homestarrunner.com
Luckily they're still active on YouTube!
The sites still up, but I don't know if it gets updated.
I think I'm about 15 years behind on my SBEmails.
The email. The email. The what what? The email.
Everybody to the limit! Fhqwhgads!
it does! And they even had a new sbemail fairly recently! https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/210-robots
Stumbleupon
lost so much time with that. just one more click before bed
Wasn't this just a Firefox extension? But, yeah, I miss stumbling too.
It was a website first that would load stumbled sites in a frame while keeping their button to stumble visible. I never used the extension just the site.
Unpopular opinion: Google?
Back before it sucked.
Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago
Slashdot (still with us, but not the same)
Digg (back with us, but not the same)
Freshmeat
Kuro5hin
Slashdot was my fucking jam back in the day. I even met CmdrTaco once before I really even knew what Linux was.
Unsanitized blogs where people just spilled out their thoughts. Overwhelmingly were they inconsequential, but it was still a funny little peek into the lives of people you’d never know. You can’t do that sort of thing as freely anymore, between doxxing, scraper swarms, and the abundance of lunatics online. The barrier to entry is higher and the risks greater.
These blogs do still exist, they just lack discoverability because they‘re not focusing on SEO. You might want to give Kagi Small Web a go. It‘s their explicit goal to promote these kinds of websites.
It‘s not quite the same as the good old days, but it‘s probably as close as we can get right now.
MySpace and Facebook from before 2010. There's not really any social media that's designed to show me posts from my friends and nothing else. Now whenever I open up Facebook I am just shown shit from people and pages I never subscribed to and ads.
Original Neopets.
Stumbleupon.
Early Reddit.
Killfrog.com
I definitely miss Stumbleupon. Closest I can find to fill that void is jumpstick.app, which is also good.
Albino Blacksheep, Cracked, early message boards (/., Digg, reddit, etc, before they turned into garbage), NewGrounds, RatherGood
There was a website many years ago that when opened, it looked like an online retailer in Germany for all sorts of things, similar to Walmart. When you scrolled around it would behave as you'd expect, but once you left it alone for half a minute or so, suddenly every element of the page became a Rube Goldberg machine.
A stack of pots and pans or something would fall down to the next row and send something hurtling across the screen, on and on, with the page moving up and down as needed. I wish I'd had the thought to record somehow it at the time. Only other thing I've seen like it was an old Google Chrome commercial on YouTube that used the whole page and not just the video player.
I've looked a few times for some hint of what I remember, but it might only live in the archive of my memories now.
The ones without paywalls and ads.
Ze Frank had a great personal site with a dozen JavaScript / flash apps that let you draw with different brushes etc. fun time waster
bash.org
I don't think that new items can be submitted, but the old stuff is available here.
Altavista.
I'd love to have it back. I hate all the search engines right now.
Google and youtube.
The 2000s Cartoon Network US site and Nitrome ( still alive but feels like a shell of its former glory ).
I know I can still play a lot of the old CN flash games on Flash Point, but it's not as aesthetically satisfying as the old CN site.
As for Nitrome, I got a zip file that contained a lot of the games since they ain't available on Flash Point and I don't wanna use the modern site. The old games like Mutiny or IceBreakers are still kinda fun, even if games like Rubble Trouble, for some reason, don't run well on my potato desktop under Ruffle.
Those were 2 of my favorite game sites in the 2000s, before I learned about NotDoppler.
Edit:
After looking at various comments, gonna say I remember the old Pencilmation series back when there was maybe a few different shorts on their website. Back when evil blue pen man was the big bad. Before they, or whatever copycat it was, started making tons of them on yt that are nothing but mass produced slop. Lived long enough to become a villain.
I also remembered an old PopTarts website with some dumb flash game about going down the red carpet without getting toasted and/or eaten ( IIRC ) that lead to me finding Pencilmation.
You could do anything on zombo.com.
Neocities and just generally when it was cool for everyone to have their own personal website rather than having profiles on the major platforms.
Should be easier than ever today.
Lego.com 's online games section
It looks like a lot of them may be archived here, as searching for "lego" turns up about 600 results. At least some of those look like officially-branded things.
Literally any website that had flash games. I miss scrolling through and having thousands of games to play.
StickDeath.com
https://stickdeatharchive.github.io/
This site aims to archive as many of the original StickDeath.com games and animations as possible!
Unfortunately, StickDeath.com is gone and it has been excluded from the Internet Archive for reasons unknown. This site aims to host as many of the original StickDeath swf files as possible.
Thanks to the discovery of an active internet archive of the original StickDeath website, most of the animations have been recovered! However, some favorites are still missing, such as most of the wrestling ones, and most of the animated shorts.
Flash is dead, but the open-source Ruffle can play many Flash things, and I suppose could probably play them.
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