What websites do you miss from the 2000s?
3mon 15d ago by piefed.social/u/AskewLord in asklemmy
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.
Everybody to the limit! Fhqwhgads!
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.
I may be the proud owner of the Trogdor board game.
My daughter got me a Trogdor T shirt last Father's Day. I usually get at least one reaction when I wear it in public.
It's working again, through the power of Ruffle!
The could fucking convert their flash files into HTML5. There are tools that do it.
It's still around, and a while ago had a cartoon about going back to a website!
AND at their website, which now uses Ruffle as its Flash player!
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.
Ooops... Sorry. I didn't mean to mislead you.
All I did was scroll down and note that I didn't see any articles written by "Cracked readers" - I didn't actually look at the articles themselves.
DigDoug? Here? MeFi DigDoug? How are ya!
I think that must be someone else, I don't know what MeFi is, I'm afraid.
Aah okay. "MeFi" is "Metafilter," another website out there. where I've seen a different DigDoug. It's a cool name anyway.
Stumbleupon
lost so much time with that. just one more click before bed
Wasn't this just a Firefox extension? But, yeah, I miss stumbling too.
It was a website first that would load stumbled sites in a frame while keeping their button to stumble visible. I never used the extension just the site.
I did both, loved them.
I still talk about the facts and sites I stumbled upon using it. For a very, very, short time old Reddit felt a bit like it.
ytmnd. Technically it still exists but the magic is gone
Ohhh yeah. You had to be there as part of the community in the early 2000s to really get the magic. It’s like LUE, SA, even /b/. I will forever look back fondly on my teenage shitposting days.
Unpopular opinion: Google?
Back before it sucked.
Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago
Searching for anything on YouTube now is a nightmare
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!
Unfortunately not! But anyone who preserves Apple II disks is awesome in my book
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.
Second vote for kagi small web. One of my favorite feeds
I supposed the alternative would be browsing i2p or freenet sites, pretty much nothing but weird small blogs, almost all of them focused on security and privacy tho
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
Good news!
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
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.
Agree. If only I could convince more of my friends to drop siloed socials and get fediverse accounts, I'd have a solution for that, but that's not happening.
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'
For me it's the 'Can you hear me now?' animations. Every once in a while, when I see someone having issues with their phone/earbuds/whatever, those pop into my head unbidden.
Albino Blacksheep, Cracked, early message boards (/., Digg, reddit, etc, before they turned into garbage), NewGrounds, RatherGood
Newgrounds, that one probably hurts the most. There was so much free creativity happening.
What? Newgrounds is still alive and still has lots of things posted?
Stumbleupon it was how I found Reddit
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.
HamsterDance.com
Demoniod was great!
RIP
thebox
Craigslist forums were kinda the wild west.
You just miss w4m
bash.org
I don't think that new items can be submitted, but the old stuff is available here.
Ze Frank had a great personal site with a dozen JavaScript / flash apps that let you draw with different brushes etc. fun time waster
The ones without paywalls and ads.
what.cd
Oh man the day what shut down was a goddamn international tragedy
Altavista.
I'd love to have it back. I hate all the search engines right now.
Google and youtube.
kongregate. place is practically dead now
Yeah, Newgrounds keeps chugging along though.
&totse
All Hail the Temple
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.
Sure! I don't really care what people use, I'd just like to see more of it. It's also on me to be part of the change I want to see, because I have my domain and everything, but I haven't given myself the time to set up my site how I want.
Neocities still exists, and is doing great!
I think you meant geocities :)
The oldschool zone.com.
That's how I got into online chess. And I played the Quake2 demo a lot there too. Good times.
You could do anything on zombo.com.
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.
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.
"For reasons unknown"
Lmao it's not hard to figure it out.
Most all of the site was racist as fuck with a hearty scoop of unironic MERICA FUCK YEAH
Justin.tv
Who did you watch there? I can recall 4PlayerPodcast and Mega64's podcast. Especially the annual vomitting festival Christcast.
