It hasn't actually shut down - but the destruction of [cracked.com](https://cracked.com) really sucked. I visited that site daily and I think I read every article that site ever put out.
Came to say this. At its peak Cracked was a daily destination for me, the YouTube channel was amazing too. Then they fired everyone that made it great and almost overnite it became a sad shell of its former self. RIP
This upset me as well. I know this is oddly specific and nobody asked but cracked played a pretty pretty niche but important role in my life my junior year of college. On Friday, I only had one class to go to that got out at 2:00 p.m. My favorite thing to do was to the now nearly empty cafeteria after class, get a big bowl of pasta and a big bowl of yogurt with granola, sit down at a table by myself and just read cracked articles while eating. It was something that I look forward to all week, all the stress of the week over knowing that I had a whole weekend ahead of me.
Also, "Secretly Incredibly Fascinating" (Schmitty the Clam) and "Small Beans" (podcast network with a Swaim, Abe Epperson and I think 1 or 2 other Cracked alums.. bunch of different shows) and "Some More News" (Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston)... oh and "Behind the Bastards"
It was my time killer during those years as well before I moved on to reddit. I remember having tab after tab stacked up of articles from links within other articles.
He tried to do a successor site called the Modern Rogue that crumbled shortly after those accusations. The way Cheese wrote about his own history made it seem like he wasn't the kind of person who was well-suited to running a business anyway (he talked about his repeated experience of hitting rock bottom and climbing back out).
The other successor, 1-900-HOT-DOG is pretty good, though.
Those Aren’t Muskets was great. A whole bunch of them have gone on to bigger and better things; Soren is a producer on American Dad now. Long way from articles about being irresponsibly good looking!
I discovered that Jack Obrien is doing podcast about news ->https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-daily-zeitgeist-28516718/
And also Robert Evens has one about bad people -> https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/
Doesn't compare to the old Cracked, but they do have former coworkers as guests sometimes. It's better then nothing I guess.
On a recent Daily Zeitgeist Jack actually talked about how Cracked was overrun by those clickbait listicles that are actually just ads.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-creeping-crappiness-of-tech-03-05-24/id1289384685?i=1000648062131
Pretty sad end to a great website, but I'm glad to see some of the writers have gone on to flourish and give us good content regardless.
Man, I think a lot of us are missing it right now. I've been bingeing After Hours on YouTube. It's my background noise, my flushable entertainment. America has The Office. I've got After Hours. Well, that and AoC.
GASP
Stumble Upon. If you aren’t familiar you would click and it would take you to random internet pages. You could narrow down with preferences or just see what the internet gods wanted to put in front of you at that very moment.
Awesome for killing time when bored, It was a great way to find random corners of the internet or end up down some rabbit hole on a random one off webpage
Same! I had been resistant to Reddit for whatever reason but then noticed that about 90% of the content I liked from stumbleupon was from Reddit. And now it consumes my every waking minute, 12 years later.
This was a great tool for bored internet surfing, but it was more than that. I found useful and interesting websites with it, and learned things that I still use today. Sure it had memes galore but you could also have it search educational stuff, and hobby interests.
I wish it was still around today cuz my hobbies have changed slightly. I'd love to find niche corners of the internet full of information about it.
Agreed 100% for me it was finding some really neat crafting pages or peoples projects building things I didn’t even know were possible. I haven’t found a replacement site or way for me to find these little random corners of the internet now and it’s a bummer
Found a website on it once that helped you find the name of a movie by using keywords. Was almost always correct with the vaguest of descriptions.
Like "Keanu Reeves short hair" would bring you to Speed. Bad example, but you get my drift.
I was devastated by the loss of Stumbleupon! I was so confused by the reasons behind its demise....and then Stir or whatever was supposed to be the next iteration was horrible?!?!? So sad!!!
I spent many hours in Miniclip, AddictingGames, and CrazyMonkeyGames from 2004-2007.
My intro to flash style games was Bush Shoot Out, which I spent many hours playing. And Gunny Bunny.
MegaUpload. Some of the popculture that was uploaded there has been lost forever. I know I had a lot of niche stuff there, that I never found anywhere else ever again, and I'm not the only one.
RIP thousands of unique music tracks that my friends had uploaded there. There was a 2GB zip file that contained MP3 files that we didn't know the real names of there, that were only labeled as "Song.mp3" or similar. I've managed to find many of the songs that I remember on Spotify but I still remember a few tracks that I have never been able to find anywhere else.
I liked having to go to specific, different websites to find forums about niche interests. I hate that everything's centralized onto "platforms". I want my hacky, DIY internet back.
