Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://html5zombo.com
ahh life is complete again. the only limit is myself.
Try opening 10 tabs at random intervals. It enhances the unknown.
Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
231–240 of 472 posts
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#232what.cd
It was truly the Library of Alexandria of music. Cataloging standards were high and you could find even obscure releases in perfect quality in multiple formats (CD rips, multiple vinyl rips). Now I use Spotify and it frustrates me that songs will disappear without notice because their license expired and that I can't find most foreign music I previously listened to. The audio quality isn't comparable, either.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#233It seems clear we all miss websites. There aren’t any websites anymore, just companies and YouTube channels and Instagrammers and Twitter and all that other new crap I am too old for.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#234What.cd
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#235It'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
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#236what.cd It was truly the Library of Alexandria of music. Cataloging standards were high and you could find even obscure releases in perfect quality in multiple formats (CD rips, multiple vinyl rips). Now I use Spotify and it frustrates me that songs will disappear without notice because their license expired and that I can't find most foreign music I previously listened to. The audio quality isn't comparable, either.
The library + the community were unparalleled. I spent more time on those forums than anywhere else.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#237It'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??
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, you could browse everything Napster had indexed. If people didn’t configure Napster right, you could browse their whole C:\ drive. Good times.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#238It'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??
Users shared folders in the Napster client and you could navigate those folders exactly as you imagine.
It was a great way to discover new music.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#239The 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…
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 desktop to be a punchline in a joke, mocked as some infeasible fantasy and inevitable failure.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#240stylegala, cssbeauty and the other css-oriented design sites and attached communities