Literally any website that had flash games. I miss scrolling through and having thousands of games to play.
Lego.com 's online games section
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.
The old school Gawker sites like io9, Deadspin and Jalopnik.
I guess I can say Homestar Runner and now the Homestar Runner Wiki.
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.
I'm aware they're still around. I appreciate that they only come out with something when they think it's worth making (and have time to make it) rather than desperately trying to stay relevant. But the flash era enabled a kind of interactivity that I'm not sure is possible in these latter days of passive content consumption.
At the time, I thought this April fools' video was their way of saying they wanted to wind things down. I also think Marzipan's Answering Machine 17 was a brilliant way to celebrate the site, and I would have been happy if that was the last thing they ever made. (Also you know the OUYA screwed up if H*R is making fun of it).
But I do mourn the seemingly immanent loss of the wiki. I hope someone else can revive it. I think the TV Tropes article on H*R calls the wiki "disturbingly comprehensive", and that's an apt description. I used it to read the transcripts of new toons after watching them as there often visual gags I missed that the text would point out.
Gaia online
The original FAQS.org site.
( nowadays, the awesomest lifesink is TVTropes.org , btw, for all the people needing a fix of interestings : )
_ /\ _
Tvtropes is starting to go downhill. I know they need to fund the site but the ads are out of control. There used to be one static ad in the corner not obstructing the content. Now it’s looking more like Fandom. And they block ad blockers.
I like excite over yahoo pre 2000's
Draac's Gifs 123 / School of HTML.
Taught me basic skills back in my WebTV days.
Fuk Warner Brothers.
Webtv was my real intro to the Internet as not just a place to look up stuff for school. I was introduced to IRC, Usenet, multiplayer online games all from our webtv set top
Gosh. Any, ya know?
I used to mock them, back then, because I thought I was better at it (and I was a stupid edgy teen), but now I really miss those janky, HTML illiterate pages that someone threw together without much of an inkling of what they were doing but with all the passion for their chosen subject, their fandom, their tiny niche ship, their obscure hobby.
I know, I know, "these still exist", neocities is a thing and a handful similar projects are desperately clinging to existence too. It's lost its innocence. Idk. I'm old.
Also, old-style message boards. Like subscribe smash that notification bell if you remember the 1. SMOF (which only existed for a few days into the actual 2000s don't at me).
I miss nectarine demoscene radio. Now we just have hypr.
You mean this Nectarine Demoscene Radio? https://scenestream.net/demovibes/
In name, perhaps in some sense. I'm thinking about nectarine.ojuice.net, hosted by Yes.
Well, the content is the same and it works the same as far as I can tell. I'm not terribly attached to the old domain name when the (rebooted) radio works just fine.
Dear blank please blank and FML were my go-to time wasters.
IndyMedia. It was direct, citizen journalism in all the best and worst ways. It's where I learned that the job of riot police is to attack citizens and start riots.
Tvtome.com
Miles better than IMDB, and specifically for TV shows. It was a great way of keeping track of episodes and seasons in preparation for tormenting torrenting (ducking autocorrect).
gamehippo.com, dohgames.com, 1up.com and zone.msn.com which technically is still around I just miss the Age of Empires game rooms and chat.
Yes! I know Jeremy Parish of 1up and Retronauts, he rues 1up's passing as well.
Also good was Joystiq, which was one of the best game news and culture sites. And recently I was reminded of Happy Puppy, the first really big gaming trailer and demo site, now dead for many years and barely remembered.
Haha it's a small world after all. When 1up did that super ambitious web 2.0 update... man. What a gorgeous website. RIP.
Brunching Shuttlecocks. Fucking hilarious comedy site with daily posts. Can't find any remnants of it out there.
YES! I happen to know a bit about that!
Half of it, Lore Sjöberg, is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/loresjoberg.bsky.socialI'm sure he'd be delighted to hear from someone else who remembers Brunching!
