What I miss...
Amdzone Firingsquad Anandtech Tomshardware Hardocop Bunch of other sites that I can't remember. The pc/mac chat room on AOL.
Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
251–260 of 472 posts
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#252Old versions of the current if still alive..
Amdzone.com Tomshardware 3dnow Hardocop Firingsquad
Pc/mac chat room on aol chat.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#253Oink's Pink Palace. Yes it was a torrent tracker so arguably illegal, but the breadth and depth of music it cataloged (not to speak of the community) is still unmatched.
Here's a bit of history that might get lost: OiNK's rules specified minimum bitrate of 192k for MP3 uploads. OiNK was a British tracker, and Radiohead's "pay what you want" MP3 release of _In Rainbows_ (2007) was purposefully 160k to be under that limit. I don't remember if the upload was allowed or not :p
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#254I was going to say I missed http://zombo.com/ (because at some point I had checked, and it no longer worked). But I just tried it, and it's working again. Hurray! -- "you can do anything at zombo com!" :-D
html5zombo.com if your device doesn’t support Flash
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#255You don't miss the websites, you miss being young.
It can be both.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#256GameWinners.com. Great source for video game cheats. But the best part for me was the chat room. I would say crazy things to people. Good times.
Also GeoCities. I wouldn't gone into web development without it.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#257Yahoo in the mid to late 90s. I've wondered if there might not be a renewed niche for a curated site directory, preferably as a non profit and with no comments. I miss the web then in general. It was full of basically honest information rich stuff.
Dmoz[1] was supposed to be that. Sadly it withered on the vine as well.
The thing a directory does well that search doesn't is being able to eliminate the things you don't want to find. Let's say I want to find information about operating a whatchamacallit. While I can ask Google it may tell me that, but I'm also going to see a lot of information by people trying to sell me a whatchamacallit. In a directory I can find the category that covers the information domain I'm interested in then search only within that subtree for what I want to find.
[1] currently archived at https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#258Kuro5hin.org. It was the best of internet culture and discussion before apps and 24/7 connectivity.
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#259Another 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.
A few diehards are still discussing things on Usenet.
comp.misc was brought back to life as part of the slashdot beta exit. Other groups have some traffic as well. Nothing like the heyday's however.
And there is a free, text only, news server named Eternal September:
Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
#260The 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 $250 million and that's all it was worth. Had he played his cards right, it could have been Twitter and valued at tens of billions of dollars.
If you want to get into great sites that I miss, I really miss Reddit from 2005-2010, maybe a little later. Do I get a prize for using Reddit when it had no comments? The programming related discussions were good. HN's too ideological and big for them now, and r/progamming is a clusterfuck of people being assholes to each other and talking about shit we were arguing about 15 years ago.
Those early sites had a feel that I can only imagine the pre-Eternal September net had for older people.