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

SA goons are also still hard at work. Fark, too.

usenet, especially rec.music.phish

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consumerist.com before some as*le hacked the commenting system. After that, they closed the comments which was usually more valuable than the articles.