What was your number one favorite website 'back in the day', that is now defunct?

Miniclip.com.

Sure you could go there still now. But it's an empty husk of what it was before. Flash died without any viable replacement for all the old flash games that relied on it.

They enshitified a ton too.

www.google.com

Defunct in the sense that it doesn't work as well it used to.

My state passed ID verification for adult websites, does that count?

StumbleUpon

www.ebaumsworld.com its still around but its not the same.

Also www.thingsididlastnight.com - it just said YOUR MOM in huge letters. Thats it. No ads, no images, nothing. Just YOUR MOM

Also www.mostannoyingwebpage.com (I think). Just an endless stream of popup messages with no way out

Digg.

I wouldn't be on Lemmy today if it weren't for Digg committing suicide, forcing everyone to switch to reddit. And then reddit went full retard with the 3rd party app thing, so here I am.

XPhilez

Best free shit. Vanished without a trace in a day

Egg2.com was my favorite flash game archive. Literally just a few hundred links to various flash games.

Ytmnd.com

Yahoo Games

Iminlikewithyou / omgpop

Peak Myspace-era cringe but so fun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_Ninja

They were super early YouTube.

Wow! I can't believe I forgot this!! Core memories unlocking...
- I learned about net neutrality through him
Were? I get their short clips in my Youtube recommendations.
- There WERE super early YouTube. Meaning they were first to be uploading on that platform. Not saying they haven't been producing content.

What.cd?

So hard to keep a ratio, too

Ytmnd.com ! Punch the keys for God's sake !

The SciFi channel forums used to have a "caption this" page where they had stills from their channel's live feed people could post quips about. That was back when they aired MST3K.

I used to spend hours watching people try to be funny.

I miss the old SciFi channel website. The chatrooms there are where my life on the internet began. Too much time spent chatting about this weeks episode of Sliders or when there was a petition because they cancelled MST3K and we fought to get it back.

lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala.con one day as a kid just typed in a random amount of la and .com and that just appeared.

The old Cartoon Network website. Used to play a lot of flash games on there back in the day, probably like most every other person who had that channel.

I would say Nitrome, but they're still alive even if they're a shell of their former self IMO.

I miss the Teen Titans game on there.
- The one where you go through the UK-ified Jump City? If so, yeah, same here. Never beat it. Might see if it's on Flashpoint and try to actually beat it some day.

Suck.com

back when there was not much excite was very nice. If it would have gotten tabs like yahoo it would have went at least as long.

There used to be a website called "thesmartass(dot)info". It had online emulators for old video game consoles as well as some flash games and a bunch of other stuff that I never used. The homepage also had a daily (or it might have been weekly, I've forgotten) artwork that was usually abstract but sometimes it got weird. Like, there is this one image that I sometimes think about, where it was a realistic looking image of a naked woman (or at least I think it was a woman) with a really long and flexible torso, and her torso is contorted so she fits inside a box.

I don't know when it happened but it seems like the domain has been transferred over to someone else and it's a completely different website now. Also, I did check the Wayback Machine and it is archived but it seems like it wasn't archived properly as the website is almost completely broken.

Reddit. Unfortunately it's defunct beyond repair now, but back in the day it was a nice place to discuss all sorts of topics with knowledgeable and like-minded folk.

The Zionists and American fascists seem to be taking it over too.
r/politics was mass censoring any coverage of the Jimmy Kimmel debacle recently.

Rip Stumble upon.

I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!

Gotcha fam
(Link works like stumbleupon basically)
- ooh, neat! ty!
I liked the idea, but after a while it just kept sending me to the same places.
- yeah haha that was a bit annoying!

Joecartoons

Hey look I'm hamster dancing.

Kuro5hin (pronounced "corrosion").