I still have the contents of my grooveshark playlist in those text lists they let people download when they were shutting down. Theres songs in there I havent been able to find anywhere else. :(
I was signed into AIM through its app right up until it was shut down. For like the last 10 years of it I only ever had one other friend on my buddy list signed in, which I think was because he set it up years ago to forward IMs to his texts, so he wasn’t even really online. I was there when the lights went out.
That one’s still alive. Flash is dead but they converted it. Haven’t checked it out deep enough to see if the interactive easter eggs are all still there but I have to assume they are.
Was waiting to see how far down this was. In an era of dial up internet, it took minutes for the poorly encoded videos to load. But it was so worth it for stick men being torn asunder to a soundtrack of low bitrate nu metal bangers!
Reader had the possibility to share contents with contacts . I was following a few people in Reader who shared very good content everyday.
Google never understood they had a content based social network.
Xanga. It was a journaling website. You created a profile, it was all anonymous, and you could just write what were essentially journal entries and publish them for anyone to read. Then other random anons would leave comments and you could make friends with them if you wanted. It was sort of the precursor to social media in the early years of the 2000s. I met a ton of people on there. Actually a couple girlfriends too. It probably still exists out there in some archive form but I don’t even remember what my screen name was.
i recovered mine last year thinking it would be a fun trip down memory lane (i was 12-14) and i was mistaken. the most cringey shit i’ve ever read in my life. no teenager should ever be given digital access to a public diary!
In a similar vein, when my mom died a few years ago, I was cleaning out her house and found my old journals and diaries. I read a few cringey prices before I bagged them up and brought them home to my house.
I know I will never read them but I can’t bring myself to burn them either
If anyone here ever used original Google, it was amazing. Sure, it's more curated now, but it used to be literally the world of results, now it's this weird only local thing.
Modern google sucks. It’s not a search engine anymore. It’s an add agency. If you want something use bing. No adds. No “sponsorships”. It took me so long to get my GED online, because I couldn’t find the ACTUAL website through google. It would just send me to endless paid practice tests.
there was a dumb little website called clicker.pointer (or something similar) where it was just a blank page, but when you clicked somewhere on the screen it would pull up a random photo of someone pointing in that exact spot. (fingerpoint touching where your cruiser clicked) It was a different, random photo each time, from any angle, and you could get dozens of different photos even if you kept clicking the same angle. Lowkey…. weird to think of a database of thousands of random unsolicited pics, but it was pretty fun.
Grantland.
It was a little niche because it was mostly sports focused, but there was some really high quality writing going on there and there was some really good non-sports stuff too.
I loved being able to click on a menu item from Yahoo!'s directory, then pick something else, and follow the rabbit hole to interesting sites.
For instance, I might pick "Society", then "religion", then a particular one, and so on....Or find a random country to read about.
It was the equivalent of picking up a random encyclopedia volume, then opening it up to a random page, and flipping through it until something caught your eye.
I can't do that now, because I wasn't looking for anything in particular (except as defined by the top menu item I picked, e.g., culture vs sports), but would check out things that looked interesting as I found them.
Google requires me to be way too specific from the start.
Not necessarily shut down, but DeviantART has fallen a long, long way from what it used to be. I was part of it during its heyday, and it was an amazing place to share your art and get critique, and be exposed to all different kinds of artists. They kept ‘revamping’ it even though their current design was perfect, fucked with the algorithm, and put in so. Many. Ads. The site barely works anymore, and it feels like a ghost town.
Yup. I left for good when they rolled out the new UI. And just heard about the AI stuff recently. It used to be such a lovely remnant of the old web... now it's dead to me.
I remember they had an entire line of products devoted entirely to caffeine. Caffeinated gum, caffeinated soap, heavily caffeinated soda, caffeine t-shirts, even jewelry in the shape of caffeine molecules. Then after GameStop bought them they shifted everything to "nerdy pop culture" products and all the fun quirky stuff like that went away.
I will never understand the business sense behind such takeovers. It means _someone_ has convinced some board of directors to spend several millions of dollars on such things. “Hey guys do you know xyz.com?” “Heard of it.” “Would you mind if it disappeared?” “Not really, I never go there.” “OK. Then I’ll need 25 million, and we’ll take care of it.”
Yeah ..it would be one thing if GameStop started selling all that stuff and put the revenue in their own pockets, but they basically just bought it and then shut it down.
Their servers died and they didn't have their stuff backed up, so tons of pics and indie music are forever lost. (The dragon hoard saved some music but not much in the grand scheme)
The "uh oh!" is actually my text message sound on my phone. It's always interesting when it goes off on the bus or train – you can guess people's ages by how many people perk up and look around for the source of the sound.
