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What's your favorite defunct website?
I was looking for an old movie review from a movie news website that (sadly) no longer exists and it took me down an Wayback Machine rabbit hole that got me thinking about all of the websites I used to be extremely active on that aren't reachable any more.
So I'm just curious if others have any fond memories of sites that they used to be a part of that no longer exist?
It's not a website I've ever used, more something I found a while ago.
It used to be arvanitakis.com which now is a dead domain. It was a Greek contractor for water pumps and industrial equipment (from what I understood of it), but it's web design was......something else.
If you've ever heard of the crazy Ling's Cars website: It's like that, but way way worse.
Just a description: It's mostly built using Flash elements from completely random and unrelated sources. There's a gladiator on the side with a blinking shield and a flaming sword. There's a caroussel on the page with images of industrial stuff. There's a Santa Claus crossing the page riding a polar bear. It's horrendous.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that it autoplays a very crunchy adventurous song.
I'm not sure what drugs the web designer was on, but even with drugs and getting paid 10k for it I couldn't make such a magnificent website.
If you click some of the links on the sidebar it navigates to some other website of theirs, which has a background of cooling towers in yellow and orange, an eagle flapping around and circling the page and more nonsense.
Luckily, I have a video of it before it went down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42rTuXpugoM
Oh, and apparently it's still live and kicking on the Wayback machine. (warning, as said: autoplays audio).
Requires flash, too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150304202626/http://www.arvanitakis.com/
Edit: Oh, the other page I mentioned is also on there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150423175126/http://power-chemicals.com/
Click around on the web archive pages, every single one of them is horrendous.
I'm so glad you saved a video of this website, words really can't do justice. I don't know whether this is an abomination, or if I'm just too pearl brain to understand this gem of human imagination. What a time the early 2000's internet was.
Early 2000s? This was made around 2015!
I'm guessing you may have found it in 2015, but the video has a 2009 date in it to celebrate 35 years, ergo "early 2000's". If it was made in 2015 I'd assume the creator would have a 40 year 2014 anniversary on the homepage.
No I mean, the design was completely different before 2015, so it must've been a new addition. It's also said the 35 year thing for the time until it was shut down, so they probably lost interest around that time.
http://kuro5hin.org used to be a tech news alternative to slashdot in its day. RIP.
Wayback Machine link for those interested in seeing what it looked like. E.g. random snapshot from 2005
I love looking at the banner ads on archived sites like these. Aside from the regular locally hosted linux / hosting / IT ones you've got a pro united nations ad from Ted Turner's foundation, you've got an ad for PBS Science Now, which doesn't seem to be available on archive.org, as well as oilfoodfacts.org, which is "a resource to those who seek information on the UN Oil-for-Food Program (OFFP) and news about the on-going investigations into the program’s alleged mismanagement."
All the syndicated ads have a super obvious agenda, and it's super obvious they're not only ads, but third-party ones. Most of the time their agenda is for the greater good. I miss this internet.
Caution, many aspects are very much NSFW.
Rotten was one of the very first NSFL shock/gore sites on the net (along with goregallery, and a few others), so that's not surprising. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com
I think I even saw my very first beheading video on Rotten back in the day... fun times!... if you think scarring yourself for life is "fun", which I apparently did when I was young. :(
Yep the Daniel Pearl video basically satisfied my morbid curiosity for life.
For me it was a video of a young Russian soldier in Chechnya having his throat slit while he was tied up and being held down, and then his head was cut off and held up to the camera afterwards. Even 20+ years later I can still perfectly recall the look of absolute panic/horror in his face after he realized what they were going to do to him. It was literally the stuff of nightmare, and I deeply regret watching it. :(
The mention of shock sites brings me back (and not in a good way). I remember back in the day there were a ton of sites and flash animations that would have jump scares built into them -- screaming ghost faces and such. People would also link to some incredibly raunchy or provocative images which I will not name directly but also don't need to: if you know, you probably haven't forgotten them or their names. Links to these were often hidden or obscured, with the game being to get unsuspecting people to click on them like an awful, proto-RickRoll.
Did shock sites and the sort of widespread dupe-others-into-clicking-a-horrific-link social game actually go away, or did I just age out of that?
I think it went away. I'm still in a few communities that seemingly never grew up, but there's no more shock content being posted. No disgruntled people spamming the sites with furry porn.
Oh, man...Rotten was my first foray into the seedier side of the web! Memories...
Same. Someone told me about it in primary school, good grief.
I used purple.com as my internet connection test my entire life. Literally, it was one of the first websites I was exposed to by my father. It was a blank purple page. Then the god-damned mattress company comes along, and steals this beautiful piece of the universe. Disgusting.
I used to use this to test people's internet connection when doing tech support over the phone. It was great because it's almost guaranteed they didn't have it in their browser cache, it's quick, simple, and gives a definite go/no-go indicator. Them: "It's really more of a blue." Me: "Good, that means it's working!"
Now I use http://example.com for that, but it's just not the same.
wait, purple.com is gone?!?!
I'm sorry to break the terrible news.
