Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 472 posts

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

#381

Post by crtasm »

o10449366 wrote: post #245
alexenko wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall right, you used to pick a music directory, and whatever you had there would be indexed and made available to all for downloading. Everything you downloaded would go into that directory as well. Once you find a file you wanted to download, you didn’t download from a pool of people like with bittorrent, but from that one specific user. If you click on a username, either while searching or while downloading,…

Wow, that sounds awesome. Now I'm sad I missed out on this! Admittedly, what I like about Spotify is how easy it is to share music with other people and discover music from my friends just by looking at their profiles or what they're currently listening to. There are even certain livestreamers I follow specifically for their taste in the music that they play in the background.

As mentioned upthread, install Soulseek and you'll get the experience now!

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

#382

Post by hyperman1 »

cmdrtaco wrote: post #56
vardump wrote: post #7

1996 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.

Me too.

This is why I loved slashdot and now hacker news. You're discussing some technology/framework/... and the local god of the ecosystem drops in and says hi.

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

#384

Post by monster99 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #279
asveikau wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the free software activism bent of old slashdot. There was so much optimism at Linux and others being the way of the future, and beating Microsoft at the desktop. I feel like the Unix enthusiast's shift to the Mac kind of killed some of that. If people think a desktop ui is a "solved problem" (by Apple), there end up fewer people interested in those kind of projects. Now it's pretty common for a free software…

It's nuts to me how much peole despised MS at the time. I remember getting a hacked/modded version of Halo 2 (2004) and it came with a picture of Gates with a bullet hole in his head. Which is sick and not appropriate, but people despised him. They've done a really good job of rehabilitating their image. Having grown up at the time, it's hard for me to see Gates and them as different than that. It does make me somewh…

We hated MS because they wer planning for DRM in the OS, the last 20 years has proven the original slashdot nerds like ourselves correct.

MMO's, steam, origin, uplay, are all DRM systems the original slashdot nerds feared.

Modern hackernews nerds, even if they could be called that, are pro DRM, pro steam, and PRO DRM in windows 10... a giant wtf for any real nerd.

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

#385

Post by rikroots »

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?

Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose.

We don't talk about Usenet ...

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

#386

Post by partisan »

nicwolff wrote: post #301

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.

I came across TWOP kinda late in the game, but in the era before streaming and fragmented forums (fora?), it was a good way to catch up on Project Runway and get other viewers perspectives.

I wonder if a site like that could reach critical mass nowadays.

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

#388

Post by kavinskyy »

mguerville wrote: post #235
xrd wrote: post #184

It's not a website but I loved Napster. When you were downloading a song and then could browse the filesystem of that user to see what they had. It was like opening a cave with treasure inside and finding all these songs that might not have been available online at all at that point.

You can still do that in Soulseek, i love browsing people’s cataogs for inspiration

I'm glad that Soulseek is around and the users are still using the platform.

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

#389

Post by partisan »

wmnwmn wrote: post #304

Garageband.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.

When I started using the Internet in 1997, Yahoo had a feature where it let users upload their favorite sites. I would browse through those sites puzzled and delighted by the seemingly endless, random content. That was how I came across Peep Research (http://peepresearch.org/).

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

#390

Post by badsectoracula »

cambalache wrote: post #133
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…

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.

The UI was awful though... and still is, just not as awful as it used to be. Like, come on, what is with the comment UI? Why can't they just, you know, display these comments like every single other site out there and instead they have this weird control panel with partial comments, two(!) sliders, etc. At least now there is a button to load all comments (but you still have to adjust the sliders)... but you have to do it for every single comment, it doesn't remember the setting. And at the past it was even worse, with a floating(!) control panel and many comments were hidden, but you could still see replies to them.

Like WTF? What were they thinking?

Post reply on HN