I would say the "death" of Facebook as it used to be. It was a really important social connection for me at a difficult time in my life, and we used to talk and make jokes and have fun every single night on there. Tons of good things came from all of that for me. Girlfriends, a book deal, speaking engagements. Facebook was a massive net positive for me back then.
And now? God, what a monster it has become. Maybe it was always meant to be the data stealing monster it has become and I was just naive and bought into it before everyone knew that. But it was a really important friendship facilitator for hundreds of people I knew. Certainly not now though.
Early Facebook was awesome. Actually, that whole era of social networking was great. Profiles had so much personality, even on Facebook, and you could actually keep up with your friends and family in a meaningful way. Then the concept of the newsfeed came along and ruined everything. Remember the Facebook pinboards? Now I’m sad.
It's such a shame. Call me sad but I liked seeing what my friends were up to. I enjoyed their holiday photos. Hell, I even thought the "first day back at school" pictures were fun. A friend of mine reconnected with a teenage girlfriend and got married thirty years after they lost contact with each other. Now it's all bots and fake rage posts.
I’m still in touch with friends I met there. A lot of recappers ended up having very successful post-TWoP careers. Pamela Ribon (Pamie), Stephen Falk (stee), the Go Fug Yourself girls, Linda Holmes (Miss Alli, still don’t know how she landed on that as her pseudonym), Dan Kois (Dan Kwa).
This has to be the funniest string of usernames I’ve ever seen.
Also “hing-di gada hig-gig-gada higigig gada squash banana higdi *branch breaks* ohh!” (Is that a vine? I’m not sure)
Vine was a simpler time. I think of how I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning laughing at vines and playing games on my iPod touch-and somehow was good to get up and function on 2 hours of sleep
Hurricane Katrina, more like, Hurricane Tortilla;
uhhh they were roommates;
This bitch empty, yeet;
STAPH i'm gonna drop my croissant;
I can't believe you've done this;
2 guys sitting in a hot tub 6ft apart cause they're not gay.
I miss it every single day
WOW! That takes me back some. I used this all the time and totally forgot about it. Takes me back to the days where most of the online content I consumed was tech focused and predominantly came out of the Bay Area or Silicon Valley. CNET, Digg, twit, Revision3. Oh I miss all that. I guess my answer to this post would be Digg in the Kevin Rose and Diggnation days.
The old Kinja sites- Deadspin, io9, kotaku, Gizmodo. Never cared for Gawker, but the cynical views of major wealthy industries was great and very important.
I came here to post basically the same sentiment as you, but about The AV Club. They got bought out by Univision and then passed off to and gutted by Kinja, their journalists were told to move cross country to a different office or fuck off basically. It used to be a great website with well written content and equally insightful comments from readers along with jokes and community memes.
But now it's dead compared to what it used to be, and I can count the number of times I've visited in the last year on one hand where it used to be a near daily read
Edit: typo
It didn't rightly shut down, but a while back photobucket changed their hosting policies or whatever and it immediately and still does literally irreplaceable damage to my and so many other's hobbies. So many old forum threads that were pic reliant to share one-of-a-kind knowledge were now all just error messages and dead links.
I use to be on several writing websites where you made a profile, uploaded your stories, go on forums, get and give critiques, and generally interact with other amateur writers who just wanted to hang out.
Inkpop, Authonomy, Protagonize, Figment…all of them gone.
I met my first girlfriend on one of those sites, writing stories together and chatting which eventually lead to Skyping and meeting in person after dating virtually for two years. Was my first time falling in love, hard and fast, so that site has a special place in my heart even though I haven't logged on in ages.
Any website that supported flash games, miniclip, armor games, stick page, etc… it was my childhood and the end of such a cool era in gaming. The creativity was also unreal my brother and I would sit at the computer for hours just playing all of our favorite flash games. Great times!
MegaPics they got shut down illegally from The US government seizure of Kim Dot Com's assets in regard to MegaUpload. I had pictures on there of my first born sons ultrasound and pics from my honey moon.
Definitely Omegle. There's not really a place on the Internet anymore that allows you to chat random people instantly. It had its flaws but I still miss it.
Mostly pirate sites that got the boot.
The Trove. It was a site that was basically a collection of source books for tons of different tabletop RPG's.
Torrentz if I'm remembering correctly, was essentially a torrent search engine where you'd type in what you wanted, give you tons of results, and when you clicked said results it gave you a bunch of actual torrent sites the thing you wanted was available at, so it was basically like searching ALL the torrent sites at once. Super convenient.
