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[GamerJM]

Google
Reddit
Facebook

Most of the sites in this thread were killed by these three juggernauts.

I hate how homogenized the internet is now because of this. I have my fair share of issues with Reddit and Facebook but I wouldn't dislike them as much if it wasn't for this. Back in the day information was scattered all over the place, the internet felt like it was just like the wild west, with every man for himself. A friend could link you something that just blew your mind every day. Communities were diverse and scattered all over the place. Now if you need to know something or some piece of news it's just on the front page of Reddit where everyone else is.
/rant

 

[Sesuadra]

animepalace

 

[MC Safety]

MEGACAR!

Also, I miss JibJab. I know the site still exists, but it had these interactive videos based on historical figures. They were great; you could click on the founding fathers to make them rap or have John Adams scratch records. The videos are still there, but they're totally noninteractive.

 

[chiimisu]

thatguywiththeglasses.com (now http://channelawesome.com/). I miss the time when Nostalgia Critic was good. His fellow "critics" are literally unwatchable. Phelous *cringes*

 

[Valhelm]

NewGrounds

 

[Khalifa Jayy]

bolt.com
digg.com
habbo hotel
xanga.com
trillian the pioneering all-in-one chat program was big for a while, too.

 

[captainraincoat]

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.

I agree with the above....i thought the site was hacked or something but instead its become some sort of hybrid between 4 chan and the old sa.....lowtax....or i think its him seems to of had too much of his own kool aid and is either really funny or heavily medicated and posting to appease fyad.

 

[Burai]

apple.com/quicktime/trailers
i remember spending hours downloading trailers there. Nowadays everything is streamed via YouTube because nobody wants to use QuickTime, not even Mac users.

Wireplay
BT's excellent online gaming service. It provided an Xbox Live style community and front end for your DOS and then Windows games. Was bought by online games retailer Gameplay and was then mismanaged to the point of irrelevance.

Wrestlecrap
A written Botchamania before Maffew was Maffew. RD Reynolds struggles with server costs really took the wind out of its sails but the podcast was still worth listening to. Then they relaunched it with new writers who weren't up to his standard and everyone stopped giving a shit.

TheHun's Yellow Pages
YouPorn for the 56k generation.

Hot or Not
Ruin your afternoon by spending five hours rating whether people are attractive or not. They then tried to turn it into a dating site which completely missed the point of anonymously rating the photos of anonymous people. You can't even access the site without giving up your Facebook login now. Everyone uses POF and OKCupid instead.

 

[Megadragon15]

Stage6-RIP.

 

[Rentahamster]

Asian Avenue.








...wait, what?

 

[Mr Nash]

Shacknews (Always liked it best when it was Shuga Shack, and pretty much stopped caring about it when Steve Gibson left)

Stomped

Telefragged

VE3D

Evil Avatar

Fat Babies

The Magic Box

 

[CreepingFear]

Not sure if anyone mentioned Reel.com. They had so many discounts and coupons on dvds/vhs back in the day. Amazon killed them. Also, Real Player. Fuck sites that required you to dl that junkware player to view their videos. All hail players such as VLC that freed us from them.

 

[Blastoise]

I miss the Digg of 2005-2008.

And I miss Reddit before the Digg infestation.

 

[andrerobot]

Tucows.

Slashdot

aw. that site was great back in the day. Long live cmdrtaco.

 

[acheron_xl]

Ah, Fark. I was a paid Totalfarker for almost 10 years. The piss poor moderation/tacit approval of trolls and cliquishness drove me away. I remember when they were one of the fastest places around for breaking news, now they sit on breaking stories to filter out headlines. Twitter and GAF (and Reddit, I suppose) easily trump them now.

 

[Black_Stride]

I really miss team xbox. Used to have such a fun community. It's always nice to see guys from the old forum on here.

TXB was killed by IGN id say.

It was honestly still the shit right up until IGN got it.

The OTL was like my most visited forum for the longest time.....then i started abusing NeoGAF, never looked back though.

P.S GXD vs OTL gaming events were pretty much what got me into online gaming hard.

