I frequented tutorialforums.com around 2004. It was quite big around at that time but sadly the site went down for months when they decided to rewrite their forum from scratch .
By the time it was up, most of the regulars already moved on.
1996 or so: altavista.digital.com! I loved (and got pretty good at due to daily training, heh) using boolean operations to find whatever I wanted. No Google back then.
Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam.
I used altavista long after google had become the hip new thing. I liked it, because for certain searches I knew what results I would get back. Which is to say I knew how to look for things I wanted to find.
Google was smarter but seemed less intuitive to me to get at what I wanted.
I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....
I miss the old Google, back before it got gamed and curated to hell, and it felt like you could find what you wanted to find as long as it was on the net.
Slashdot is one for the ages. I quit cold when I realized I was a karma addict. It was the first website which I kept open in a tab and hit refresh on.
I also came to love penny arcade and the filthy movie reviews linked off slashdot homepage. Thanks for your effort.
This is why I loved slashdot and now hacker news. You're discussing some technology/framework/... and the local god of the ecosystem drops in and says hi.
I know you are an active user here, but this comment reminded me those users on Slashdot who would only comment when there is a user id competition (ie. who has the lowest id).
You wrote "altavista", and I heard "astalatista" which was a site I followed, for the cracks and reverse-engineering content.
Astalavista and +Fravia's reverse engineering sites were a lot of fun to follow back in the day, when reverse engineering anti-piracy dongles that plugged into your PC's parallel-port.
Unrelated to your comment here but a while back you mentioned you liked some Space Cadet keycaps I had, but they are usually only available via a group buy. There's another one going on right now for a set that looks the same but comes in a different key profile: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=105375.0
Not a website, but I miss a weekly email newsletter called NTK (Need to Know). I'm not sure how many HN readers were NTK readers, but I bet all NTK readers are now HN readers.
Slashdot. The technical discussions, the flamewars, dumping on Jon Katz, William Gibson vs. Neal Stephenson, using the web as a primary source of news on 09-11-2001. Posting as user #41803.
I miss the word game Acrophobia (I think it was an IRC game originally, but there was a good webapp version where I wasted more time than I'd like to admit)
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 432 ms ] threadBy the time it was up, most of the regulars already moved on.
Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam.
Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.
Google was smarter but seemed less intuitive to me to get at what I wanted.
It's as if they don't care about search result quality as much anymore.
I also came to love penny arcade and the filthy movie reviews linked off slashdot homepage. Thanks for your effort.
Astalavista and +Fravia's reverse engineering sites were a lot of fun to follow back in the day, when reverse engineering anti-piracy dongles that plugged into your PC's parallel-port.
Completely unrelated but somethingaweful.com was really hilarious back then. back when meme wasn't a thing.
The link dumps of all the new and exciting shit people were doing with the internet.
gatekeeper.dec.com ... an FTP site, but hey, you did say early days!
https://m.slashdot.org/story/31348
Posting as user 1XXX :)
https://www.acrofever.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20020802140849/http://www.zfilte...
Also, Metafilter and Fark. Both still exist to my surprise.
Information Leak
SoCal (ProBoards)
Too Smart Guys/PSP Hacking 101