with all the big
poster artists hanging around and giving beginners advice.

------
sssilver
Cybertown.com. So much ahead of its time. 3D social network using VRML through
a browser plugin called Blaxxun Contact.

~~~
bitwize
Fun fact: Blaxxun was named for the Black Sun, the virtual club from Snow
Crash.

------
chaz6
I miss segfault.org. It is still there on the wayback machine. It contained
well written parody tech stories.

------
mechhrt
"Mr. T Ate My Balls" \- probably the original "meme" as it would be defined
today

------
rrival
Mirsky's Worst of the Web, because Gabocorp and FuckedCompany were already
mentioned =)

------
mhd
sunsite.unc.edu

I used to check it almost daily for new Linux software, because maybe that
next editor, scripting language or window manager would be just what I want --
or at least an interesting experience.

------
Mankhool
hell.com, gabocorp.com

------
dver
Eric Conveys an Emotion, still there but not updated

------
scarecrowbob
The "Decapitate an Angel" page, of course.

------
oconnore
neverside.com // tutorialforums.com

~~~
chatmasta
Was going to post this! That was a great community. I bet many of us are still
here.

------
webyacusa
The Fake Steve Jobs Diary comes to mind.

------
to_audiophile
meebo.com

There's nothing like it anymore (web-based, quick, secure). It was fast and
excellent. Google killed it.

------
croisillon
kopikol.net, an early (2005 until 2007) very nicely designed digg-like

------
Paperweight
stickdeath.com

Can't find a mirror or archive of it, nor the creator. :(

~~~
eddof13
I'm not sure if they still exist as I won't risk checking them at work, but
stickdeath.com, albinoblacksheep.com, neopets.com, rotten.com,
portalofevil.com, lemonadestand.com, oilwars/gangwars and others were a big
part of my middle school years

------
mankypro
Fuckedcompany.com

------
speedkills
Lowbrow.com

------
ccachor
Web Monkey

------
dharma1
Geocities

------
kimusan
goatse.cx .... or not!

------
HugoDaniel
www.fravia.org

------
dep_b
av.com