 

[lednerg]

Anyone remember DailyRadar?

 

[J@hranimo]

meebo

 

[TheMan]

I know it's been mentioned already, but Slashdot used to be much more significant than it seems now.
That may just be me though.

Back in the day, getting linked on the front page of slashdot meant that smaller websites would become inaccessible to traffic. It was my homepage for years . Nowadays I visit once every few months and then go back to reddit within minutes.

 

[Einhander]

Planet Namek was the definitive Dragon Ball source out there in the late 90s. It shut down in the early to mid 00s. Fun times.

 

[Contra11]

Facebook

 

[fhqwhgads]

Homestar Runner will never die, damnit

 

[moggio]

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.

Did Harry ever get round to making more episodes of his awful show out of the 130k he scammed from his gullible fans on Kickstarter?

Oh, no he didn't.

 

[friskykillface]

I totally forgot about newgrounds and ebaumsworld, loved those sites growing up

Ebaumsworld was kinda like the dark side since it had creepy x gross stuff , loved it

 

[Huw_Dawson]

Nobody has said this incredibly obvious one.

Hotmail.

Now finally consumed by a different Microsoft email service, Hotmail was the king of free email addresses. Until the Gmail invitation only beta, back when every product Google launched was a must-have.

 

[Slayven]

I still remember Cnet's tech show

 

[Skel1ingt0n]

Used to live on N64.com, PlanetGamecube.com, Nintendojo.com, and then the IGN Boards.

Miss things like user-submitted questions and answers, dedicated rumors sections, etc.

 

[kabel]

I like to use Google trends fot that.


myspace

newgrounds

digg

facebook

 

[jstripes]

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

Wow, Stile Project. I'd forgotten about that one.

It was one of the original "E/N" sites, and was pretty interesting at times... until he got totally fed up with it, and started posting nothing but porn and gore for the clicks.

Google
Reddit
Facebook

Most of the sites in this thread were killed by these three juggernauts.

Google pretty much annihilated what the web used to be.

There were search engines before it, but they weren't as effective.

You used to spend hours clicking from one site to another (remember when every site had a "Links" page?), going through webrings, and discovering amazing sites you never expected.

Now you just search Google, and find what you want right away with none of the in between.

 

[1st Course]

facebook

Doesn't reflect reality. The site is still growing

 

[Saganator]

Fileplanet. Cnet, which is still around, but it use to be huge in the 90's and early 2000's.

 

[industrian]

I guess Bebo is another.

It was the de facto social network in Scotland (and probably the rest of the UK) before Facebook stole its lunch.

 

[PetriP-TNT]

I wonder if AlbinoBlackSheep is still up

Oh it is. And it's hilariously ugly. Still, can't beat Fly The Copter

 

[jstripes]

I wonder if AlbinoBlackSheep is still up

Oh it is. And it's hilariously ugly. Still, can't beat Fly The Copter

It's amazing how dadaist the early web was.

I guess that was a side-effect of communities having to be self-built.

 

[The Albatross]

Fark.com

predates reddit and I think even digg

also Slashdot used to be a bigger deal

It's still, to this day, known as "Drew Curtis' Fark.com" which is just so odd.

He recently announced that he's running for Governor of Kentucky.

 

[Maninthemirror]

Internet used to be a lot of fun in late 90s to early 2000s . It's just a chore now with select websites. There is no sense of exploration anymore. A lot of free stuff went paid. Go to your favorite social network, a couple of favorite forums. Search news on Google or get news off social network

 

[njean777]

Kotaku.

Yeah, I took it there...

You are not wrong, their redesign killed the site for me. Any time I look at kotaku I start getting a headache.

 

[chronos86]

I hate how homogenized the internet is now because of this. I have my fair share of issues with Reddit and Facebook but I wouldn't dislike them as much if it wasn't for this. Back in the day information was scattered all over the place, the internet felt like it was just like the wild west, with every man for himself. A friend could link you something that just blew your mind every day. Communities were diverse and scattered all over the place. Now if you need to know something or some piece of news it's just on the front page of Reddit where everyone else is.
/rant

Internet used to be a lot of fun in late 90s to early 2000s . It's just a chore now with select websites. There is no sense of exploration anymore. A lot of free stuff went paid. Go to your favorite social network, a couple of favorite forums. Search news on Google or get news off social network

Yeah i miss the hunt. I could sit there for hours back in the day searching for sites with good info about stuff i was into at the time. Then Wikipedia came around in it was like well i got all the info i need after a few minutes.

