The <i>old</i> slashdot.org<p>The <i>old</i> digg.com<p>Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?<p>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".
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.<p>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
Fravia's (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia</a>) old site on geocities in the second half of the 90's.<p>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.<p>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...
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.
what.cd<p>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.
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.<p>Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam.<p>Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.
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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a> the whole Internet feels like the Eternal September to me. It all got dumbed down.
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.<p>The Happy Puppy games site.<p>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
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.<p>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.
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.
Many have already mentioned Slashdot.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).
usenet, especially rec.music.phish<p>It's still there but not the same.<p>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.
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 ...<p>Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come up with.
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.<p>One of the most recent such sites I've found is actually someone's Angelfire site, rather than their own domain: <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/cherlinks.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/cherlinks.html</a> . 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.<p>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.
Weather Underground.... classic<p>Up until 2015 Weather Underground was the top weather website, had huge amounts of information density, easy to navigate... fast<p>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.<p>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.
So many sites that technically still exist but have changed<p>slashdot<p>shoutcast<p>pricewatch<p>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)<p>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<p>Not a website, but I miss the heyday of IRC.
Deoxy.org - The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension<p>It was a personal wiki of sorts about psychedelics, new age mysticism, anarchy, subversive philosophy, environmentalism, and obscure information.<p>It was still up until a few years ago. I haven’t found a complete archive. The archive here is fairly outdated: <a href="https://jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/index.html</a> (click the small links for “hi-res” or “low-res” framesets.)<p>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.
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.
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.<p>I miss the web then in general. It was full of basically honest information rich stuff.
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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmEP93NVTaw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmEP93NVTaw</a>)
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.
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.<p>Then Twitter happened and it all changed.
I was going to say I missed <a href="http://zombo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://zombo.com/</a> (because at some point I had checked, and it no longer worked).<p>But I just tried it, and it's working again.<p>Hurray! -- "you can do <i>anything</i> at zombo com!" :-D
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.<p><a href="https://m.slashdot.org/story/31348" rel="nofollow">https://m.slashdot.org/story/31348</a>
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.
zombo.com.<p>it kind of sort of still exists, but I haven't had flash installed on any of my devices since about 2015.<p>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.
Fark, Plastic, Metafilter<p>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.
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.
The old Google.<p>You could see a cached version of links.<p>A search for a technical issue generally brought up the answer on the first page.<p>Spam and click bait websites were effectively filtered out.
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.<p>Then e-commerce and adtech happened and it became a lot more homogenised and a lot less fun.<p>Usenet was a distillation of the culture and a crucible of madness. Yahoo Groups were (sometimes) a more grown up version.
Space Jam<p>Oh wait, it's still there. And still the same as 1996.<p><a href="https://spacejam.com/" rel="nofollow">https://spacejam.com/</a>
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://flipcode.com/" rel="nofollow">https://flipcode.com/</a>
I miss kuro5hin, which had a very interesting way of submitting content for peer review. Unfortunately it was overrun by trolls and eventually closed.<p>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.
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.
The Keepers of Lists.<p>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.<p>But this was back before you had to log in to web sites to use them. The internet worked on the honor system.<p>So after the Eternal September, it started to get targeted by spammers and angry losers and eventually became useless and went away.
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.<p>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.<p>Finally froogle, superficially similar to google shopping that replaced it, but it actually helped you find things at a good price.<p>That is the internet I miss, the one where the products provided a better experience than the high street.
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.<p>A million phpbb boards.
- 2008 - 2010 /g/ when Bitcoin was pennies on the dollar<p>- GBATemp.net during the height of Wii Homebrew<p>- [Wii/DS/Nintendo]-Play.com - first online community for Nintendo Friendcodes<p>*edit one more<p>- The community surrounding Half-Life 2 and specifically Team Fortress 2 circa 2007-2009
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: <a href="http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://leisuretown.com/library/qac/index.html</a><p>"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 $$$."<p>"i'll spell it MICRO$LOTH WINBLOWS in a DELICIOUS TWIST"
lowbrow.org, started by one of the editors of suck.com, collected anonymous stories about the lowest points in people's lives.<p>it helped me get through some low points of my own in high school.<p>i helped fund it by mailing in cash when i was 16. i received a few branded match boxes in return.<p>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.<p>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.
Maybe around 2006-2010, <a href="http://ajaxian.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ajaxian.com/</a> was an inspiring aggregate of web related articles that I would visit daily.
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.
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.<p>Edit: Well, a bit of searching and I find Burbs and a few others still alive. Gonna have to check them out
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.
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.
Consumerist.com before some as<i></i>*le hacked the commenting system. After that, they closed the comments which was usually more valuable than the articles.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>I'm surprised that hasn't been mentioned by anybody else yet!
World New York, long gone, but hand curated interesting stories :till about 2000. I still miss it.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19991129051036/http://www.worldnewyork.com/about.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19991129051036/http://www.worldn...</a><p>Memepool. Another curated story site. Silly but fun.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepool.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepo...</a>
There was a site called something like mydeardiary.com which allowed anonymous users to keep a diary in public.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="http://www.wwwentworth.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wwwentworth.co.uk/</a> .
Old school quake 1/2/3 news portals! Those were fun. Classic example today would be <a href="https://www.quakeworld.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quakeworld.nu/</a>
Pixelsight.com<p>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.<p>The creator, Keith Ohlfs, passed away in 2016 of a heart attack.<p>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.
