Stumbleupon
post
ytmnd. Technically it still exists but the magic is gone
Unpopular opinion: Google?
Back before it sucked.
Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago
A bit of the Google that was like that persists as the 'web' subsearch. The site at https://udm14.com/ exists purely as a frontend to that search. It's not exactly like the old Google, it's still too ready to throw Youtube videos at the top of the results, but it's still much easier to find interesting websites that way than Google's default search.
It's crazy that there is a whole generation of people who will never know how good google was at some point. You could find all the obscure shit. How often i just googled a serial number or some weird machinery to find parts, and people thought that i'm some sort of wizard. Try that now
Slashdot (still with us, but not the same)
Digg (back with us, but not the same)
Freshmeat
Kuro5hin
Slashdot was my fucking jam back in the day. I even met CmdrTaco once before I really even knew what Linux was.
I have to ask, is the software preservation 4am, who cracks the Apple II disks? If so then hooray, thanks for being so great!
Cracked in it's prime was fucking amazing.
Like, it's the type of "just stay here" website everyone keeps trying to make.
On any random day they'd post like an article every 15 minutes. No matter when you needed to kill 15-30 there was something funny and usually informative.
There was probably 5 years straight I didn't poop without reading an article on Cracked.
There's no other quality stream of content like that since.
I just had a quick look at the Cracked homepage and it looks like they've got articles written by actual writers again, which is a nice change. It turns out that, while cheap, filling your website with bullshit listicles written by "Cracked readers" makes for bad content.
Shit man, I tried...
Those aren't "articles" there's like a paragraph, and then a shit ton of pictures with text.
Fucking got my hopes up and everything, I'm gonna remember this one for April Fool's though. Right up until you scroll down the first time it's super convincing that it's back.
DigDoug? Here? MeFi DigDoug? How are ya!
I think that must be someone else, I don't know what MeFi is, I'm afraid.
homestarrunner.com
Luckily they're still active on YouTube!
The sites still up, but I don't know if it gets updated.
I think I'm about 15 years behind on my SBEmails.
The email. The email. The what what? The email.
it does! And they even had a new sbemail fairly recently! https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/210-robots
Technically the website is still around. It just doesn't have any of the fun interactive stuff now that Flash is defunct. It's where they sell merch now.
It's still around, and a while ago had a cartoon about going back to a website!
Unsanitized blogs where people just spilled out their thoughts. Overwhelmingly were they inconsequential, but it was still a funny little peek into the lives of people you’d never know. You can’t do that sort of thing as freely anymore, between doxxing, scraper swarms, and the abundance of lunatics online. The barrier to entry is higher and the risks greater.
These blogs do still exist, they just lack discoverability because they‘re not focusing on SEO. You might want to give Kagi Small Web a go. It‘s their explicit goal to promote these kinds of websites.
It‘s not quite the same as the good old days, but it‘s probably as close as we can get right now.
They are still around and thriving. Keywords to search for are: personal web, small web, indie web
Yeah, it was interesting to read people's unfiltered narcissism sometimes. Just pages and pages of journal entries about how they were a genius and their agonizing over every little social interaction and relationship in their life. That had zero traffic of commentary.
I never ever understood any of it. But it was scary to realize some people really do think of their life as a novel and they are the main character struggling to some liberation or something.
All my blogs were just random nonsense or short fictional pieces. I could never take the 'dear diary' stuff seriously.
Most of my friends would just post random funny links or talk about something they did that day and if it was cool or not. I never had the privilege of socializing with people who were writing autobiographical novels on the internet.
Zombocom
You could do anything at Zombo-com
I think that one still exists?
Sadly was taken over and no longer has the iconic voice and music. Now it’s just some crap TTS without the same level of whimsy.
It doesn't use flash anymore so it's dead to me
edit: wtf, did it change hands recently? they fucked it up
The current owner bought the domain when it was available, and since they dont own the previous content they wont post it. They do have a notice asking the original owner to contact them though. /u/DavidGA did post that theres https://html5zombo.com/ which seems to be the OG content
Original Neopets.
