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, but played some of the BBS games and downloaded some warez from a "31337" BBS with a backdoor whose login was "elite". At least the sysop didn't call himself "Crash Override".
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.
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 unsavory language).
My earliest memories are CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL. I remember AOL had a file share like service where you could search for and download images. I’d spend hours downloading a single Batman logo or Star Wars still. What stands out to me was when I went to work with my dad once and they had internet in a browser without having to connect to something first. My mind was blown. I was in elementary school at the time.
Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down
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.
> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?
Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose.
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 years ago, but the community and popularity - as well as the feeling of discovery I used to get while playing - won’t ever come back
Some of the content lives on in the wayback machine under the 'www.searchlores.org' domain, but the period before he launched that site was magical to me. For several years there, he kept his identity deliberately secret (there was a bit of a mystery around it). The sort of reverse engineering techniques he described were fascinating, and frequently applied to real life.
It was fun to load his site, download a bunch of pages, and then hang up the metered dial-up internet connection and spend the next few hours reading...
I had TOTALLY forgotten him/his sites but holy crap. Looking that up on the Wayback Machine is a rabbit hole I don't have time to fall down today but I really want to. If I remember right, I found him in a link roulette-type thing from someone else's Geocities page.
Let me be real: I loved Geocities and Angelfire. I liked seeing what people could build (and there were some pretty crazy-good personal sites). But I think even more, I liked that everyone was there because they were either really into the web, or really into some particular topic.
I miss the concept of deep dives. Being able to take them myself, and being able to tag along on other people's, and knowing that there were a vast number of topics where I could be pretty confident that I understood about 85-90% of what could be understood about them at the time.
My golden era was the brief period where I could do ALL of the following well:
- Hardware-build a computer
- Fully program said computer to do anything I wanted it to
- Network my various devices however I wanted
- Access the internet
- Build webpages
- Play arcade, desktop and console games that, in theory, I understood well enough that I could have coded them
- And, let me be really honest, engage in some minor phone phreaking because I was a teenager and that seemed REALLY COOL
And I felt like I understood the totality of most of those things. Which, again, maybe was just due to being a teenager and not knowing what I didn't know, but the size of the domain spaces seemed more manageable.
Now, I spend all day building websites. It's a good job. I can't complain. But I can only build websites. A couple of years ago, for fun, I tried to take a Coursera networking course and I about lost my mind because of how complex I realized it had gotten. My wife is about to start the second year of her Master of Software Engineering degree and I have realized watching her learn Java that there's a whole domain there that I will never be able to understand. Forget understanding how my phone works, and forget the idea of taking apart a Nintendo Switch and putting it back together with mods like I did that classic NES. I probably wouldn't even recognize most of the components.
I sound like I'm sitting in my rocking chair getting ready to yell at the whippersnappers to get off my lawn, don't I?
I'm 37.
Please tell me I'm not the only person to feel this way at this age?
(Edited to add: I am, at least, reassured that I'm not completely alone in this by the quote attributed to physicist Eugene Wigner: "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." Poor Eugene died in 1995 and I feel like he'd have hated the 2000s.)
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.
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.
This was such a huge missed opportunity by the music industry. A massive network of volunteers dedicated to curating and meticulously tagging music. I might have payed a lot of money for access to such a network. The largest collection of music in human history... Wiped out because there wasn't a business model in time
I truly miss what.cd. I spent so many hours listening to music, finding old, new and eclectic music, chatting in the forums and debating on the individual torrent comments. I think I actually shed a tear when I saw it was closed. Thankfully there has been a real attempt to replace what we lost.
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.
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.
I agree; NNTP is much better. I just started using Usenet last year, actually (with client software I wrote myself, because I wanted a command-line interface and support for SQLite, and other programs don't do those two things).
GameSpy and the planet network, especially thier hosting / match making systems. Maybe it was just being able to know a couple servers and run into the same people over and over, but I remember liking that a lot.
The Happy Puppy games site.
Not really the web, but the original RealPlayer surfaced some amazing content for the time. I was able to watch Russian news, which while I didn't understand a single word was pretty amazing for a cold war obsessed kid
I miss Google from when it first started getting popular and overtaking Alta Vista and the other search engines. It feels weird to say now, but it truly felt like magic how it provided such better search results than its competitors. I wasn't tied to any one search engine then, and many of my searches were done on multiple search engines, with lots of wading through results to _attempt_ to find relevance. But with Google, almost every time, its results were almost exactly what I was looking for.
Though I guess it's not so much the site itself I miss, but the feeling of witnessing magic, for a little while, until I just got used to and expected such good search results.