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
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)
The Applet Arcade
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020604024000/http://theshadowlands.net/arcade.htm" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20020604024000/http://theshadowl...</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19981201063456/http://members.aol.com/Shadows125/arcade.htm" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19981201063456/http://members.ao...</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19961222221629/http://www.serve.com/shadows/arcade.htm" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19961222221629/http://www.serve....</a><p>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 <a href="http://theshadowlands.net/" rel="nofollow">http://theshadowlands.net/</a> ). I have yet to find its successor: The Javascript Arcade.
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 <a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/docs/rotten.com/library/index.html</a>
All the Ezboard and Proboards communities I used to post in.<p>Would love to browse the posts I made in that ten year period of my most formative years on the internet.
TMOL/True Meaning Of Life<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.co...</a><p>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.
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.
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.
fray.com - still around, but the old site is archived, not active<p>theschwacorporation.com - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_(art)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa_(art)</a><p>kuro5hin.org<p>scottland (can't remember if it actually had a .com) - website of Scott Thompson, of Kids In The Hall
Garageband.com<p>Silicon Investor<p>Groovetech<p>And let's not forget how exciting it was to explore around in the original Yahoo!<p>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.
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).<p>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.<p>I wish I could thank that guy for writing.<p>1 -<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin</a><p>2 -<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/3/19/133129/548" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5h...</a>
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.
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.<p>edit: sp
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: Fixed "HoV" casing, very important :-)
Dejanews, with all the search functionality that google groups did not keep.<p>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).
3dfightclub - timed 3D modeling battles where you had short (or sometimes long) periods to make a render of whatever the given prompt was.<p>Community votes on the winner, winner got to pick the next prompt.<p>Made some lifelong friends there.<p>Also the original yourethemannowdog.com
LanphEs's Useful Page, among others lost to memory.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.vghq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.v...</a><p>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.
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.
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.
Not a website specifically. Here's what i miss:<p>- Forums without upvotes/downvotes<p>- Not having to tell people what they wanted to hear<p>- Short laconic statements without fear of being taken out of context<p>- hierarchical navigation
43 Things <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things</a>
The "reverse acronym generator". You could put in a few letters and it would return an important- and/or technical-sounding meaning for it.
wastedyouth.org - a fun community with art and programming tutorials. I think the creator also made DeviantArt.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010206203747/http://www.wastedyouth.org/index2.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20010206203747/http://www.wasted...</a>
The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace....</a><p>Inspired a lot of learning about graphics.
One? There was a something new that left you in awe and wonder pretty regularly.<p>- Message forums run on pbpbb that taught users to not to feed the trolls<p>- AltaVista's search parameters
Search that wasn't for presenting ads on 80% of the screen.<p>- Friendster as a way to interact beyond IM<p>- Digg as original reddit frontpage.. Slashdot too.<p>- Napster as the first internet disruption to an established industry.
mingthemerciless<p>i cant even explain it but<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/WszvRT5" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/WszvRT5</a><p>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<p>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.<p>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
This site is still online but I have no idea if it is the same. <a href="https://www.ca-zeb.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ca-zeb.com</a> 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.
ff0000<p>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.<p>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.
Global Network Navigator: <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/gnn/</a><p>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.
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.<p>Newgrounds pre-YouTube was also a lot of fun.
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.<p>Oh and hotline on the Mac.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 .<p>By the time it was up, most of the regulars already moved on.
HotWired — sibling to “Wired”, and was a fertile ground of invention for the early web.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotWired</a>
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.<p>Also Friendfeed, shame to Facebook that they dissolved my first and best social media web site.
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
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.<p>Also GeoCities. I wouldn't gone into web development without it.
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.
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.
- old GameFAQs (before the GameSpot merger)<p>- Homestar Runner<p>- YTMND<p>- Newgrounds<p>- ieatcrayons.com (a webcomic that 11-year-old me found very amusing)<p>finally, not a website, but Ragnarok Online was the first MMO I played and the one I have the best memories from
galaxy.com - a late-90s+ curated internet directory. Example capture from 2000:
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061436/http://www.galaxy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20000815061436/http://www.galaxy...</a><p>It still exists, sort of, as <a href="https://www.einet.net/" rel="nofollow">https://www.einet.net/</a> .
<a href="http://omgwtf.superlime.com/" rel="nofollow">http://omgwtf.superlime.com/</a><p>Doesn't seem to be around anymore unfortunately.
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.
Newgrounds, Homestar Runner, Kongregate.<p>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
What I miss...<p>Amdzone
Firingsquad
Anandtech
Tomshardware
Hardocop
Bunch of other sites that I can't remember. The pc/mac chat room on AOL.
wiretap.spies.com (originally a Gopher site, but eventually had an http version)<p>gatekeeper.dec.com ... an FTP site, but hey, you did say early days!
zfilter, it was basically reddit of the early 2000s:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilte...</a><p>Also, Metafilter and Fark. Both still exist to my surprise.
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
It’s been on my mind lately and I’d be surprised if anyone else recognized these:<p>Information Leak<p>SoCal (ProBoards)<p>Too Smart Guys/PSP Hacking 101
yerf.org<p>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...
ithell.com<p>As a relatively new IT admin, for a brief time it was a great forum for swapping war stories with others in my position.<p>The site is actually still up, but appears strangely frozen in time at around April of 2001.
baidu.com<p>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.
Some of these are still around, but none are in the form I remember them:<p>NSider Nintendo forums<p>slashdot<p>somethingawful<p>facepunch<p>reddit<p>freenode<p>digitalgangster
Doodie.com<p>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.
1. orkut.com<p>This was the first social network I ever signed up for. Was in it for 3 years. Google later shut it down in 2014.<p>2. Yahoo Messenger<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.