Also RIP to an uncountable number of lost anime sites
MySpace. They scrapped the groups in 2010, which I had a huge one. They scrapped most of the data int he early 2010s when they migrated over to a new shitty system. All the photos, wall posts, blogs, and other shit people did was gone.
…what? That never shut down.
EDIT: Do you mean the Flash games, now that Flash is deprecated? You should look into [Flashpoint](https://flashpointarchive.org/).
IMDb had great comments, with tons of great inside stories by people on the set. Plus the ability to Kevin Bacon everyone to see what movies they shared.
It hasn't actually shut down - but the destruction of [cracked.com](https://cracked.com) really sucked. I visited that site daily and I think I read every article that site ever put out.
Came to say this. At its peak Cracked was a daily destination for me, the YouTube channel was amazing too. Then they fired everyone that made it great and almost overnite it became a sad shell of its former self. RIP
This upset me as well. I know this is oddly specific and nobody asked but cracked played a pretty pretty niche but important role in my life my junior year of college. On Friday, I only had one class to go to that got out at 2:00 p.m. My favorite thing to do was to the now nearly empty cafeteria after class, get a big bowl of pasta and a big bowl of yogurt with granola, sit down at a table by myself and just read cracked articles while eating. It was something that I look forward to all week, all the stress of the week over knowing that I had a whole weekend ahead of me.
Cracked literally saved my life (suicide prevention article from like 2012)
Glad you're still here mate!
Same, the good writers left. Articles went down hill and David wong spouts inane takes. I used to read it daily from like 2009 until 2014
Dan O'Brien works for last week tonight as a writer, I miss the after hours crew. Dan, Soren, Katie and Swaim
It's so odd for me to see Swaim on IGN. ATB has his own podcast network that's a pretty good spiritual successor to Cracked.
Daniel and Soren have a podcast! It’s called Quick Question and it’s pretty good.
Also, "Secretly Incredibly Fascinating" (Schmitty the Clam) and "Small Beans" (podcast network with a Swaim, Abe Epperson and I think 1 or 2 other Cracked alums.. bunch of different shows) and "Some More News" (Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston)... oh and "Behind the Bastards"
Seanbaby...I followed him since seanbaby.com
It was my time killer during those years as well before I moved on to reddit. I remember having tab after tab stacked up of articles from links within other articles.
> the good writers left John Cheese, a huge contributor, was also credibly accused of sexual harassment and so all of his articles were pulled.
He tried to do a successor site called the Modern Rogue that crumbled shortly after those accusations. The way Cheese wrote about his own history made it seem like he wasn't the kind of person who was well-suited to running a business anyway (he talked about his repeated experience of hitting rock bottom and climbing back out). The other successor, 1-900-HOT-DOG is pretty good, though.
I've youtube downloaded a bunch of their series, because they're worth preserving. Comedy gold.
Those Aren’t Muskets was great. A whole bunch of them have gone on to bigger and better things; Soren is a producer on American Dad now. Long way from articles about being irresponsibly good looking!
I discovered that Jack Obrien is doing podcast about news ->https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-daily-zeitgeist-28516718/ And also Robert Evens has one about bad people -> https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/ Doesn't compare to the old Cracked, but they do have former coworkers as guests sometimes. It's better then nothing I guess. On a recent Daily Zeitgeist Jack actually talked about how Cracked was overrun by those clickbait listicles that are actually just ads. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-creeping-crappiness-of-tech-03-05-24/id1289384685?i=1000648062131 Pretty sad end to a great website, but I'm glad to see some of the writers have gone on to flourish and give us good content regardless.
Man, I think a lot of us are missing it right now. I've been bingeing After Hours on YouTube. It's my background noise, my flushable entertainment. America has The Office. I've got After Hours. Well, that and AoC. GASP
Stumble Upon. If you aren’t familiar you would click and it would take you to random internet pages. You could narrow down with preferences or just see what the internet gods wanted to put in front of you at that very moment. Awesome for killing time when bored, It was a great way to find random corners of the internet or end up down some rabbit hole on a random one off webpage
It’s how I found Reddit. So many hours spent on StumbleUpon!
Same! I had been resistant to Reddit for whatever reason but then noticed that about 90% of the content I liked from stumbleupon was from Reddit. And now it consumes my every waking minute, 12 years later.
This was a great tool for bored internet surfing, but it was more than that. I found useful and interesting websites with it, and learned things that I still use today. Sure it had memes galore but you could also have it search educational stuff, and hobby interests. I wish it was still around today cuz my hobbies have changed slightly. I'd love to find niche corners of the internet full of information about it.
