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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?

#451

Post by ta1771 »

geocrasher wrote: post #73

The 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…

> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?

They're just underground. Now you have to read a project's docs to see who they link to/thank/reference.

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

#453

Post by zzo38computer »

theonemind wrote: post #221

Another not-a-website submission, but Usenet with actual discussions. Web forums still annoy me compared to the elegance of Usenet, with hierarchical categories and sophisticated client software that can do things like score and filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September the whole Internet feels like the Eternal September to me. It all got dumbed down.

I agree; NNTP is much better. I just started using Usenet last year, actually (with client software I wrote myself, because I wanted a command-line interface and support for SQLite, and other programs don't do those two things).

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

#454

Post by zzo38computer »

bdcravens wrote: post #101

So many sites that technically still exist but have changed 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…

I still use IRC. At least Freenode seems to be still in use, although many other IRC services they don't have much these days it seems.

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

#455

Post by kristopolous »

mech422 wrote: post #261
joemi wrote: post #243

I 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 Go…

I'm the opposite - I miss alta vista... I miss a search engine with a real _search_ language that gave me the results I actually _asked_ for rather then just randomly picking stuff that matches half the query and stuffing the page with paid results.

Do you want to work on one? I've got a secret searcher project I've been doing for about 12 years I'm finally ready to do something with. It works on about a 1.7TB corpus right now, returns results in a few seconds on a single 3rd generation i5. I'm thinking of putting real work and money behind it now

Contact me if interested.

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

#456

Post by zhte415 »

me551ah wrote: post #310
geocrasher wrote: post #73

The 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…

Slashdot also has a better moderation system than HN with comments designated as funny , insightful or informative.

https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml

And meta moderation. Some of the smartest discussion was at the +5 Troll level. Very liberal and self governing. When getting meta-mod rights, it felt like a civic duty to do my part.

Plus friend, friend-of-friend, foe, etc traffic lights. It was way ahead of it's time. Then got sold, many moved out including myself - never liked Digg, old or new - and now with potentially an order of magnitude of technology people (hardware, software, other stuff) compared to 2000, a shadow of it's former self.

Also, kuro5hin, which Reddit has captured in theme in niche subs.

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

#457

Post by codingdave »

yumraj wrote: post #175
geocrasher wrote: post #73

The 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…

old Slashdot had an anti MS and pro Linux bias, but nothing more. It was more free spirited. It was not dominated with startups and VCs and did not go overboard trying to moderate certain kind of discussions. I do love HN, but it is still part of YC and allows some commercial activity and I feel at times goes overboard on flagging certain kind of discussions and comments (I'm not referring to obvious trolling and uns…

> It was not dominated with startups and VCs...

That is a reason I like HN. I am not a startup guy, so that crowd and the resulting discussions on HN are basically an R&D shop for the rest of us. They can go do the bleeding-edge, so we can sit back, see what works, and take that on as leading-edge.

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

#458

Post by nocman »

tartoran wrote: post #404
krallja wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

html5zombo.com if your device doesn’t support Flash

Is this supposed to be a joke? The spinners spinning to no avail and zombocom funny message keeps on repeating. That is it, right?

Yeah. It's supposed to be a joke.

It's poking fun at how many early "dotcom"-ish type companies promised the world on their landing pages, but in the end they failed to deliver anything of value.

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

#459

Post by duggable »

shaklee3 wrote: post #391
chrisandchips wrote: post #54

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?

Oh my goodness, yes. I had no idea he was the original creator.

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

#460

Post by codethief »

winrid wrote: post #350
codethief wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, those were the times! I'm still crossing for fingers that we'll eventually see a W:ET remake with better graphics but the same game dynamics (and, most importantly, physics). Or that ET Legacy [1] or the inofficial ET2 [2] will pick up steam. [1] https://www.etlegacy.com/ [2] https://www.crossfire.nu/journals/156955/et2-remake-new-upda...

The remake looks promising! I like ET Legacy and even contributed a tiny bit, but I think it would need a remake for my friends to play, for example...

Honestly, I'm not holding my breath when it comes to ET2. Chances are they won't get the game physics right in ET2. But ET without trickjumping is simply not ET.
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