Some of the great old Flash stuff, homestarrunner.com was like an endless fount of content and I remember there being some really fun one-off games at the original Macromedia site.
Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience.
I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back memories of LAN parties. I'm not sure if there's a modern game that has a similar style of gameplay? I hardly play any games so am out of the loop.
The first game I ever played online was R6. Kids these days don't know the joy of finding a cable host so you could do 2v2 with tolerable lag, nor what it was like to fill someone up with a mag and for them to fall over dead 10 seconds later. I think part of the joy of that was the imagination of how cool it would be if it all worked right vs the actual experience, but yeah, I'll never forget it. I dunno why but I'll never forget one time playing with this guy isoplus. I don't know we even communicated, nor if we played more than a single game together, but isoplus, wherever you are, be well.
You ever play Tribes?
UO. Wow. It's really another experience that can't be recreated. So incredibly magical. EverQuest and Asheron's Call were similarly formative experiences. I never could have thought at the time that massively multiplayer games would seem boring and even lame (what, I've gotta play with people?) now.
My parents would make sure I wasn't sneaking on EQ late at night by picking up the phone next to their bed to make sure I wasn't on the phone line.
In case you're interested, I've recently ported Ultima Online to mobile via Unity+ClassicUO: https://github.com/voxelboy/mobileuo. I'll be publishing a blog post about it soon.
I also miss old-school slashdot, lobste.rs and HN are the closest communities I've found to it. I also played Rogue Spear - on a crappy rural dialup connection no less. I wasn't well liked by other players because my lag was significantly worse than everyone else. My favourite level was the airport.
Anyone remember Joystiq? For a long time, I kept up with video game news through them, but I basically stopped caring about when they went down. Never found a site to scratch that same itch. Still instinctively went there as soon as I opened the browser for about a week.
From my early days, probably flash portals, like addicting games. Kongregate wasn't the same after GameStop bought them. I know Newgrounds is still alive and I still go there, but it's sad to see the traffic dwindle like it has (especially since Tom Full is one of my internet heros).
Also I want to give a bit more info about why rec.music.phish was special. Phish, like the Grateful Dead, allow people to record and distribute concert recordings as long as they didn't profit from it. So people would offer free "blanks and postage" deals to other people on rec.music.phish who would mail cassette tapes with return envelopes and get recordings of live concerts back in the mail a month later. That whole process is completely irrelevant now but it was a unifying fan experience that had real meaning to everyone involved. Going on a bittorrent site (bt.etree.org) doesn't compare in the development of meaningful relationships with total strangers even though it is far more efficient.
I miss the feeling of 'exploring' I got everytime I found a new .edu gopher server...
Tracking down all the nooks and crannies looking for documents related to tech. How awesome it felt went you found some lecture notes/thesis that was just _gold_ and you could curl up and read it ...
Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come up with.
It's not really one website per se, but finding someone's old website that they'd built up over the years in the '90s with all sorts of interesting, detailed, yet approachable content. Sometimes academics, sometimes just people with interesting hobbies. There's a certain je ne sais quoi about them that most blogs these days just don't have, and I could get lost in some of those sites. Every so often I still find one, and every so often I find a site of more recent provenance but with the same quality, but overall they're a rare breed.
One of the most recent such sites I've found is actually someone's Angelfire site, rather than their own domain: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/cherlinks.html . I went down the rabbit hole of her Chernobyl content way too late at night one day in February. All sorts of interesting content based first-hand experience.
The other thing I miss is desktop-focused instant messaging that focuses on the text experience. I had so many great text conversations on AIM, and GChat when it was new, sometimes over the course of hours. Just this week I had my first AIM conversation in at least a couple years, and it still had the same magic. Probably the closest thing to it we have today is Slack, but the ubiquity of all your friends having AIM (or at least Yahoo! Messenger or MSN) just isn't there.
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 was a sad day.
Ever since ~2015 there hasn't been a good, "go to" weather website. Dark Sky came out not long after wunderground classic, and it looks like recently Apple bought them. Dark Sky is no Wunderground Classic, but it's a good attempt.
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.
So many sites that technically still exist but have changed
slashdot
shoutcast
pricewatch
anandtech - now it has such a sterile, corporate feel - back in the day in addition to reviews they'd do write-ups on their own infrastructure - not in the nebulous sense, but actually step by step, detailing what they were running (ColdFusion at the time as I recall)
allaire.com (no longer exists) - before Github or any of the modern package managers were a thing, and before anything conceived of frontend components, ColdFusion's custom tags seem to encompass a lot of great ideas that today seem obvious, but not so much in the late 90s. I'd spend hours browsing through their custom tag directory
It was a personal wiki of sorts about psychedelics, new age mysticism, anarchy, subversive philosophy, environmentalism, and obscure information.
