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

For me it's not so much websites as it is the old BBSes I spent my early teens calling up, and of course the door games. MajorMUD, LORD, TradeWars 2002, Usurper, Fazuul. You can still play these games, but playing with the other nerds in my town was really something special. There was also a MUD I played called MUME which is actually still up and still has an active playerbase [0]. Then there were the phone conferences which I dialed into when I could. And of course the old Unix systems I had access to. Probably the most nostalgic and fun of them all was Telenet. For anyone else that remembers Telenet fondly, there's actually a pretty true-to-life Telenet simulator with tens of thousands of systems to explore, and a quite active userbase [1].

[0] http://mume.org/

[1] http://telehack.com/

Hmm, I'd say CheatEngine Forums used to be a pretty great place in terms of a bunch of geeks, finding various exploits in video games. It's what got me interested in computing in the first place.

I miss Google Reader. I used to read ~100 longer-form blogs that didn't publish daily. After Google Reader went away, I tried other RSS readers but they just weren't as convenient, and my online reading habits shifted to more Twitter. At first that seemed fine but over time it has become hard to keep my Twitter feed free of distracting trivia. Nowadays I just have a much smaller list of blogs I read regularly.

I also miss the way Slashdot made me feel near the dawn of the internet. Before I had the internet, I got my tech news from CNN or from newspapers. Once I got the internet and could read Slashdot, that was just amazing.

The original del.icio.us

What.CD - not because of the free music but because of the community, recommendations by friends and discovering new music on a daily basis.

Right now I’m just listening to the “For You” section of Apple Music and very rarely discover something new. I also don’t really have a way to keep things that I like around as there’s no nice way to put things in your library if you don’t use iCloud Music library. Streaming services also miss a lot of editions or different recordings and their meta tags are usually very bad.