I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!

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.

Not dead, but not nearly as alive as it used to be.
https://homestarrunner.com/

Not defunct and was only my favorite for a very short period of time, but it left an impression and I still find myself referencing it from time to time. Serving the same great content for 25 years!

https://zombo.com/

It's not defunct tho... Newgrounds is still around.

Actually, none of my favorite websites are defunct. Something Awful, LiveJournal, and Penny-Arcade are also still going.

YTMND from 20 years ago.

Technically it still exists but it's effectively dead.

not dead, but pretty dead anyway: cracked.com

I wouldn't say it was a number one favorite, but I feel like the internet isn't the same without timecube.com

TW: conspiracy nonsense, racism, crimes against grammar https://web.archive.org/web/20050829015921/http://www.timecube.com/

StumbleUpon

Rip Stumble upon.

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.

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.

myspace.com

No, not the social network with my friend Tom, I mean the online file storage (would now be called 'cloud' storage) site that it was before it died and Tom bought the domain.

It had an astounding 300MB of space available for free, much more than the contemporary competition.

Of course now there's Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Myspace was just too far ahead of their time.

I don't know about number one, but a few that I miss.

• freshmeat.net. Announcements of open source software releases and updates.

• newegg.com

computer components retailer

is still around, but it doesn't hold the spot it once did.

• bash.org. Searchable list of funny, ranked quotes from IRC and similar. There are some archives, like this one.

• 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.

• 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.

Digg.

I wouldn't be on Lemmy today if it weren't for Digg committing suicide, forcing everyone to switch to reddit. And then reddit went full retard with the 3rd party app thing, so here I am.

BBS and IRC. Technically neither are totally dead, but that was my introduction to the Internet a few years before the WWW existed.

gamehippo.com was basically itch.io of the late 90's / early 2000's.

The Wayback Machine, I misremembered but sometimes you can find an archived binary/archived external mirror. Often the screenshots are at least.

Edit: Some examples:

2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010401174047/http://www.gamehippo.com/

2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040830074642/http://www.gamehippo.com/

2006 (best bet for finding active links): https://web.archive.org/web/20060112161747/http://www.gamehippo.com/

reddit

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_Ninja

They were super early YouTube.

Cracked.

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

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, I guess. And Google.

Not really a web site but stumble upon was magic.

stile project went from a collection of bafflingly weird shit to a shitty porn site.

Yeah, there was a lot of porn before, but it wasn't really the main focus- it was basically a collection of shock value pics & videos that probably played a big part in me becoming desensitized... It was my source of "Eh, I've seen worse"

Not A website, but in the early modem days there used to be these things called web rings. When you were done going through one site (usually just a few short pages or a short story kind of deal back then), you clicked the 'next' button and it brought you to another random, related (usually) website. My favorite web ring was the Star Wars ring. Learned a lot of expanded universe stuff, and random fan fiction. There was one site it brought me to that told me how to use the force...still trying to make my beer come to my hand :-)

Pick pretty much any forum.

The SciFi channel forums used to have a "caption this" page where they had stills from their channel's live feed people could post quips about. That was back when they aired MST3K.

I used to spend hours watching people try to be funny.

Back in 1995, I was still using Gopher, when someone showed me WWW. I soon found the chatroom at Mrshowbiz.com, and was hooked to this new Internet technology.

But my favourite was Geocities. Had several sites there. They taught me HTML coding, and that there was such a thing as too many "Under construction" animated gifs.

The old Cartoon Network website. Used to play a lot of flash games on there back in the day, probably like most every other person who had that channel.

I would say Nitrome, but they're still alive even if they're a shell of their former self IMO.

Ytmnd.com

Not favourite, but I used to use Google search almost exclusively because the results were good, and I could tell it to never show results from certain sites.

No need to tell this community the sad state of affairs it's in now...

What.cd?

Joecartoons

Stickdeath

No idea if it's still up or not.

VideoGameJams

Was a website of midi versions of video game songs and also had guitar tabs for the songs. I would legitimately just listen to those versions of the songs themselves.

I spent a lot of time in chat rooms roughly 30 years ago. Yahoo chat rooms were fun, and also The Offspring's old website from back in the late 90s had a chat room. Also I used to get a kick out of the "Ate my balls" webring and the dance ones that started with hamster dance.

Ytmnd.com ! Punch the keys for God's sake !

www.google.com

Defunct in the sense that it doesn't work as well it used to.

The Dark Side of the Net and Goth Girl of the Week. There use to be a goth dating site but I can't remember the name. It doesn't matter I suppose. I will be dead soon any way.

Club Penguin. RIP :(

Waddle on, folks. Waddle on…

Wormhole by Centerfleet

Or Tea Games

Yahoo Games

MotoModders.net

That shit was wild back in the day. Rhythm lights, anyone?

I really enjoyed Cracked in its internet heyday. It was at times funny and others poignant. Somewhere I would have wanted to publish. Technically it still exists... but it is not the same.

Joecartoon

My state passed ID verification for adult websites, does that count?

hamsterdance.org

Wiki

lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala.con one day as a kid just typed in a random amount of la and .com and that just appeared.