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

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391–400 of 472 posts

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

#391

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. You can still play, they brought it back a few…

Old school RuneScape was also written by a single guy: Andrew Gower. Him and his brothers moderated it. He's since sold it and done very well. Does anyone remember BlueRose?

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob, thank you for Slashdot, it was my first tech forum.

Happy to oblige.

Man I love this site. You're here too, Commander Taco!? The best of my youth and old age fused together!

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

#395
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software…

In a way OSS did become the future.. Linux powering Android.. Bsd powering macos and ios. Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.

Ubuntu works great, i just installed it in a VM and it told me i can use "Ubuntu Software" to install new applications - i opened that and it was completely empty for a few seconds until images started to appear.

Then i went to games which was empty and nothing would appear. I closed it and started it again and now games would show up, so i decided to install "WolfeDoom" which sounded interesting. While it was downloading, i went back and decided to also install ZZT (i think) so i pressed Install for that too. That installed fast so i tried to run it and... nothing happened. I tried again, but nothing - the game's name appeared for a bit at the top but then disappeared without any indication about what was wrong. So i uninstalled it and closed the Software app.

At this point i thought to try WolfenDoom but... i couldn't find it anywhere. I opened the Software app to see where it was, went to the installed tab, scrolled down and found it, but instead of "Launch" (or whatever) it had an "Install" button next to it (which is weird since i was in the installed category). I clicked it and an error popped up about some state or whatever. So i restarted the Software app, went directly to the game's page and pressed Install from there - error again. So i googled to figure out what is wrong and i found vague messages about it.

Eventually it fixed itself. Somehow. My guess it was installing at the background but this wasn't shown anywhere and trying to install it again was failing because of that.

Very usable.

Very just works.

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

#396
post #75

Yahoo Games.

Prior to that, there was WebSpades which was free to play and tons of fun. They were bought out by one of the bigger sites and things went downhill as they often do.

I played a lot of spades and backgammon on Yahoo as well. Is there a replacement for these types of sites nowadays?

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

#397
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel the simplification (or perhaps, dumbing down) of search queries is a bad thing?

I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....

Seconded. With increasing frequency Google returns pages and pages of totally irrelevant results.

It's as if they don't care about search result quality as much anymore.

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

#398
post #315

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 ... Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come u…

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.

I have a feeling Gopher nowadays has more 'holes' available than it ever had :-P
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