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".
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
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...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September the whole Internet feels like the Eternal September to me. It all got dumbed down.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come up with.
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 . 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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
I miss the web then in general. It was full of basically honest information rich stuff.
Then Twitter happened and it all changed.
But I just tried it, and it's working again.
Hurray! -- "you can do anything at zombo com!" :-D
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.
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.
Web 2.0: del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon
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.
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.
Oh wait, it's still there. And still the same as 1996.
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.
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.
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.
A million phpbb boards.
- 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
"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"
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.
Edit: Well, a bit of searching and I find Burbs and a few others still alive. Gonna have to check them out
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.
I'm surprised that hasn't been mentioned by anybody else yet!
https://web.archive.org/web/19991129051036/http://www.worldn...
Memepool. Another curated story site. Silly but fun.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000301230131/http://www.memepo...
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/ .
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.
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/ ). I have yet to find its successor: The Javascript Arcade.
Would love to browse the posts I made in that ten year period of my most formative years on the internet.
https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.co...
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.
theschwacorporation.com - 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
It was right up there with my hard copy of Lynda Weinman’s web design book I picked up at Computer Literacy.
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.
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
2 -https://web.archive.org/web/20150417064721/http://www.kuro5h...
I’m not a perv; it was novel.
edit: sp
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 :-)
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).
Community votes on the winner, winner got to pick the next prompt.
Made some lifelong friends there.
Also the original yourethemannowdog.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20000601000000*/http://lanphes.v...
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.
Old, not evil Google
Absence of FB
Geocities
Cricinfo
Slashdot
Codeguru/Codeproject
- 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
Crowd-sourced music discovery/sharing/listening and some great interactions.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010206203747/http://www.wasted...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004131/http://freespace....
Inspired a lot of learning about graphics.
- 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.
i cant even explain it but
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
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.
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.
Newgrounds pre-YouTube was also a lot of fun.
Oh and hotline on the Mac.
Exurbannation.com (a site that was full of people in 2007 calling out the looming mortgage crisis)
The link dumps of all the new and exciting shit people were doing with the internet.
By the time it was up, most of the regulars already moved on.
// Now it's unfortunately taken by mattress company
Also Friendfeed, shame to Facebook that they dissolved my first and best social media web site.
Also GeoCities. I wouldn't gone into web development without it.
- 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
It still exists, sort of, as https://www.einet.net/ .
Doesn't seem to be around anymore unfortunately.
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
Amdzone Firingsquad Anandtech Tomshardware Hardocop Bunch of other sites that I can't remember. The pc/mac chat room on AOL.
gatekeeper.dec.com ... an FTP site, but hey, you did say early days!
https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilte...
Also, Metafilter and Fark. Both still exist to my surprise.
Boys those were the days. Getting up at 4AM to coordinate an attack against Amello. Man I miss the internet!
Information Leak
SoCal (ProBoards)
Too Smart Guys/PSP Hacking 101
Amdzone.com Tomshardware 3dnow Hardocop Firingsquad
Pc/mac chat room on aol chat.
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...
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.
Rev3 was cool too.
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.
They had an early MMORPG old religiously style to it.
NSider Nintendo forums
slashdot
somethingawful
facepunch
freenode
digitalgangster
Sidewalk.com - social events
And the general demise of chatrooms.
Old-school MUDs.
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.
Hands down
slashdot
homestar runner
albino blacksheep
newgrounds
ebaumsworld
slime flash games
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.
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.
