Hotline servers.
Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
241–250 of 472 posts
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#242The 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…
The old avclub
Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#243I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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!
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never used Napster, but this sounds really interesting. Could you explain how browsing the filesystem of the user works in more detail??
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,…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#246Old 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…
Your comment is vely insightful. I first played runescape in 2001 I think (and then I came back later), and I had never thought about it the way you describe it. I too learned a lot of life skills: scamming, bartering, arbitrage, and quite a few social interaction skills despite being online. My best friend had some weird pubescent (text-based) sexual things with weirdos claiming to also be 13, or whatever we were at the time. It was a precursor to AIM for my small group of friends. Scripting/botting that game taught me a lot of basic skills in computers.
I wonder what today's version is. Maybe Fortnite?
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#247Fravia's ( 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 describ…
Damn, now there’s a name I haven’t heard in years! +1
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#248what.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.
This was such a huge missed opportunity by the music industry. A massive network of volunteers dedicated to curating and meticulously tagging music. I might have payed a lot of money for access to such a network. The largest collection of music in human history... Wiped out because there wasn't a business model in time
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#249I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#250Overgrow.net