 

[manzoman96]

Not a website, but AOL Instant Messanger.

Everyone I know used to use it. Now it's just part of the internet's past.

 

[DiipuSurotu]

Doesn't reflect reality. The site is still growing

Yup. Google Trends reflects searches on Google. Obviously there are less searches for "facebook" on Google nowadays because people already have the site in their favorites, homepage, smartphone, etc. or they can also just type the URL.

 

[CarpeDeezNutz]

One of you old timers remind me how facebook overtook myspace? I had a fb when it was strictly college emails but I can't seem to remember how it outpaced myspace.


OMG I just remember I had a Friendster account too.

 

[Alienous]

Remembering Newgrounds is depressing me.

It must have been a very gradual decline, because it didn't even come to mind until people mentioned it.

EDIT:

I like to use Google trends fot that.
newgrounds

That explains it.

 

[And_Gignac]

PerezHilton

TMZ killed it.

Hi5, metroflog.

 

[Bobby Roberts]

I've noticed Cracked seems to be fading as they've covered most of the easy stuff on the 3 main types of articles they write:

I think it's less that, and more that they've started pouring more resources and focus into video/podcast content.

Yeah i miss the hunt.

The hunt is still there. The question is whether you'd rather just settle. Most people don't really miss the hunt, obviously, because instead of following links and establishing which sites are actually worth paying attention to when it comes to news and quality writing, people prefer to just scan a one-stop shop for headlines.

Here on OT side, it's why almost every bit of news you've ever heard comes from ComicBook dot com, or ComicBookMovie dot com. Because people don't like having to determine where news is coming from, or how it got there. They just like having it there.

At least Fark, even though it was one of the first all-purpose aggregators to get attention, would make the link back to the news source very obvious, and force you to click that link if you wanted the story, which helped readers learn what sources to trust and what not to. Speaking of Fark.

He recently announced that he's running for Governor of Kentucky.

Oh man. That's...

I don't know about that shit.

PerezHilton

Pink-ass Harry Knowles, basically.

 

[knicks]

addictinggames.com

 

[zomaha]

damn acts of gord was good stuff

 

[Fewr]

emotioneric?

 

[Zapages]

Well let's see:

http://freearcade.com/
-Hasn't been updated years
http://jayisgames.com/
-Used to visit very often when I was in high school and undergrad. It still updates, but it used to do a lot of free java/flash games. But now they mostly review cell phone games
http://teamxbox.com/
-Sad faith after IGN takeover
http://poplegacy.com/
-Same with the Gamespy/Planet Network sites. Died in late 2000s due to restructuring at IGN.
http://ffalpha.net/
-Final Fantasy Alpha. A couple folks will know about this here.
http://www.toonzone.net/forums/
-I used to be so active with Toonami Digital Arsenal/CNX(The X Bridge)
Pakmusic.net
-The place died after many of the creators made too many sister sites. There was Indian/Indian British Music (Sunzara) and Pakistani Indie/British Pakistani Music with PMX. Then made a cricket site where they charged folks to watch illegal stream of cricket matches and then after that the site died to the members hating the owners forgetting about the music for the site was made for. Also many attacks on the site by many disgruntled old banned members that left offline for 3 to 6 months a few times...

 

[DimmuBurgerKing]

The Dilly.

I remember it being fairly popular as a social network way back in the day. Like maybe 2004-ish? It was never as big as MySpace or Facebook, of course.

 

[Slayven]

Well let's see:

http://www.toonzone.net/forums/
-I used to be so active with Toonami Digital Arsenal/CNX(The X Bridge)

This one was really sudden and quick. like in the last 18 months or so, I wonder what happened?