My top pick for a super obscure defunct site is:
The Sneeze
http://thesneeze.com/
I'm 26, and a friend showed me this site in 2006 when I was in middle school. This was before I had a computer of my own, so I wasn't really aware of what was available online, but man I thought this site was HILARIOUS at the time, and I still do now. I like how the guy came back after several years and gave an update on his life, and a little bit of a retrospective on the sneeze. I highly recommend this if you want a snark filled, early internet humor experience.
In high school I had a huge inferiority complex about how smart I was (constantly feeling like I was behind others), this led me to forcing myself to read a huge amount of stuff online, and keeping a massive organized collection of bookmarks organized by category. That list is probably a cool snapshot of some websites from 2008-2010, and I will add some screenshots of it to this post when I get to my laptop in a tiny bit.
ALSO, this site is not defunct, but if you still want some of that early internet humor, or course, check out http://maddox.xmission.com/ Also has plenty of new posts if you forgot about it for the last decade or so.
Is that the "none pizza, left beef" guy?
https://ffffound.com/
I mean, it's really tragic. I found out (heh) about it months before it closed and it was one of these truly unpredictable design-focused image collection sites, a real culture of weird, high-brow "too cool to be labelled" randomness. But tasteful. Stuff that surprised you and made you wonder. Also occasional boobs, because that's how it goes.
They shut down in 2017. Supposedly, it was run by a Japanese guy so none of the usual Western internet etiquette of looking for other people to run it, dumping the content somewhere or – gasp – selling it... it just disappeared. Someone made a copy (scraped the site?) and posted a huge file dump on reddit, but that's not the same.
Closest thing today I found is Are.na. Similar taste-level but not as big yet (and a lack of updates and maybe too optimistic business model make me wonder how long it will last). Let's see.
I mean I’m just pretty impressed that the website for the movie Space Jam is still up:
https://www.spacejam.com/
https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/pressbox/pressboxframes.html
"No Spacejam news at the moment! Go back to the Space Jam home page to see more of the site!"
I'm so surprised there's no recent spacejam news!
After the success of the recent MJ doc I would keep an eye on that page...
Hmm... these are probably quite damning, but off the top of my head:
Ninjavideo.net
Maxxed Football Forums
Forums.ffshrine.org (sadly, no archive!)
Masterani.me
Afro-orgasm (very NSFW)
In a past life my name was Long John Silver.
In many ways, the death of flash could not have been better, but there is one standout that I'll always miss: homestarrunner.com.
I realize that you can access various parts of it using not-flash, but it is not the same. I still make strong bad references in team meetings.
I didn't realize that they had taken down the Flash parts.
The toons themselves are moving to YouTube for archival purposes, but since it's converting to video instead of Flash animation, easter eggs are gone.
At least you still get TROGDOR!
I don't know if they have, but I don't have Flash on any machine.
Zthing was once a really good parody website that had various Flash games and animations lampooning various celebrities. It was definitely a product of the late 90s.
I always wondered what happened to that website, because from around 2003 onwards, they replaced all the content on their site with this message:
This message is still up to this day.
As for finding content that was on the site, there are ways to access the old SWF files via the Wayback Machine, and some of the site's content has been reposted to YouTube.
Yet... Zthing's hiatus remains one of the biggest internet mysteries that has yet to be solved.
Suck.com. Wonderful satire for the millennium changeover.
Carl Steadman of suck also made http://plastic.com (random 2005 snapshot: http://web.archive.org/web/20050828003806/http://www.plastic.com/ ). Now plastic.com points to his tumblr, it would seem, but at the time it was a discussion board a very tildes sort of vibe, similar smallness.
There is http://suckagain.com if you want some nostalgia in your mailbox each day.
Blex's page of good mp3.
All the whinging aside, if you were looking for piles of new music it was pretty hard to beat for a couple years in the late 90s. That was back before the record labels knew piracy was a thing.
There used to be a site/blog called Looks Like Good Design and it was filled with great photography, digital art, and design. It shut down a few years ago but I remember it being a place to always find something off the wall and creative.
I remember really enjoying AllTooFlat, a humor site from the early 2000s. The site's still up but there hasn't been new stuff in over a decade, but it used to crack me up. Same with EmotionEric, a site with a simple premise: a guy takes funny pictures of himself conveying different emotions.
As a kid I was a huge fan of this Zelda website called "The Odyssey of Hyule". It was in many ways like a magazine, with letters of the week and so on. I remember a pretty decent hoax about how to obtain the Triforce in Ocarina of Time really blew my mind at the time.
For bigger sites, I miss 1UP.com, where I used to love the forums. Gawker cracked me up every day. I was addicted to Flashplayer.com, which was a Newgrounds-esque hub of Flash game activity.
And of course what.cd. Between rise of services like Spotify and the fact that I'm no longer a morally dubious teenager without money to buy music, music piracy has no place in my life anymore, but what.cd was still the best music community I've ever seen. The forums were a really fantastic place to learn about and discover new music, and I'm so lucky to have access to it at a time where all I wanted to do was hear new stuff.
pebble.com