It was still up until a few years ago. I haven’t found a complete archive. The archive here is fairly outdated: https://jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/index.html (click the small links for “hi-res” or “low-res” framesets.)
Before it shut down the amount of content was huge, and everything was personally curated by the creator Dimitry Novus. Supposedly when Google Video shut down and lots of the YouTube links broke he got upset and stopped updating. After a while it disappeared.
[+] [-] geocrasher|6 years ago|reply
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, but played some of the BBS games and downloaded some warez from a "31337" BBS with a backdoor whose login was "elite". At least the sysop didn't call himself "Crash Override".
[+] [-] cambalache|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yumraj|6 years ago|reply
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 unsavory language).
[+] [-] Lammy|6 years ago|reply
> Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them?
They stopped having web pages and started having Xangas/Friendsters/Myspaces that had the networking feature built-in.
[+] [-] lukejduncan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inasio|6 years ago|reply
Dense layout with links to all the new reviews with grades, by section (music, film, etc), no infinite scroll. Quite a few other websites were like that, you could get the gist of all the new things at a glance, now they all feel dumbed down
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rikroots|6 years ago|reply
Web Rings! That bought back some memories of adding webring code snippets to my website. I agree they are a fantastic idea and I'm sad they seem to have gone away. Wikipedia claims that they were (effectively) killed by Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
Beyond webring sites, most of my early browsing time was spent on web forums (devoted to poetry and conlanging, my key interests). It's sad-interesting to see that of the various software packages used to run those sites, only phpBB seems to be under active development for its original purpose.
We don't talk about Usenet ...
[+] [-] me551ah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hopesthoughts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ta1771|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisandchips|6 years ago|reply
You can still play, they brought it back a few years ago, but the community and popularity - as well as the feeling of discovery I used to get while playing - won’t ever come back
[+] [-] cure|6 years ago|reply
Some of the content lives on in the wayback machine under the 'www.searchlores.org' domain, but the period before he launched that site was magical to me. For several years there, he kept his identity deliberately secret (there was a bit of a mystery around it). The sort of reverse engineering techniques he described were fascinating, and frequently applied to real life.
It was fun to load his site, download a bunch of pages, and then hang up the metered dial-up internet connection and spend the next few hours reading...
[+] [-] abiogenesis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jconcilio|5 years ago|reply
Let me be real: I loved Geocities and Angelfire. I liked seeing what people could build (and there were some pretty crazy-good personal sites). But I think even more, I liked that everyone was there because they were either really into the web, or really into some particular topic.
I miss the concept of deep dives. Being able to take them myself, and being able to tag along on other people's, and knowing that there were a vast number of topics where I could be pretty confident that I understood about 85-90% of what could be understood about them at the time.
My golden era was the brief period where I could do ALL of the following well:
- Hardware-build a computer - Fully program said computer to do anything I wanted it to - Network my various devices however I wanted - Access the internet - Build webpages - Play arcade, desktop and console games that, in theory, I understood well enough that I could have coded them - And, let me be really honest, engage in some minor phone phreaking because I was a teenager and that seemed REALLY COOL
And I felt like I understood the totality of most of those things. Which, again, maybe was just due to being a teenager and not knowing what I didn't know, but the size of the domain spaces seemed more manageable.
Now, I spend all day building websites. It's a good job. I can't complain. But I can only build websites. A couple of years ago, for fun, I tried to take a Coursera networking course and I about lost my mind because of how complex I realized it had gotten. My wife is about to start the second year of her Master of Software Engineering degree and I have realized watching her learn Java that there's a whole domain there that I will never be able to understand. Forget understanding how my phone works, and forget the idea of taking apart a Nintendo Switch and putting it back together with mods like I did that classic NES. I probably wouldn't even recognize most of the components.
I sound like I'm sitting in my rocking chair getting ready to yell at the whippersnappers to get off my lawn, don't I?
I'm 37.
Please tell me I'm not the only person to feel this way at this age?
(Edited to add: I am, at least, reassured that I'm not completely alone in this by the quote attributed to physicist Eugene Wigner: "It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." Poor Eugene died in 1995 and I feel like he'd have hated the 2000s.)
[+] [-] alfiedotwtf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xrd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mguerville|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] o10449366|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] o10449366|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] peterlk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haroldp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weisser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vardump|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] theonemind|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September the whole Internet feels like the Eternal September to me. It all got dumbed down.
[+] [-] pwg|6 years ago|reply
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:
https://www.eternal-september.org/
[+] [-] zzo38computer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|6 years ago|reply
The Happy Puppy games site.