It started with a lot of people who disliked Slashdot. Kinda like Lemmy is full of a lot of people who dislike Reddit. It had a broader subject matter than Slashdot, though. You might end up reading about someone's experience of being fully immersed in a BDSM relationship where all windows were covered, all clocks were removed, and they spend the entire day in service to their master until a safeword is called. (IIRC, that went on for something like 6 months, but when they came out, the person thought it was closer to 4).

Or it might just be about how badly WEP on WiFi broke this week. There was a lot of that at the time.

There were probably three waves of users. I was around for the first; my UID is around 2,700. Second started around UID 30,000 and I think it was also mostly Slashdot refugees. Third was around UID 50,000 and it really went downhill with that one.

Did Ru5ty ever add the extra functionality he collected all those donations for?

Not dead, but not nearly as alive as it used to be.
https://homestarrunner.com/

I wanted to say this too, but yeah they are still here. And their latest cartoon is relevant too.
https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite

I mean, whether or not I liked Sodahead, whether or not it was good for me, and whether or not it was a good website are all questions without definitive answer, but I sure did spend my teenage years there

myspace.com

No, not the social network with my friend Tom, I mean the online file storage (would now be called 'cloud' storage) site that it was before it died and Tom bought the domain.

It had an astounding 300MB of space available for free, much more than the contemporary competition.

Of course now there's Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Myspace was just too far ahead of their time.

300mb is pretty freaking decent

Back in 1995, I was still using Gopher, when someone showed me WWW. I soon found the chatroom at Mrshowbiz.com, and was hooked to this new Internet technology.

But my favourite was Geocities. Had several sites there. They taught me HTML coding, and that there was such a thing as too many "Under construction" animated gifs.

not dead, but pretty dead anyway: cracked.com

Cracked had a 10/10 movie podcast that was stopped abruptly (after it was bought up & butchered ,laying off like 100 staff) & it was the best movie podcast.
- i fondly remember one post once that had me in tears, about teaching somali pirates about ebay
I liked them until they got political. Totally ruined their vibe.
- typical dot world

stile project went from a collection of bafflingly weird shit to a shitty porn site.

Yeah, there was a lot of porn before, but it wasn't really the main focus- it was basically a collection of shock value pics & videos that probably played a big part in me becoming desensitized... It was my source of "Eh, I've seen worse"

I liked his comics

Reddit, I guess. And Google.

YTMND from 20 years ago.

Technically it still exists but it's effectively dead.

That site was peak meme humor in its heyday. I still have a big list of some of my top urls.
Forgot about that one

Club Penguin. RIP :(

Waddle on, folks. Waddle on…

There was still an iteration of it up last I checked.
- You mean those CPPS? Idk about those… seems there were plenty of controversies around them. I miss the OG. A proper experience, safe for the youngins. These CPPS seem to have shown themselves as rather the opposite, actively dangerous to them. I'm not a youngin anymore, but still

Imagine my surprise when I just now typed in fark.com and saw that it's still there and it looks exactly like it did 25 years ago. Mind blown! I might even go back.

I used to use the NME website, which was a weekly music paper in the UK, back in the day.

It had forums and free webmail, so I had had an nme.com address that made me feel kinda cool (I was a teenager and music was very much my identity).

Then they cancelled the webmail and that was that. All my teen emails gone forever. I'd love to get them back, and who knows,they could be sitting on a server somewhere, but I doubt it.

Oh, also Bebo. Posted a lot on that precursor to Facebook and now it's all gone.

I don't know about number one, but a few that I miss.

freshmeat.net. Announcements of open source software releases and updates.
newegg.com --- computer components retailer --- is still around, but it doesn't hold the spot it once did.
bash.org. Searchable list of funny, ranked quotes from IRC and similar. There are some archives, like this one.
A few "hosting" sites that went down with a lot of user-created content. No one thing was amazing, maybe, but it produced a lot of dangling links. Geocities: "At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated.[7] The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.[8]". AngelFire. Tripod. Apparently the latter two are still around in some limited form.
Kaleidoscope.net, a site featuring themes for the eponymous classic MacOS themeing software package. They did a good job of generating theme previews. Fun to browse through.