Stumbleupon.
Early Reddit.
Killfrog.com
I definitely miss Stumbleupon. Closest I can find to fill that void is jumpstick.app, which is also good.
Killfrog.com
Shit, that just awoke some memories in me. Back from ye olden days when people would just fire up their own website to host their stuff.
I still think of the Dumbass Bass bit every few years or whenever I see one of the basses in someone's cottage or something. Or hear the song 'like a virgin'
Albino Blacksheep, Cracked, early message boards (/., Digg, reddit, etc, before they turned into garbage), NewGrounds, RatherGood
There was a website many years ago that when opened, it looked like an online retailer in Germany for all sorts of things, similar to Walmart. When you scrolled around it would behave as you'd expect, but once you left it alone for half a minute or so, suddenly every element of the page became a Rube Goldberg machine.
A stack of pots and pans or something would fall down to the next row and send something hurtling across the screen, on and on, with the page moving up and down as needed. I wish I'd had the thought to record somehow it at the time. Only other thing I've seen like it was an old Google Chrome commercial on YouTube that used the whole page and not just the video player.
I've looked a few times for some hint of what I remember, but it might only live in the archive of my memories now.
Craigslist forums were kinda the wild west.
bash.org
Ze Frank had a great personal site with a dozen JavaScript / flash apps that let you draw with different brushes etc. fun time waster
Stumbleupon it was how I found Reddit
MySpace and Facebook from before 2010. There's not really any social media that's designed to show me posts from my friends and nothing else. Now whenever I open up Facebook I am just shown shit from people and pages I never subscribed to and ads.
Altavista.
I'd love to have it back. I hate all the search engines right now.
kongregate. place is practically dead now
The 2000s Cartoon Network US site and Nitrome ( still alive but feels like a shell of its former glory ).
I know I can still play a lot of the old CN flash games on Flash Point, but it's not as aesthetically satisfying as the old CN site.
As for Nitrome, I got a zip file that contained a lot of the games since they ain't available on Flash Point and I don't wanna use the modern site. The old games like Mutiny or IceBreakers are still kinda fun, even if games like Rubble Trouble, for some reason, don't run well on my potato desktop under Ruffle.
Those were 2 of my favorite game sites in the 2000s, before I learned about NotDoppler.
Edit:
After looking at various comments, gonna say I remember the old Pencilmation series back when there was maybe a few different shorts on their website. Back when evil blue pen man was the big bad. Before they, or whatever copycat it was, started making tons of them on yt that are nothing but mass produced slop. Lived long enough to become a villain.
I also remembered an old PopTarts website with some dumb flash game about going down the red carpet without getting toasted and/or eaten ( IIRC ) that lead to me finding Pencilmation.
https://bill.newgrounds.com/news/post/1607118
Newgrounds bringing back flash.
Neocities and just generally when it was cool for everyone to have their own personal website rather than having profiles on the major platforms.
Should be easier than ever today.
The oldschool zone.com.

It looks like a lot of them may be archived here, as searching for "lego" turns up about 600 results. At least some of those look like officially-branded things.
Justin.tv
Literally any website that had flash games. I miss scrolling through and having thousands of games to play.
StickDeath.com
https://stickdeatharchive.github.io/
This site aims to archive as many of the original StickDeath.com games and animations as possible!
Unfortunately, StickDeath.com is gone and it has been excluded from the Internet Archive for reasons unknown. This site aims to host as many of the original StickDeath swf files as possible.
Thanks to the discovery of an active internet archive of the original StickDeath website, most of the animations have been recovered! However, some favorites are still missing, such as most of the wrestling ones, and most of the animated shorts.
Flash is dead, but the open-source Ruffle can play many Flash things, and I suppose could probably play them.
As mentioned elsewhere Homestar Runner is still around and not doing badly. The Wiki, however, is severely starved for resources, it always takes a long long time to load for me.
top 98 comments