google.com (when it was still useful), dejanews (and Usenet in general) before Google bought it and took a whole generation's output of tech discussions, formal announcements, and so on with it
Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
311–320 of 472 posts
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#312suck.com, kvetch.org, four11.com, Cool Site of the Day. Used to lurk on slashdot since my employer barred me from posting anywhere publicly. There were many fun, experimental, one–off sites in the early days that barely lasted a few months, let alone long enough to be archived by archive.org.
suck.com was great!
I still carry a torch for Polly Esther.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#313Pixelsight.com
It was a site that created web graphics and logos (great looking ones, too). You just had to enter the text, select styles and parameters, and a gif came out. Amazing for 1994. It was one of the few non-static sites of the time.
The creator, Keith Ohlfs, passed away in 2016 of a heart attack.
The saddest thing is that there is no code left behind to recreate it. I believe the site used the NeXTSTEP API, so it had to run on a NeXT server. There are no screenshots showing you how the site worked. Maybe the only thing left are the graphics created by it on archive.org.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#314The 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…
What happened to Slashot in the end? I went there a few months back and the topics are still being added but the comments section on all articles was off topic conspiracy theory rant type stuff, with nobody replying to each other.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#315I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#316As others have pointed out, many websites have evolved away from their old ways from the old days. Or maybe their audience changed as the web became mainstream.
Apart from these websites that still exist, I miss the sense of discovery from the old web, which felt more democratized then today’s web, where it feels most of the online experience is monopolized by a few big platforms. I liked chancing upon some roughly designed personal website and finding the gems therein, which was more special than the manicured template of platforms like Medium.
I don’t have an explanation for what the gap or difference is. I just know it exists. Another example is how AIM away messages felt special and personal, in a way that Facebook statuses have never matched. What changed? Maybe it’s just that we have.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#317Yet another not a website one: MUDs and talkers. MUDs are still around, but the talkers like Foothills are long gone. The Burbs was still around a few years ago, but there were only about 5 people on. Nothing like the heyday when there would be hundreds on.
Edit: Well, a bit of searching and I find Burbs and a few others still alive. Gonna have to check them out
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#318There was one site that had something like 100(?) brain teaser exercises - I suppose you could also call them puzzles - which became successively more difficult as you moved on (ie, hours to figure out just one of them). Each was distinct and challenged you in a different way. I only used the site once, around the early 2000s, but I forgot its name and never found it again.
You might be talking about notpron/notpr0n? I found it both unsettling and fascinating at the time.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#319Doodie.com
It’s not exactly XKCD, but the regular (daily?) update felt like something new and special. More so than the new content posted on slashdot, though that was just as popular.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#320The 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…
The old Slashdot was orders of magnitude better than HN -I am not going to even mention Reddit-. For all its lame jokes it was filled with people who actually loved technology and science and the moderation system was very solid.
+5 Insightful
...is something I still say out loud to myself occasionally. For example if I hear a good point made on the radio.