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Websites that were super popular and relevant, then faded away

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HIGH DEF JEFF

Banned
I go to aintitcool every 6 months or so just to see what the gossip is about Harry. The talkback, which was once policed pretty aggressively is now a free for all where they rip Harry apart for all his lies and fumblings. As someone who was never a fan of Harry its a lot of fun to watch the car accident that site has become. He is such a relic of the dial up days. Once considered "Hollywoods Public Enemy #1" now he just writes his weekly DVD column praying someone clicks the links to Amazon.
 
S

Slayven

Member
terrisus said:
Everything on AOL

Contrary to what people would have you believe now, there were a whole bunch of awesome things on AOL in the 1990s.
Since the mid-2000s though, pretty much every "AOL Keyword" just brings you to an internet page that you could get to just the same without AOL.

aolwelcome.jpg


RIP 1990s AOL
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the trivia rooms were great.

HIGH DEF JEFF said:
I go to aintitcool every 6 months or so just to see what the gossip is about Harry. The talkback, which was once policed pretty aggressively is now a free for all where they rip Harry apart for all his lies and fumblings. As someone who was never a fan of Harry its a lot of fun to watch the car accident that site has become. He is such a relic of the dial up days. Once considered "Hollywoods Public Enemy #1" now he just writes his weekly DVD column praying someone clicks the links to Amazon.
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Damn, he did have an ego.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
HIGH DEF JEFF said:
The talkback, which was once policed pretty aggressively
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I don't rememeber this as ever having been the case, myself.

Hollywood co-opted him pretty quickly. He had a couple production deals that bounced around and ultimately went nowhere (including John Carter, once upon a time).

AICN's track record is interesting to look at, considering how big the site was in the late 90s/early 2000s. AICN ended up basically being responsible for:

kickstarting the enthusiast press for film
getting JJ Abrams' Superman trilogy shitcanned
coining the phrase "Raped my childhood."

...and that's about it so far as lasting impact. The first one on the list is pretty big, though. Lot of quality writers came out of that primordial ooze, eventually. Hollywood eventually learned how to turn that to their own interests, as of course they would, but the way the internet reads about movies now can be traced back basically to AICN and its writing about The Phantom Menace back in 98/99.

There was that bootleg scandal with Joe Hallenbeck, too, but that didn't seem to affect much either at AICN or in the industry.
 
R

riotous

Banned
HappyPuppyGames
VoodooExtreme (VE3d)
SharkNews

Nerd sites used to dominate the internet so I think they are fair to bring up.
 
S

shuri

Banned
Somethingawful, fatbabies, oldmanmurray, fark, shacknews, aintitcool, fuckedcompany, stileproject, rotten, portal of evil.
 
H

HIGH DEF JEFF

Banned
Slayven said:
the trivia rooms were great.


Damn, he did have an ego.
Click to expand...

He is the dumbest person in the movie reporting business. He became an advertising tool for all the studios. The two biggest examples of this were when they used him to quell the episode 2 and the JJ Star Trek concerns by supposedly showing him early versions of the film. Then he came back and wrote his "X fans have nothing to worry about" articles.

Now...he basically scammed people via Kickstarter to help pay the 300k in taxes he owes.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
HIGH DEF JEFF said:
The two biggest examples of this were when they used him to quell the episode 2 and the JJ Star Trek concerns by supposedly showing him early versions of the film.
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The latter might be right (Abrams probably still remembered how McWeeney's Superman takedown basically got that movie killed) but the former wasn't Lucasfilm getting a hold of Knowles. I believe that was some sketchy shit that led to a piracy investigation at some point.
 
1

1st Course

Member
Definitely Altavasita. Used to be in like top 5 or so most visited sites, now it doesn't even exists.

Msn.com also used to be huge but it doesn't seems like many people use it anymore.
 
H

HIGH DEF JEFF

Banned
BobbyRoberts said:
I don't rememeber this as ever having been the case/QUOTE]

It certainly was. I spent a lot of time on those talkbacks and negative Harry statements would get deleted all the time. Then they changed the way you registered for accounts and would ban IP addresses if you got too wild.
Click to expand...
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
HIGH DEF JEFF said:
BobbyRoberts said:
I don't rememeber this as ever having been the case
Click to expand...

It certainly was. I spent a lot of time on those talkbacks and negative Harry statements would get deleted all the time.
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ohhh, I was misunderstanding you. You were talking about Harry-specific comments, not comments in general.

The talkbacks were a fucking cesspool of awful horseshit and shit was mostly free-for-all - unless you talked shit about Knowles, and then it was about 50/50 if you were gonna get hit for it.

It's funny - comments were the internet's first real attempt at social media, really, and the ideal was that a website would essentially form its own community ecosystem or whatever, a selfperpetuating click engine.

The talkbacks was as close as most sites got to being the idealized form of that vision. Which says all you need to know about why that vision was always doomed.
 
2

2Crisis

Member
riotous said:
HappyPuppyGames
VoodooExtreme (VE3d)
SharkNews

Nerd sites used to dominate the internet so I think they are fair to bring up.
Click to expand...

Don't forget about BluesNews

Still updated every day, but just by the comment count alone it seems like it doesn't get much traffic.

HardOCP still going as well with daily updates.
 
G

GraveHorizon

poop meter feature creep
Interfectum said:
Newgrounds
Soon: kongregate
Click to expand...

Man, Kongregate used to be so awesome. Up until a couple years ago I was on there all the time chatting it up. After I got a job and started working, I stopped playing the games there and only hung out in the chats. Within the last two years, maybe more, I noticed not a lot of people were chatting, until I rarely ever saw room regulars (in Bowser's Castle). Last year I basically have up on it entirely. At least I still have 1 Facebook friend from Kong, though.

I remember some sort of chat room change that made less users appear on the list. Did that have anything to do with it?
 
C

Calamari41

41 > 38
TUSR said:
somethingawful
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Hoo boy, this one big time. I used to practically live on the SA Forums, but once they let FYAD invade GBS and didn't do anything to reverse it, I lost absolute and total interest. I still check back every now and then and it's still a cesspool. Absolute shame.
 
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