Angelfire and Tripod were my first internet homes. And I'd forgotten about freshmeat! Thanks for the nostalgia.
As for bash.org: there's a fedi bot that posts a random quote once per hour:
https://p.mr64.net/users/bash
Comes with the warning about early 2000s humor
https://neocities.org/
What would you suggest instead of newegg now? I'm still using it out of momentum haven't thought to look elsewhere in a long time
- Microcenter is preety good.

Not defunct and was only my favorite for a very short period of time, but it left an impression and I still find myself referencing it from time to time. Serving the same great content for 25 years!

https://zombo.com/

You can do anything with zombo.com.. welcome to zombo.com
Zombocom was and still is the only website in the world.
I hear anything is possible at that website! Anything at all! The infinite is possible! The unattainable is unknown!
ZOMBO COM!
I make references to it periodically and only like 2 people IRL have gotten it.

I used to love IMDB before it got taken over. Especially the old forums where pretty much every TV show, every actor, etc... all had a forum on their page to discuss.

I would spend hours on there discussing the latest episodes of BSG, or Lost, or what have you. It was legitimately a water cooler for television watchers when no one in the real world shared the same television interests as me.

For Lost, the number of debates during that first couple seasons about what the connection would be in Locke and Hume being named after philosophers who wrote on human nature.

Or basically an easy place to go and discuss any thoughts or questions about a movie you just watched, or to find out if anyone else felt like an actor's performance was good/bad/etc...

It was just a fun place to hang out for a movie/TV buff. When they took it away, I was pretty sad.

It's not defunct tho... Newgrounds is still around.

Actually, none of my favorite websites are defunct. Something Awful, LiveJournal, and Penny-Arcade are also still going.

Long live the old internet.

The Dark Side of the Net and Goth Girl of the Week. There use to be a goth dating site but I can't remember the name. It doesn't matter I suppose. I will be dead soon any way.

&TOTSE

I got there right after the facelift in the early oughts, when they switched to vBulletin.

Shortly before the last shutdown, I cloned the entire website and I host it privately just for myself for future browsing.

Not favourite, but I used to use Google search almost exclusively because the results were good, and I could tell it to never show results from certain sites.

No need to tell this community the sad state of affairs it's in now...

I spent a lot of time in chat rooms roughly 30 years ago. Yahoo chat rooms were fun, and also The Offspring's old website from back in the late 90s had a chat room. Also I used to get a kick out of the "Ate my balls" webring and the dance ones that started with hamster dance.

BBS and IRC. Technically neither are totally dead, but that was my introduction to the Internet a few years before the WWW existed.

There are a few people running telnet-connected BBSes on the Internet.
kagis
Ah, someone has a list.
https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
The Telnet BBS Guide focuses Bulletin Board Systems – the original Social Network, serving the BBS community for over 27 years! We list both Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. We currently list 976 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.

Digg.com used to be my absolute favorite. Then it got bought out by a company who turned it into a content farm and it eventually died out. Now it's back and owned by Kevin Rose again, and I do like it a lot better than Reddit, but I still spend more time on Piefed these days.

I tried to join when I got banned from Reddit permanently after like 12 years for ban evasion (using a throway account). I joined the waiting list for an invite but still waiting. That's when I discovered Lemmy, which I'm quite liking. Never heard of Piefed. Is it similar?
- It's still invite only for now but I'd imagine it has to be getting close to the public release. If I had any invite codes left I woulda sent you one! We might get more pretty soon though. If so I'll dm you one but idk when they're coming. And piefed is pretty much Lemmy, only it's powered by Python instead of Rust and it has more moderation features. Pretty similar experience though. You're not really missing anything if you're already on Lemmy. Right now, Lemmy/Piefed are definitely more active and mature than Digg. It looks pretty slick but there aren't a whole lot of users yet. I do like it, I just like it here better right now.

