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.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!
I liked the idea, but after a while it just kept sending me to the same places.
yeah haha that was a bit annoying!
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.
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.
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!
ZOMBO COM!
I make references to it periodically and only like 2 people IRL have gotten it.
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 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/
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.
YTMND from 20 years ago.
Technically it still exists but it's effectively dead.
Forgot about that one
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.
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/
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.
Cracked.
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.
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.
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!
Not really a web site but stumble upon was magic.
Stumbleupon was absolutely magic.
Joecartoon
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.
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
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.
!fark@ibbit.at
Stickdeath
No idea if it's still up or not.
Pick pretty much any forum.
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.
goldesel.6x.to for eMule links or bockwurst.6x.to for direct downloads of SW
Some of the old hardware forms, Gideontech and Pimprig/PCApex.
Wormhole by Centerfleet
Or Tea Games
skafunkrastapunk.com
epic music sharing...
also
dancingmokey.com
FunnyJunk
Memepool
Scary Go Round
Everything2.com (holy shit! still exists)
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 :-)
maybe freshmeat?
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.
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