Some of the old hardware forms, Gideontech and Pimprig/PCApex.
There was a site I found in '98 or '99 that showed a crap graphics bubble wrap sheet and you could click them all and hear popping sounds!
Reddit. Unfortunately it’s defunct beyond repair now, but back in the day it was a nice place to discuss all sorts of topics with knowledgeable and like-minded folk.
Joecartoon
I don’t know about number one, but a few that I miss.
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freshmeat.net. Announcements of open source software releases and updates.
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newegg.com — computer components retailer — is still around, but it doesn’t hold the spot it once did.
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bash.org. Searchable list of funny, ranked quotes from IRC and similar. There are some archives, like this one.
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A few “hosting” sites that went down with a lot of user-created content. No one thing was amazing, maybe, but it produced a lot of dangling links. Geocities: “At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated.[7] The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.[8]”. AngelFire. Tripod. Apparently the latter two are still around in some limited form.
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Kaleidoscope.net, a site featuring themes for the eponymous classic MacOS themeing software package. They did a good job of generating theme previews. Fun to browse through.
What would you suggest instead of newegg now? I’m still using it out of momentum haven’t thought to look elsewhere in a long time
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BBS and IRC. Technically neither are totally dead, but that was my introduction to the Internet a few years before the WWW existed.
There are a few people running telnet-connected BBSes on the Internet.
kagis
Ah, someone has a list.
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
The Telnet BBS Guide focuses Bulletin Board Systems – the original Social Network, serving the BBS community for over 27 years! We list both Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. We currently list 976 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.
Not dead, but not nearly as alive as it used to be.
https://homestarrunner.com/I used to love IMDB before it got taken over. Especially the old forums where pretty much every TV show, every actor, etc… all had a forum on their page to discuss.
I would spend hours on there discussing the latest episodes of BSG, or Lost, or what have you. It was legitimately a water cooler for television watchers when no one in the real world shared the same television interests as me.
For Lost, the number of debates during that first couple seasons about what the connection would be in Locke and Hume being named after philosophers who wrote on human nature.
Or basically an easy place to go and discuss any thoughts or questions about a movie you just watched, or to find out if anyone else felt like an actor’s performance was good/bad/etc…
It was just a fun place to hang out for a movie/TV buff. When they took it away, I was pretty sad.
not dead, but pretty dead anyway: cracked.com
Cracked had a 10/10 movie podcast that was stopped abruptly (after it was bought up & butchered ,laying off like 100 staff) & it was the best movie podcast.
Digg.com used to be my absolute favorite. Then it got bought out by a company who turned it into a content farm and it eventually died out. Now it’s back and owned by Kevin Rose again, and I do like it a lot better than Reddit, but I still spend more time on Piefed these days.
Cracked.
Imagine my surprise when I just now typed in fark.com and saw that it’s still there and it looks exactly like it did 25 years ago. Mind blown! I might even go back.
Way way way back in the late 90s I visited slashdot multiple times a day. I know it’s still around but it is nothing like the commander taco days
I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!
I liked the idea, but after a while it just kept sending me to the same places.
yeah haha that was a bit annoying!
