Tvtome.com

Miles better than IMDB, and specifically for TV shows. It was a great way of keeping track of episodes and seasons in preparation for tormenting torrenting (ducking autocorrect).

Cracked in it's prime was fucking amazing.

Like, it's the type of "just stay here" website everyone keeps trying to make.

On any random day they'd post like an article every 15 minutes. No matter when you needed to kill 15-30 there was something funny and usually informative.

There was probably 5 years straight I didn't poop without reading an article on Cracked.

There's no other quality stream of content like that since.

Zombocom

You could do anything at Zombo-com

ytmnd. Technically it still exists but the magic is gone

Slashdot (still with us, but not the same)

Digg (back with us, but not the same)

Freshmeat

Kuro5hin

Albino Blacksheep, Cracked, early message boards (/., Digg, reddit, etc, before they turned into garbage), NewGrounds, RatherGood

homestarrunner.com

Luckily they're still active on YouTube!

I think that one still exists?

Technically the website is still around. It just doesn't have any of the fun interactive stuff now that Flash is defunct. It's where they sell merch now.

HamsterDance.com

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.

Killer chicken

I may be the proud owner of the Trogdor board game.

Stumbleupon

It doesn't use flash anymore so it's dead to me

edit: wtf, did it change hands recently? they fucked it up

Jiggmin. It was some independent flash developers website where he posted a lot of browser games and had a forum with a decent community. Played a ton of platform racer games on there and had a lot of fun as a kid. It's been defunct for at least a decade if not more.

Sadly was taken over and no longer has the iconic voice and music. Now it’s just some crap TTS without the same level of whimsy.

Craigslist forums were kinda the wild west.

The sites still up, but I don't know if it gets updated.

I think I'm about 15 years behind on my SBEmails.

I miss nectarine demoscene radio. Now we just have hypr.

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.

Good news!

https://html5zombo.com/

Wasn't this just a Firefox extension? But, yeah, I miss stumbling too.

Yeah, it was interesting to read people's unfiltered narcissism sometimes. Just pages and pages of journal entries about how they were a genius and their agonizing over every little social interaction and relationship in their life. That had zero traffic of commentary.

I never ever understood any of it. But it was scary to realize some people really do think of their life as a novel and they are the main character struggling to some liberation or something.

All my blogs were just random nonsense or short fictional pieces. I could never take the 'dear diary' stuff seriously.

Most of my friends would just post random funny links or talk about something they did that day and if it was cool or not. I never had the privilege of socializing with people who were writing autobiographical novels on the internet.

Gosh. Any, ya know?

I used to mock them, back then, because I thought I was better at it (and I was a stupid edgy teen), but now I really miss those janky, HTML illiterate pages that someone threw together without much of an inkling of what they were doing but with all the passion for their chosen subject, their fandom, their tiny niche ship, their obscure hobby.

I know, I know, "these still exist", neocities is a thing and a handful similar projects are desperately clinging to existence too. It's lost its innocence. Idk. I'm old.

Also, old-style message boards. Like subscribe smash that notification bell if you remember the 1. SMOF (which only existed for a few days into the actual 2000s don't at me).

Google and youtube.

Dear blank please blank and FML were my go-to time wasters.

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.

StickDeath.com

The current owner bought the domain when it was available, and since they dont own the previous content they wont post it. They do have a notice asking the original owner to contact them though. /u/DavidGA did post that theres https://html5zombo.com/ which seems to be the OG content

My daughter got me a Trogdor T shirt last Father's Day. I usually get at least one reaction when I wear it in public.

lost so much time with that. just one more click before bed

my Spanish bro will remember Petardas.com

Draac's Gifs 123 / School of HTML.

Taught me basic skills back in my WebTV days.

Fuk Warner Brothers.

You mean this Nectarine Demoscene Radio? https://scenestream.net/demovibes/

Justin.tv

I hung soo much on Get that azzhole?, a site with a huge collection of user-made cars for GTA1. It wasn't easy to find the URL back, but I got it through the equally retro-looking https://www.lnkworld.com/.

Ze Frank had a great personal site with a dozen JavaScript / flash apps that let you draw with different brushes etc. fun time waster

https://wiby.me/surprise/

Newgrounds, that one probably hurts the most. There was so much free creativity happening.

IndyMedia. It was direct, citizen journalism in all the best and worst ways. It's where I learned that the job of riot police is to attack citizens and start riots.

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.

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.

The email. The email. The what what? The email.

I just had a quick look at the Cracked homepage and it looks like they've got articles written by actual writers again, which is a nice change. It turns out that, while cheap, filling your website with bullshit listicles written by "Cracked readers" makes for bad content.

Shit man, I tried...

Those aren't "articles" there's like a paragraph, and then a shit ton of pictures with text.

Fucking got my hopes up and everything, I'm gonna remember this one for April Fool's though. Right up until you scroll down the first time it's super convincing that it's back.

Stumbleupon it was how I found Reddit

I like excite over yahoo pre 2000's

Mystery of Time and Space was awesome. The site is still around but the point and click game seems to be gone.