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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_Ninja
They were super early YouTube.
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.
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.
reddit
&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.
I loved DDRFreak forums and RODiary. RIP to both of those sites.
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.
Joecartoons
Hey look I’m hamster dancing.
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.
Rip Stumble upon.
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.
