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Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

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Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#351

Post by ajtjp »

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#352

Post by conductr »

a5seo wrote: post #177

Wired’s WebMonkey. It was right up there with my hard copy of Lynda Weinman’s web design book I picked up at Computer Literacy.

WebMonkey was right up there with w3schools in terms of teaching myself how to code for web in ~2000

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#353

Post by ornornor »

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.

Oh and hotline on the Mac.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#354

Post by ajtjp »

mech422 wrote: post #323
taborj wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: gopher is still alive! It's not the same as back in the early 90s, but the protocol and some servers are alive and kicking.

Yeah? I haven't looked in years... Though I think I've probably lost some of the feeling of wonder exploring those servers 20 years ago engendered. For a young coder, from a small town with basically zero tech resources - they seemed like the library of Alexandria :-)

It's still there! I'd recommend gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ as a starting page these days, it has links to SDF, Veronica 2, and a lot of other Gopher resources. It's pretty easy to spin up your own Gopher hole with pygopherd these days as well - I re-hosted mine a few weeks ago and could't have been happier with the ease of setting it up.

There are are lot of defunct Gopher holes, but a couple times a year I still get lost browsing through a mix of old and new ones. Install OverbiteWX in Firefox and take it for a spin sometime!

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#356

Post by justinator »

kgin wrote: post #142

Fark, Plastic, Metafilter 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.

memepool.com! bud.com!

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#357

Post by jerglingu »

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.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#359

Post by tinus_hn »

technofiend wrote: post #211
Lammy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old SomethingAwful for me. > Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.

Fark/Totalfark was fun for a while but descended into an echo chamber of cliques and in-jokes. It was a good preview of what reddit would eventually become.

They also had a redesign fiasco.
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