There was a site I found in '98 or '99 that showed a crap graphics bubble wrap sheet and you could click them all and hear popping sounds!

I wouldn't say it was a number one favorite, but I feel like the internet isn't the same without timecube.com

TW: conspiracy nonsense, racism, crimes against grammar https://web.archive.org/web/20050829015921/http://www.timecube.com/

fuckedcompany.com

Cracked.

Not A website, but in the early modem days there used to be these things called web rings. When you were done going through one site (usually just a few short pages or a short story kind of deal back then), you clicked the 'next' button and it brought you to another random, related (usually) website. My favorite web ring was the Star Wars ring. Learned a lot of expanded universe stuff, and random fan fiction. There was one site it brought me to that told me how to use the force...still trying to make my beer come to my hand :-)

hamsterdance.org

Wiki

Way way way back in the late 90s I visited slashdot multiple times a day. I know it's still around but it is nothing like the commander taco days

I loved DDRFreak forums and RODiary. RIP to both of those sites.

Not really a web site but stumble upon was magic.

Stumbleupon was absolutely magic.

gamehippo.com was basically itch.io of the late 90's / early 2000's.

The Wayback Machine, I misremembered but sometimes you can find an archived binary/archived external mirror. Often the screenshots are at least.

Edit: Some examples:

2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010401174047/http://www.gamehippo.com/

2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040830074642/http://www.gamehippo.com/

2006 (best bet for finding active links): https://web.archive.org/web/20060112161747/http://www.gamehippo.com/

Pick pretty much any forum.

I would say MSN Chat/Groups. I know MSN itself is still alive and well, but those two things used to have been a way to feel a bond within a community. It was some of my earlier stages of roleplaying online with people, up until the day Microsoft decided to slap a subscription onto chat and then outright discontinuing it when that model fell apart.

mspaintadventures.com, home to the Homestuck web"comic" (it's very mixed-media) among others. It still exists, but doesn't work properly, in part because Homestuck was heavily built on flash animations.

I saw a thing once that archived it fully along with a sandboxed adobe flash, but idk how to find it now.
Not that it is even possible to catch up.
Shit didn't even make sense when it was drip fed to us, like tab from a nearly-empty can in the apocalypse.

VideoGameJams

Was a website of midi versions of video game songs and also had guitar tabs for the songs. I would legitimately just listen to those versions of the songs themselves.

Joecartoon

Stickdeath

No idea if it's still up or not.

Firingsquad - gaming focused hardware and news

https://web.archive.org/web/20040630053837/http://firingsquad.com/

Memepool

Scary Go Round

Everything2.com (holy shit! still exists)

maybe freshmeat?

I really enjoyed Cracked in its internet heyday. It was at times funny and others poignant. Somewhere I would have wanted to publish. Technically it still exists... but it is not the same.

Some of the old hardware forms, Gideontech and Pimprig/PCApex.

Wormhole by Centerfleet

Or Tea Games

skafunkrastapunk.com

epic music sharing...

also
dancingmokey.com

Something happened to fmh-child.org

It isn't what it used to be.

MotoModders.net

That shit was wild back in the day. Rhythm lights, anyone?

goldesel.6x.to for eMule links or bockwurst.6x.to for direct downloads of SW

Bolt.com! It was OG social networking and I loved it. it had chat rooms, message boards, and games etc. Miss that place

I was hoping someone else would say Bolt! That was such a great website way back. The message boards and games were so much fun. I spent way too many hours behind a computer at the library specifically to go on that website.
- Yes! I made so many friends back then

FunnyJunk

userfriendly.org . One of the great early web comics.

Ghcif.de

Steakandcheese.com when Kap was running it.

I used to visit Filesoup's forums a fair bit, and Homestar Runner too.

The Conversatron. The Internet was a different place back then.

https://everything2.com/title/The+Conversatron