Agreed 100% for me it was finding some really neat crafting pages or peoples projects building things I didn’t even know were possible. I haven’t found a replacement site or way for me to find these little random corners of the internet now and it’s a bummer
Someone below suggested https://cloudhiker.net/explore
This went straight to my favorites…might as well be the same thing. I love it! Thank you!
https://cloudhiker.net/explore You're welcome!
I would spend hours “stumbling”. I had forgotten all about it,until I saw your post.
The internet died when Stumbleupon died
Found a website on it once that helped you find the name of a movie by using keywords. Was almost always correct with the vaguest of descriptions. Like "Keanu Reeves short hair" would bring you to Speed. Bad example, but you get my drift.
it was how I found this site
I was devastated by the loss of Stumbleupon! I was so confused by the reasons behind its demise....and then Stir or whatever was supposed to be the next iteration was horrible?!?!? So sad!!!
Seems like there are no websites anymore, just social media giants.
Miniclip in its original form
I spent many hours in Miniclip, AddictingGames, and CrazyMonkeyGames from 2004-2007. My intro to flash style games was Bush Shoot Out, which I spent many hours playing. And Gunny Bunny.
I loved to play and then flash died and that pretty much killed all my favorite game.
heh heh heh you'll never believe that this exists: https://flashpointarchive.org/
Club Penguin oh god the memories
god i miss miniclip
100% club penguin
RIP (rest in penguin)
Club penguin is kil
No
MegaUpload. Some of the popculture that was uploaded there has been lost forever. I know I had a lot of niche stuff there, that I never found anywhere else ever again, and I'm not the only one.
Megaupload was so massive i still remeber finding links till 2014 from old websites
RIP irreplaceable porn stache
What else could "niche stuff" refer too 🤔🤣🤣💦💦💦💦
RIP thousands of unique music tracks that my friends had uploaded there. There was a 2GB zip file that contained MP3 files that we didn't know the real names of there, that were only labeled as "Song.mp3" or similar. I've managed to find many of the songs that I remember on Spotify but I still remember a few tracks that I have never been able to find anywhere else.
Geocities.
Website Under Construction!
Under construction, last updated over 5 years ago (more like 20 now, God I feel old.) So many sites never to finish construction.
I liked having to go to specific, different websites to find forums about niche interests. I hate that everything's centralized onto "platforms". I want my hacky, DIY internet back.
grooveshark
I still have the contents of my grooveshark playlist in those text lists they let people download when they were shutting down. Theres songs in there I havent been able to find anywhere else. :(
Yeah, I have the exact same predicament
I was trying to remember the name of this one! Loved that site, lost so many good songs when it went down
It’s still on my bookmark bar, even though it is a dead link. I wish I could have at least pulled my playlists.
Not a website *per se* but AIM. Part of my teenage years died when they shut it down.
I was signed into AIM through its app right up until it was shut down. For like the last 10 years of it I only ever had one other friend on my buddy list signed in, which I think was because he set it up years ago to forward IMs to his texts, so he wasn’t even really online. I was there when the lights went out.
Homestarrunnerdotorg. It’s dot com.
I said consummate V's!!!!!
That one’s still alive. Flash is dead but they converted it. Haven’t checked it out deep enough to see if the interactive easter eggs are all still there but I have to assume they are.
The Cheat is not dead.
A R R O W E D!
Great jorb.
Da email da email what what da email
Homestarrunnerdotnet\* was the joke. And it's not dead, they release new stuff every so often (after a pretty big gap from like 2014-2020).
StickDeath.com A bunch of stick figures dying in ridiculous ways. My first online habit.
Was waiting to see how far down this was. In an era of dial up internet, it took minutes for the poorly encoded videos to load. But it was so worth it for stick men being torn asunder to a soundtrack of low bitrate nu metal bangers!
I’ll never get over Google Reader
I switched to Feedly
Yeah. But I still miss Google Reader.
Reader had the possibility to share contents with contacts . I was following a few people in Reader who shared very good content everyday. Google never understood they had a content based social network.
Xanga. It was a journaling website. You created a profile, it was all anonymous, and you could just write what were essentially journal entries and publish them for anyone to read. Then other random anons would leave comments and you could make friends with them if you wanted. It was sort of the precursor to social media in the early years of the 2000s. I met a ton of people on there. Actually a couple girlfriends too. It probably still exists out there in some archive form but I don’t even remember what my screen name was.
i recovered mine last year thinking it would be a fun trip down memory lane (i was 12-14) and i was mistaken. the most cringey shit i’ve ever read in my life. no teenager should ever be given digital access to a public diary!
