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

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331–340 of 472 posts

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

#332
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

Soulseek is still around?! TI(honestly)L

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

#334
One? There was a something new that left you in awe and wonder pretty regularly.

- Message forums run on pbpbb that taught users to not to feed the trolls

- AltaVista's search parameters Search that wasn't for presenting ads on 80% of the screen.

- Friendster as a way to interact beyond IM

- Digg as original reddit frontpage.. Slashdot too.

- Napster as the first internet disruption to an established industry.

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

#335

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.

Anyone curious should go read Slashdot posts from that time.

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

#336
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a way OSS did become the future.. Linux powering Android.. Bsd powering macos and ios.

Ubuntu 20.04 also looks to be an extremely usable desktop that just works.

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

#337
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

HN users can be incredibly incredibly petty at times, which I think you are referring to. I think the software itself is just too easy to abuse and the moderation is too inscrutable, even if I appreciate dang. I really dislike how political/personal everything gets around here, even the tech discussions, and the tech discussions themselves are full of breathless hype and hot takes that don't really make sense, too ma…

HN should have matured with its original audience, and created a space for new community members to become productive citizens.

Instead, Clay Shirkys essay on a group being it's own worst enemy appears to be acting out in yet another online forum.

http://reddragdiva.co.uk/lj/group_enemy.html

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

#338
post #94

Old school runescape. I played it as a kid and have never otherwise had such a wonderful and memorable experience playing a video game. Im quite young (23) so when I was playing it back in 2006-2008, I learned a LOT about life. Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward in the game, etc. Most of my friends who used to play agree. You can still play, they brought it back a few…

I have empathy for your nostalgia. I played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and was part of a pretty cool community.

Man, those were the times! I'm still crossing for fingers that we'll eventually see a W:ET remake with better graphics but the same game dynamics (and, most importantly, physics). Or that ET Legacy [1] or the inofficial ET2 [2] will pick up steam.

[1] https://www.etlegacy.com/ [2] https://www.crossfire.nu/journals/156955/et2-remake-new-upda...

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

#340

Weather Underground.... classic Up until 2015 Weather Underground was the top weather website, had huge amounts of information density, easy to navigate... fast I'm not sure what the current incarnation of Weather Underground is, but it is nothing like it's former self. Wunderground was sold off to... IBM? and then later... The Weather Channel? At some point the "classic" website was finally turned off for good. It w…

For most things I prefer dark sky over classic wunderground. The one thing I do miss with wunderground is the nice graphics showing history high/low compared to the past days.
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