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The ones without paywalls and ads.
Joe Cartoon
(wow I’m showing off my freakish memory here, I’m still an active Metafilter participant)
MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs and MUSHes.
Usenet in general
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.
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!
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!)
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.
Oh man the day what shut down was a goddamn international tragedy
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.social I’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!
Unpopular opinion: Google?
Back before it sucked.
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.
Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago
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.
I definitely miss Stumbleupon. Closest I can find to fill that void is jumpstick.app, which is also good.
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’
kongregate. place is practically dead now
Yeah, Newgrounds keeps chugging along though.
zombo.com (the flash version)
You can do anything at zombo com… anything at all… the only limit is yourself
Luckily they’re still active on YouTube!
AND at their website, which now uses Ruffle as its Flash player!
It’s still around, and a while ago had a cartoon about going back to a website!
The sites still up, but I don’t know if it gets updated.
I think I’m about 15 years behind on my SBEmails.
it does! And they even had a new sbemail fairly recently! https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/210-robots
The email. The email. The what what? The email.
Everybody to the limit! Fhqwhgads!
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 working again, through the power of Ruffle!
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.
The could fucking convert their flash files into HTML5. There are tools that do it.
Stumbleupon it was how I found Reddit