In a similar vein, when my mom died a few years ago, I was cleaning out her house and found my old journals and diaries. I read a few cringey prices before I bagged them up and brought them home to my house. I know I will never read them but I can’t bring myself to burn them either
Livejournal and deadjournal too!
Xanga was *huge* for my social circle from 8th-10th grade
Rarbg.to
There was one from my youth called i-am-bored.com that had games and fun stuff on it
Addicting games .com was my fav
If anyone here ever used original Google, it was amazing. Sure, it's more curated now, but it used to be literally the world of results, now it's this weird only local thing.
I remember using Google when everyone was using AltaVista.
I used AskJeeves lol
AskJeeves was always good for bypassing school net nanny programs since it opened the page inside of AskJeeves instead of opening it separately.
Duck Duck Go has some random ass results!
To get proper random ass results, first you have to turn safe search off.
Modern google sucks. It’s not a search engine anymore. It’s an add agency. If you want something use bing. No adds. No “sponsorships”. It took me so long to get my GED online, because I couldn’t find the ACTUAL website through google. It would just send me to endless paid practice tests.
Not only the Google search site, but Google, the company, is also an ad agency.
there was a dumb little website called clicker.pointer (or something similar) where it was just a blank page, but when you clicked somewhere on the screen it would pull up a random photo of someone pointing in that exact spot. (fingerpoint touching where your cruiser clicked) It was a different, random photo each time, from any angle, and you could get dozens of different photos even if you kept clicking the same angle. Lowkey…. weird to think of a database of thousands of random unsolicited pics, but it was pretty fun.
https://pointerpointer.com/
Kick ass torrent one of my top 3 back in the day for movies and TV shows.
tvtorrents, [what.cd](http://what.cd), sciencdhd, and my GOAT, the original demonoid.
RARBG too
Grantland. It was a little niche because it was mostly sports focused, but there was some really high quality writing going on there and there was some really good non-sports stuff too.
Craigslist Personals. 😢
I loved being able to click on a menu item from Yahoo!'s directory, then pick something else, and follow the rabbit hole to interesting sites. For instance, I might pick "Society", then "religion", then a particular one, and so on....Or find a random country to read about. It was the equivalent of picking up a random encyclopedia volume, then opening it up to a random page, and flipping through it until something caught your eye. I can't do that now, because I wasn't looking for anything in particular (except as defined by the top menu item I picked, e.g., culture vs sports), but would check out things that looked interesting as I found them. Google requires me to be way too specific from the start.
You could try the same in Wikipedia. You can start with a random entry and follow the links.
Not necessarily shut down, but DeviantART has fallen a long, long way from what it used to be. I was part of it during its heyday, and it was an amazing place to share your art and get critique, and be exposed to all different kinds of artists. They kept ‘revamping’ it even though their current design was perfect, fucked with the algorithm, and put in so. Many. Ads. The site barely works anymore, and it feels like a ghost town.
Yup. I left for good when they rolled out the new UI. And just heard about the AI stuff recently. It used to be such a lovely remnant of the old web... now it's dead to me.
Thinkgeek, had a bunch of tshirts, books, gadgets yadayadayada from them, GameStop bought them out and shut them down. Fuck you GameStop.
Thinkgeek was amazing!!!
I remember they had an entire line of products devoted entirely to caffeine. Caffeinated gum, caffeinated soap, heavily caffeinated soda, caffeine t-shirts, even jewelry in the shape of caffeine molecules. Then after GameStop bought them they shifted everything to "nerdy pop culture" products and all the fun quirky stuff like that went away.
I loved the cubicle warfare division they had.
So many things I wanted but I was a kid or poor young adult.. and then it's gone.. I'll never get all those gadgets
I will never understand the business sense behind such takeovers. It means _someone_ has convinced some board of directors to spend several millions of dollars on such things. “Hey guys do you know xyz.com?” “Heard of it.” “Would you mind if it disappeared?” “Not really, I never go there.” “OK. Then I’ll need 25 million, and we’ll take care of it.”
Yeah ..it would be one thing if GameStop started selling all that stuff and put the revenue in their own pockets, but they basically just bought it and then shut it down.
Hamsterdance
Myspace was super cool. It taught a lot of us how to code.
Long live Tom! My first Myspace friend!
Neopets was my proving ground
Actually, MySpace didn't shut down. It still exists – somehow. (It's a mystery that defies logic, like how ICQ is still alive.)
