This was probably around 1995, I was a young kid just starting to be interested in computers and the internet, and we had a typical slow loading connection.
I remember at one point my dad and I found this random choose your own adventure set of webpages staring Paper Bag Head Man (or something similar) which often left him dead in comical ways. It wasn't a cartoon, just a photo of (presumably) the creator with a paper bag happy face on his head, with some descriptive text, that would take far too long to load on our slow connection.
It was one of the first "internet is weird" moments in my life, and it was fun exploring it with my dad. Ive remembered it in my adult life and have never been able to find any reference to it.
I miss the old fandom communities, like pre-strikethru LJ. Currently the bulk of fandom activity takes place on Tumblr, which is awful for a variety of reasons (the platform as designed isn’t a good fit for the type of activity, and the community is terrible)
Yeah, I do like Slashdot's time-linear format better than HN's fluid ranking, in that you can catch up from where you left off. However, the discussion in /. has gotten really old and bitter. HN has its own pervasive negative community aspects from the other direction, but certainly has more meaningful content in the discussions overall.
The two sites still share a large percentage of links, though, and I read stories on /. that I didn't happen to catch on HN's ephemeral front page.
cjb.net - I forget if they only allowed http forwarding, or actually gave you a real DNS entry (might have been either?), but you could get a hostname.cjb.net for free, as long as you kept your account active.
It's too long ago for me to remember the site's name but the subscription to it came when you signed up for a free Hotmail account back in the late 90s.
You would get an email each day that would take you to the site where you had to solve a reasonably cryptic whodunnit. I've never been good at these sorts of things but I would spend ages reading the story trying to solve the riddle. Pretty fun but years later I can't remember its name and I do miss it from time to time. It was a comfort to know these puzzles were being created and solved in the background but now is no more.
fatbabies.com was a dotcom era gossip site for people working .com startups to spill the beans on the outrageous behavior at their companies. Often times the person trying to spill beans is turned inside out for being wrong in their position. Very sarcastic and stress relieving. And as side entertainment, you and your coworkers try figure out which posts are about your company.
fark.com even though its demise was relatively recent. I missed the early days when the site wasn't sanitized (and that content, or easy access to it, still felt novel). Felt like one of many "wild west" sites of that time. Before our advertising overlords had come into power.
For me it's not so much websites as it is the old BBSes I spent my early teens calling up, and of course the door games. MajorMUD, LORD, TradeWars 2002, Usurper, Fazuul. You can still play these games, but playing with the other nerds in my town was really something special. There was also a MUD I played called MUME which is actually still up and still has an active playerbase [0]. Then there were the phone conferences which I dialed into when I could. And of course the old Unix systems I had access to. Probably the most nostalgic and fun of them all was Telenet. For anyone else that remembers Telenet fondly, there's actually a pretty true-to-life Telenet simulator with tens of thousands of systems to explore, and a quite active userbase [1].
webmonkey.com because that's where I learnt a lot of my craft, and TalkCity (which probably still exists) because of the community I discovered when I was going through a rough personal patch, and that community no longer exists.
Was going to say webmonkey too, internet connections at that time were dial up and pretty expensive at the time in Spain (you were charged by the minute)
So I downloaded the entire archive using a shareware scraper , and learned a lot from that offline copy.
Hmm, I'd say CheatEngine Forums used to be a pretty great place in terms of a bunch of geeks, finding various exploits in video games. It's what got me interested in computing in the first place.
I miss Google Reader. I used to read ~100 longer-form blogs that didn't publish daily. After Google Reader went away, I tried other RSS readers but they just weren't as convenient, and my online reading habits shifted to more Twitter. At first that seemed fine but over time it has become hard to keep my Twitter feed free of distracting trivia. Nowadays I just have a much smaller list of blogs I read regularly.
I also miss the way Slashdot made me feel near the dawn of the internet. Before I had the internet, I got my tech news from CNN or from newspapers. Once I got the internet and could read Slashdot, that was just amazing.
+1 for Inoreader. After Google Reader shut down there was a lull where no RSS reader was good enough or similar enough to be satisfactory, but Inoreader is now the proper replacement for me
It has been a while since I landed on Digg but I tried quite a few web based apps including Feedly, The Old Reader and several more that have already shut down. I also tried a few native tools like Safari's built in reader and Reeder on MacOS.
At the end of the day, nothing has been as good as Google Reader... at least not for the way I want to use it.
I feel your pain on loosing Google Reader. I have tried dozens of replacements and finally landed at https://digg.com/reader if you can believe that... Also, I am sure you have seen them but just incase you haven't - https://theoldreader.com/home was super similar to Google Reader.
Alas neither of these are the same but perhaps they will be "good enough".
I've heard this a ton of times, but I really can't grasp it. I've used RSS readers before, switched to Google Reader because it was better and didn't have a problem adjusting to another one after it went down.
But I've experienced this with other things, like for example I've been using Thunderbird since not long after Firefox was still called Phoenix and haven't manage to find anything close to a replacement, so maybe I shouldn't even speak up. :)
I shifted to Feedly and it easily imported all my google reader feeds. Today I have a couple of thousand feeds in Feedly and still find it a bliss to read through them.
Their mobile app is quite good too. I ended up buying their Pro lifetime subscription and it has been worth the money sofar.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 462 ms ] threadI remember at one point my dad and I found this random choose your own adventure set of webpages staring Paper Bag Head Man (or something similar) which often left him dead in comical ways. It wasn't a cartoon, just a photo of (presumably) the creator with a paper bag happy face on his head, with some descriptive text, that would take far too long to load on our slow connection.
It was one of the first "internet is weird" moments in my life, and it was fun exploring it with my dad. Ive remembered it in my adult life and have never been able to find any reference to it.
When they stopped it I couldn't find a good alternative and my reading habits changed, now I don't read as many blogs as I did.
The two sites still share a large percentage of links, though, and I read stories on /. that I didn't happen to catch on HN's ephemeral front page.
You would get an email each day that would take you to the site where you had to solve a reasonably cryptic whodunnit. I've never been good at these sorts of things but I would spend ages reading the story trying to solve the riddle. Pretty fun but years later I can't remember its name and I do miss it from time to time. It was a comfort to know these puzzles were being created and solved in the background but now is no more.
[0] http://mume.org/
[1] http://telehack.com/
So I downloaded the entire archive using a shareware scraper , and learned a lot from that offline copy.
I also miss the way Slashdot made me feel near the dawn of the internet. Before I had the internet, I got my tech news from CNN or from newspapers. Once I got the internet and could read Slashdot, that was just amazing.
I used Inoreader and it's now better than Google Reader ever was.
At the end of the day, nothing has been as good as Google Reader... at least not for the way I want to use it.
Alas neither of these are the same but perhaps they will be "good enough".
Reading the HN feed using RSS is much nicer than going to the main page.
But I've experienced this with other things, like for example I've been using Thunderbird since not long after Firefox was still called Phoenix and haven't manage to find anything close to a replacement, so maybe I shouldn't even speak up. :)
It solved all my Web 2.0 concerns but unfortunately was authored in Flash and not a modern framework. Alas.