He has a website where he's posted some of his work since, called Bad Gods: https://badgods.com/
And there's a Discord where old Brunching fans hang out, Brunchma Expats, I can't send an invite at the moment but I'll try to remember to do it when I get back to the house!
Oh man, thanks! I just spent an hour reading his bluesky. Still funny as shit.
He is!
Joe Cartoon
timecube.com
Television Without Pity
jumptheshark.com
(wow I'm showing off my freakish memory here, I'm still an active Metafilter participant)
Ones that aren't a div mush mess. You see them rarely nowadays.
I mean, i agree, there are too much tags with ambiguous and overlapping definition. But c'mon, at least put the text in a <p>aragraph.
Jiggmin. It was some independent flash developers website where he posted a lot of browser games and had a forum with a decent community. Played a ton of platform racer games on there and had a lot of fun as a kid. It's been defunct for at least a decade if not more.
It’s been defunct for at least a decade if not more.
Are these the games that you're talking about?
zombo.com (the flash version)
You can do anything at zombo com... anything at all... the only limit is yourself
Gamewinners. While GameFaqs has largely taken over and a lot of games no longer offer actual built in cheat codes, GW was one of the best resources and even had cheats that aren't on GF. Thank god archive.org still lets me browse GW
Also CMGSCCC which had soooooo many gameshark codes! It still kinda exists as codetwink now
I hung soo much on Get that azzhole?, a site with a huge collection of user-made cars for GTA1. It wasn't easy to find the URL back, but I got it through the equally retro-looking https://www.lnkworld.com/.
MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs and MUSHes.
Usenet in general
sodaconstructor.com
memepool
ectoplasmosis
Boing Boing when it was great
An early virtual world called WorldsAway, technically still exists at VZones but I don't think it's possible to make an account now
Hotwired
Suck.com and early discussion side adjunct Plastic.com
TimmyBigHands, short-lived humor magazine from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 people shortly after the show folded the second time.
The Sci-Fi Channel's website and MTV.com, both started with the hopes of becoming a substantial part of the World Wide Web by getting in early, then shuttered when owners lost interest or believed the lies that social media was where the only thing that mattered any more. Also Cartoon Network's website, which was once a joy. Adult Swim's website hangs on, but is a shadow of its former self, and doesn't host forums any longer.
The Usenet MSTing archives at pinky.wtower.com
MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs and MUSHes.
I mean, they're still out there. Not all of them, and the player populations aren't as large as in their heyday.
Was just playing a mud earlier today!
I know, but it's not nearly the same kind of thing as back when they were big, sadly.
One thing that still exists is WWWF Grudge Match, a likely inspiration for MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, a crowdsourced humor site where they put different pop culture figures against each other in textual battles and people contributed their takes and votes on who would win. It hasn't updated in over two decades though. It even spawned a book!
(I am slightly responsible for its continued existence. I noticed that it had gone offline a while back. I happened to have Chris, one of its founders, in my contacts list, so I sent him a message about it. Turns out to have been an expired credit card, a quick change of backing funds and GRUDGE MATCH LIVES AGAIN!)
Also, The Conservatron, another crowdsource humor site, home of the Evil Black Marble from Marble Madness.
It seems like the Internet Oracle has finally, at last, succumbed to linkrot.
Two sites that still exist are Everything, H2G2 and the homepage of venerable roguelike game Nethack!
astalavista.box.sk
Thinking back I miss Astalavista. I suppose that was before 2000 but I'll say it anyways. It's not like I actually miss the content, I just miss the wild west time when things like that existed.
ogrish
my Spanish bro will remember Petardas.com
mulletsgalore.com
The OCP, before it was hardocp.
Using metacrawler.com before google was a thing.
Version Tracker.
I more so miss that time in Mac OS software.
Heartless Bitches.
Mystery of Time and Space was awesome. The site is still around but the point and click game seems to be gone.
All sites that have been expanded since then. They were lean and efficient.
Killer chicken