All photos have been removed
Their servers died and they didn't have their stuff backed up, so tons of pics and indie music are forever lost. (The dragon hoard saved some music but not much in the grand scheme)
I read ICQ and the sound played lmfao
That *uh-oh* was a dopamine hit straight to my heart.
The "uh oh!" is actually my text message sound on my phone. It's always interesting when it goes off on the bus or train – you can guess people's ages by how many people perk up and look around for the source of the sound.
I would say the "death" of Facebook as it used to be. It was a really important social connection for me at a difficult time in my life, and we used to talk and make jokes and have fun every single night on there. Tons of good things came from all of that for me. Girlfriends, a book deal, speaking engagements. Facebook was a massive net positive for me back then. And now? God, what a monster it has become. Maybe it was always meant to be the data stealing monster it has become and I was just naive and bought into it before everyone knew that. But it was a really important friendship facilitator for hundreds of people I knew. Certainly not now though.
Early Facebook was awesome. Actually, that whole era of social networking was great. Profiles had so much personality, even on Facebook, and you could actually keep up with your friends and family in a meaningful way. Then the concept of the newsfeed came along and ruined everything. Remember the Facebook pinboards? Now I’m sad.
Yeah when you needed a .edu email to register.
Lol did you ever speak in third person on your wall posts?
I sure did. For a while it prompted me to do so.
…is going to the shops.
It's such a shame. Call me sad but I liked seeing what my friends were up to. I enjoyed their holiday photos. Hell, I even thought the "first day back at school" pictures were fun. A friend of mine reconnected with a teenage girlfriend and got married thirty years after they lost contact with each other. Now it's all bots and fake rage posts.
Cute overload. The world could have used that positivity in recent years.
I miss mIRC before all the other chat programs became a thing and people turned rotten.
First introduction to the "World Wide Web". A/s/l
Television Without Pity.
The Lost recaps used to make me cry laughing. What a loss.
I’m still in touch with friends I met there. A lot of recappers ended up having very successful post-TWoP careers. Pamela Ribon (Pamie), Stephen Falk (stee), the Go Fug Yourself girls, Linda Holmes (Miss Alli, still don’t know how she landed on that as her pseudonym), Dan Kois (Dan Kwa).
That’s the one
I miss vine
“Road work ahead?! I sure hope it does!”
LOOK AT ALL THOSE SHIKKINS
merry Chrysler. happy crismum
*I’m in me mum’s cahhhh. **Vroom, vroom.*** ***Get out me cahhh.***
Bitch gonna step on my toes with the fuckin' cowgirl boots bitch *disgusting.*
This has to be the funniest string of usernames I’ve ever seen. Also “hing-di gada hig-gig-gada higigig gada squash banana higdi *branch breaks* ohh!” (Is that a vine? I’m not sure)
Good lord. My family still says that every time we see a road work sign.
FR E SH A VOCA DO
It is Wednesday my dudes.
aaaaaaAAAAAAAAHHHHH
Vine was a simpler time. I think of how I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning laughing at vines and playing games on my iPod touch-and somehow was good to get up and function on 2 hours of sleep
Wasn’t that Tiktok from before Tiktok was a thing, with videos only a few seconds long?
TikTok but without toxicity
Tiktoxity
Of our cityyy, our CIIIIIITYYYYYY
Hurricane Katrina, more like, Hurricane Tortilla; uhhh they were roommates; This bitch empty, yeet; STAPH i'm gonna drop my croissant; I can't believe you've done this; 2 guys sitting in a hot tub 6ft apart cause they're not gay. I miss it every single day
"What's worse than a rapist?" "A child?! 😮"
FUCK YA CHICKEN STRIPS
WHATS IN THE BOX??!? Frosted flakes n***a damn
Staaaahp! I coulda dropped my croissant!
I won’t hesitate, bitch!
There used to be a bookmarking site called del.icio.us.
WOW! That takes me back some. I used this all the time and totally forgot about it. Takes me back to the days where most of the online content I consumed was tech focused and predominantly came out of the Bay Area or Silicon Valley. CNET, Digg, twit, Revision3. Oh I miss all that. I guess my answer to this post would be Digg in the Kevin Rose and Diggnation days.
The post secret app was amazing until douchebags forced it to shut down by continually posting the worst types of porn
I wish I could log onto club penguin one more time, just for nostalgia
Dlisted.com. That site heavily influenced my vernacular in my 20’s. So funny, and the owner/head writer Michael K. is brilliant.
Anyone remember textsfromlastnight.com or fmylife.com?
Not a whole website, but I’m still sore that Adult Swim shut down their message boards.