Not really the web, but the original RealPlayer surfaced some amazing content for the time. I was able to watch Russian news, which while I didn't understand a single word was pretty amazing for a cold war obsessed kid
[+] [-] deftnerd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemi|6 years ago|reply
Though I guess it's not so much the site itself I miss, but the feeling of witnessing magic, for a little while, until I just got used to and expected such good search results.
[+] [-] oppodeldoc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j79|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pottertheotter|6 years ago|reply
Ultima Online isn't a website but, for me, is synonymous with the earlier days of the net. I guess it's still around, but I played during the beta and when it first came out. There was something so exciting about it. It was all such a new experience.
I also miss the original Rainbow Six (and Rogue Spear). Loved the gameplay (stealth, planning a mission, etc.) and it brings back memories of LAN parties. I'm not sure if there's a modern game that has a similar style of gameplay? I hardly play any games so am out of the loop.
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|6 years ago|reply
You ever play Tribes?
UO. Wow. It's really another experience that can't be recreated. So incredibly magical. EverQuest and Asheron's Call were similarly formative experiences. I never could have thought at the time that massively multiplayer games would seem boring and even lame (what, I've gotta play with people?) now.
My parents would make sure I wasn't sneaking on EQ late at night by picking up the phone next to their bed to make sure I wasn't on the phone line.
[+] [-] VoxelBoy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pensv0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s0l1dsnak3123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlbucci|6 years ago|reply
From my early days, probably flash portals, like addicting games. Kongregate wasn't the same after GameStop bought them. I know Newgrounds is still alive and I still go there, but it's sad to see the traffic dwindle like it has (especially since Tom Full is one of my internet heros).
[+] [-] dicknuckle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] palehose|6 years ago|reply
It's still there but not the same.
Also I want to give a bit more info about why rec.music.phish was special. Phish, like the Grateful Dead, allow people to record and distribute concert recordings as long as they didn't profit from it. So people would offer free "blanks and postage" deals to other people on rec.music.phish who would mail cassette tapes with return envelopes and get recordings of live concerts back in the mail a month later. That whole process is completely irrelevant now but it was a unifying fan experience that had real meaning to everyone involved. Going on a bittorrent site (bt.etree.org) doesn't compare in the development of meaningful relationships with total strangers even though it is far more efficient.
[+] [-] mech422|6 years ago|reply
Stonybrook algorithm repository was a similiar feeling...just going thru and exploring all the different techniques people have come up with.
[+] [-] ajtjp|6 years ago|reply
One of the most recent such sites I've found is actually someone's Angelfire site, rather than their own domain: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/cherlinks.html . I went down the rabbit hole of her Chernobyl content way too late at night one day in February. All sorts of interesting content based first-hand experience.
The other thing I miss is desktop-focused instant messaging that focuses on the text experience. I had so many great text conversations on AIM, and GChat when it was new, sometimes over the course of hours. Just this week I had my first AIM conversation in at least a couple years, and it still had the same magic. Probably the closest thing to it we have today is Slack, but the ubiquity of all your friends having AIM (or at least Yahoo! Messenger or MSN) just isn't there.
[+] [-] jblarneyforward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadlock|6 years ago|reply
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 was a sad day.
Ever since ~2015 there hasn't been a good, "go to" weather website. Dark Sky came out not long after wunderground classic, and it looks like recently Apple bought them. Dark Sky is no Wunderground Classic, but it's a good attempt.
[+] [-] postalrat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psim1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|6 years ago|reply
slashdot
shoutcast
pricewatch
anandtech - now it has such a sterile, corporate feel - back in the day in addition to reviews they'd do write-ups on their own infrastructure - not in the nebulous sense, but actually step by step, detailing what they were running (ColdFusion at the time as I recall)
allaire.com (no longer exists) - before Github or any of the modern package managers were a thing, and before anything conceived of frontend components, ColdFusion's custom tags seem to encompass a lot of great ideas that today seem obvious, but not so much in the late 90s. I'd spend hours browsing through their custom tag directory
Not a website, but I miss the heyday of IRC.
[+] [-] alxmng|6 years ago|reply
It was a personal wiki of sorts about psychedelics, new age mysticism, anarchy, subversive philosophy, environmentalism, and obscure information.
It was still up until a few years ago. I haven’t found a complete archive. The archive here is fairly outdated: https://jacobsm.com/deoxy/deoxy.org/index.html (click the small links for “hi-res” or “low-res” framesets.)
Before it shut down the amount of content was huge, and everything was personally curated by the creator Dimitry Novus. Supposedly when Google Video shut down and lots of the YouTube links broke he got upset and stopped updating. After a while it disappeared.