Not really from my earliest days on the net, but the early 2000s feels like early days now: Television Without Pity and Fametracker, in particular the "2 Stars 1 Slot" and "Hey, It's That Guy!" columns.
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?
#302Anything circa 2000-2010ish where some sites were very unique in their designs (usually using flash).
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#303The 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…
I was around for original Digg. 1.0 was better than 2.0. 1.0 had beautiful minimalism, 2.0 turned gaudy and it just got worse and worse. Digg was cool for its time but it was way overly simplistic. The frontpage was dominated by a really narrow set of power users because of how the system worked and the comments were single threaded. It was kind of a hot mess. It is both crazy that K Rose missed out on selling it for…
Before Eternal September, usenet was great. I only got in at the tail end of things.
It's funny what you say about Digg because Reddit is that now, the same few powermods control almost everything. It feels more like reading a bunch of press releases than anything authentic nowadays, though there can be good content in smaller subs that have nothing to do with the front page.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#304Garageband.com
Silicon Investor
Groovetech
And let's not forget how exciting it was to explore around in the original Yahoo!
Although the web doesn't seem to be thing we all dreamed about anymore, it's still amazing. Remember how hard it used to be to learn about anything? Now it's so easy...but the amount of knowledge itself is oppressive.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#305Many have already mentioned Slashdot. Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience. I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back m…
I also miss old-school slashdot, lobste.rs and HN are the closest communities I've found to it. I also played Rogue Spear - on a crappy rural dialup connection no less. I wasn't well liked by other players because my lag was significantly worse than everyone else. My favourite level was the airport.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#3061996 or so: altavista.digital.com! I loved (and got pretty good at due to daily training, heh) using boolean operations to find whatever I wanted. No Google back then. Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam. Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.
Do you feel the simplification (or perhaps, dumbing down) of search queries is a bad thing?
I miss the old Google, back before it got gamed and curated to hell, and it felt like you could find what you wanted to find as long as it was on the net.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#307Garageband.com Silicon Investor Groovetech And let's not forget how exciting it was to explore around in the original Yahoo! Although the web doesn't seem to be thing we all dreamed about anymore, it's still amazing. Remember how hard it used to be to learn about anything? Now it's so easy...but the amount of knowledge itself is oppressive.
Ahh Silicon Investor. Powered by MS SQL Server stored procedures that essentially returned the entire HTML page. Real fast. Real hard to maintain.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#308I don't miss a particular website. I miss the absence of intensive and pervasive user surveillance.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#309Excite chat.
And the general demise of chatrooms.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#310The 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.