I swear I remember some precursor to YouTube somewhere

www.google.com

Defunct in the sense that it doesn't work as well it used to.

StumbleUpon

Digg.

I wouldn't be on Lemmy today if it weren't for Digg committing suicide, forcing everyone to switch to reddit. And then reddit went full retard with the 3rd party app thing, so here I am.

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.

I kinda miss stumbleupon. Found a lot of cool flash games and stuff from that!

Not dead, but not nearly as alive as it used to be.
https://homestarrunner.com/

My state passed ID verification for adult websites, does that count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_Ninja

They were super early YouTube.

Ytmnd.com

Anyone remember Happy Puppy?

There used to be rotten.com, which posted extremely disturbing pictures and I don't miss that part of it. But I do miss the Rotten Library, which used to be a bastion of suppressed literature.

My old stomping grounds, the indie gaming blog GameSetWatch.

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!

https://zombo.com/

www.ebaumsworld.com its still around but its not the same.

Also www.thingsididlastnight.com - it just said YOUR MOM in huge letters. Thats it. No ads, no images, nothing. Just YOUR MOM

Also www.mostannoyingwebpage.com (I think). Just an endless stream of popup messages with no way out

What.cd?

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.

Rip Stumble upon.

not dead, but pretty dead anyway: cracked.com

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.

reddit

myspace.com

No, not the social network with my friend Tom, I mean the online file storage (would now be called 'cloud' storage) site that it was before it died and Tom bought the domain.

It had an astounding 300MB of space available for free, much more than the contemporary competition.

Of course now there's Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Myspace was just too far ahead of their time.

Ytmnd.com ! Punch the keys for God's sake !

Yahoo Games

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.

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.

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.

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/

stile project went from a collection of bafflingly weird shit to a shitty porn site.

Yeah, there was a lot of porn before, but it wasn't really the main focus- it was basically a collection of shock value pics & videos that probably played a big part in me becoming desensitized... It was my source of "Eh, I've seen worse"

BBS and IRC. Technically neither are totally dead, but that was my introduction to the Internet a few years before the WWW existed.

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.

Egg2.com was my favorite flash game archive. Literally just a few hundred links to various flash games.

Reddit, I guess. And Google.

Cracked.

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.