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

221–230 of 472 posts

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

#221

Post by theonemind »

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.

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

#222

Post by beamatronic »

iobase wrote: post #72

hardocp.com - Kyle Bennet, amongst others, did a good job with computer hardware reviews & news. He and the site have moved on and only the forum remains.

They were the number one team for Folding@Home for a long time: [H]ard OCP is how they styled their name.

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

#223

Post by blankface »

- 2008 - 2010 /g/ when Bitcoin was pennies on the dollar

- GBATemp.net during the height of Wii Homebrew

- [Wii/DS/Nintendo]-Play.com - first online community for Nintendo Friendcodes

*edit one more

- The community surrounding Half-Life 2 and specifically Team Fortress 2 circa 2007-2009

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

#227

Post by eggsome »

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.

What happened to Trove? I signed up for that based on your involvement. Hope you're doing OK.

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

#228

Post by o10449366 »

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.

I never used Napster, but this sounds really interesting. Could you explain how browsing the filesystem of the user works in more detail??

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

#229

Post by Thriptic »

Not a site per say but a big piece of infrastructure. Before there was Steam there was Sierra's website which hosted half life updates, and World Opponent Network, a matchmaking service from Sierra who eventually got acquired by Valve. You would access WON through the half life game. Using it for online play was downright hilarious, especially because everyone was playing on dedicated servers with manual patching. A new version of the HL server / client would drop on Sierra and you would have to get in line and wait for hours at File Planet or Major Geeks or another mirror in order to download it. For like two weeks you would be getting version conflict errors because 50% of servers / clients would patch quickly and the other 50% wouldn't. Searching for a server was pretty much like using grep, there was no friends list or chat, it was amazing hahaha.
Post reply on HN