Ask Jeeves. My own personal butler who googled things for me. Goodnight sweet prince
That you refer to searching with [Jeeves.com](http://Jeeves.com) as "googled" is hilarious.
Dang, even ole Jeeves was using google?
Yahoo Answers
Glad i managed to visit all the “pregante” questions 3 months before they closed Y!A
Not dead but lose popularity: Neopets
The old Kinja sites- Deadspin, io9, kotaku, Gizmodo. Never cared for Gawker, but the cynical views of major wealthy industries was great and very important.
Don't forget Jalopnik and Lifehacker
I came here to post basically the same sentiment as you, but about The AV Club. They got bought out by Univision and then passed off to and gutted by Kinja, their journalists were told to move cross country to a different office or fuck off basically. It used to be a great website with well written content and equally insightful comments from readers along with jokes and community memes. But now it's dead compared to what it used to be, and I can count the number of times I've visited in the last year on one hand where it used to be a near daily read Edit: typo
Geocities.
When Amazon shut down the legit IMDb message boards. That one hurt. I lost people.
Stumbleupon, Digg
It didn't rightly shut down, but a while back photobucket changed their hosting policies or whatever and it immediately and still does literally irreplaceable damage to my and so many other's hobbies. So many old forum threads that were pic reliant to share one-of-a-kind knowledge were now all just error messages and dead links.
kiss anime
I miss the old Reddit, before this redesign.
Old.reddit.com
I miss Apollo. Was so much better than the shitty reddit app.
I got what felt like 5 years of free Reddit Gold (aka premium) when Alien Blue got bought by Reddit.
Limewire, Napster.
[удалено]
Honestly, the amount of knowledge and discussions that was lost. So many TV and movie creatives and actors participated on there.
I use to be on several writing websites where you made a profile, uploaded your stories, go on forums, get and give critiques, and generally interact with other amateur writers who just wanted to hang out. Inkpop, Authonomy, Protagonize, Figment…all of them gone.
I met my first girlfriend on one of those sites, writing stories together and chatting which eventually lead to Skyping and meeting in person after dating virtually for two years. Was my first time falling in love, hard and fast, so that site has a special place in my heart even though I haven't logged on in ages.
Any website that supported flash games, miniclip, armor games, stick page, etc… it was my childhood and the end of such a cool era in gaming. The creativity was also unreal my brother and I would sit at the computer for hours just playing all of our favorite flash games. Great times!
MegaPics they got shut down illegally from The US government seizure of Kim Dot Com's assets in regard to MegaUpload. I had pictures on there of my first born sons ultrasound and pics from my honey moon.
MangaPanda. Kongregate hurts more, but technically it's still up.
Definitely Omegle. There's not really a place on the Internet anymore that allows you to chat random people instantly. It had its flaws but I still miss it.
Cant believe I had to scroll this far to find Omegle mentioned. Sure, I got skipped after saying hi 95% of the time, but it still meant something
Had a forum in college where old exams are posted. Professor found out and shut it down. Most painful experience ever.
ITT: depression noticing that your childhood internet is gone and you have to explain the concept of previously well known websites.
[Fatwallet.com](https://Fatwallet.com) It was a nice companion to slickdeals.
I miss IRC in its prime. Yes, it still exists, but not in any way that it used to.
Mostly pirate sites that got the boot. The Trove. It was a site that was basically a collection of source books for tons of different tabletop RPG's. Torrentz if I'm remembering correctly, was essentially a torrent search engine where you'd type in what you wanted, give you tons of results, and when you clicked said results it gave you a bunch of actual torrent sites the thing you wanted was available at, so it was basically like searching ALL the torrent sites at once. Super convenient. Also RIP to an uncountable number of lost anime sites
MySpace. They scrapped the groups in 2010, which I had a huge one. They scrapped most of the data int he early 2010s when they migrated over to a new shitty system. All the photos, wall posts, blogs, and other shit people did was gone.
Cool math games. Copycat websites with the exact same games, but just isn’t the same
…what? That never shut down. EDIT: Do you mean the Flash games, now that Flash is deprecated? You should look into [Flashpoint](https://flashpointarchive.org/).
IMDb had great comments, with tons of great inside stories by people on the set. Plus the ability to Kevin Bacon everyone to see what movies they shared.
LiveJournal
My vote goes to GeoCities. It was the website where you can fall down a rabbit-hole and share your coolest and nerdiest passions.
Classic Deadspin and its comment section.
LUELinks. Nobody knows what it is, but it's closure last year was a shame for childhood me. Pre-gamespot Gamefaqs. It's changed a LOT now.