Ooops... Sorry. I didn't mean to mislead you.

All I did was scroll down and note that I didn't see any articles written by "Cracked readers" - I didn't actually look at the articles themselves.

&totse

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.

It’s been defunct for at least a decade if not more.

Are these the games that you're talking about?

https://jiggmin2.com/

The could fucking convert their flash files into HTML5. There are tools that do it.

Slashdot was my fucking jam back in the day. I even met CmdrTaco once before I really even knew what Linux was.

The oldschool zone.com.

Everybody to the limit! Fhqwhgads!

It's still around, and a while ago had a cartoon about going back to a website!

Altavista.

I'd love to have it back. I hate all the search engines right now.

The original FAQS.org site.

( nowadays, the awesomest lifesink is TVTropes.org , btw, for all the people needing a fix of interestings : )

_ /\ _

Original Neopets.

Stumbleupon.

Early Reddit.

Killfrog.com

ogrish

Gaia online

All Hail the Temple

Unpopular opinion: Google?

Back before it sucked.

Version Tracker.

I more so miss that time in Mac OS software.

You just miss w4m

Thinking back I miss Astalavista.

I suppose that was before 2000 but I'll say it anyways. It's not like I actually miss the content, I just miss the wild west time when things like that existed.

kongregate. place is practically dead now

Killfrog.com

Shit, that just awoke some memories in me. Back from ye olden days when people would just fire up their own website to host their stuff.

"For reasons unknown"

Lmao it's not hard to figure it out.

Most all of the site was racist as fuck with a hearty scoop of unironic MERICA FUCK YEAH

bash.org

zombo.com (the flash version)

Honestly, yeah, my first thought is that I miss the Google and YouTube from 15 years ago

gamehippo.com, dohgames.com, 1up.com and zone.msn.com which technically is still around I just miss the Age of Empires game rooms and chat.

Who did you watch there? I can recall 4PlayerPodcast and Mega64's podcast. Especially the annual vomitting festival Christcast.

That's how I got into online chess. And I played the Quake2 demo a lot there too. Good times.

Second vote for kagi small web. One of my favorite feeds

Webtv was my real intro to the Internet as not just a place to look up stuff for school. I was introduced to IRC, Usenet, multiplayer online games all from our webtv set top

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.

Brunching Shuttlecocks. Fucking hilarious comedy site with daily posts. Can't find any remnants of it out there.

what.cd

Demoniod was great!

I definitely miss Stumbleupon. Closest I can find to fill that void is jumpstick.app, which is also good.

I did both, loved them.

Agree. If only I could convince more of my friends to drop siloed socials and get fediverse accounts, I'd have a solution for that, but that's not happening.

Oh man the day what shut down was a goddamn international tragedy

YES! I happen to know a bit about that!

Half of it, Lore Sjöberg, is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/loresjoberg.bsky.social I'm sure he'd be delighted to hear from someone else who remembers Brunching!

He has a website where he's posted some of his work since, called Bad Gods: https://badgods.com/

And there's a Discord where old Brunching fans hang out, Brunchma Expats, I can't send an invite at the moment but I'll try to remember to do it when I get back to the house!

A bit of the Google that was like that persists as the 'web' subsearch. The site at https://udm14.com/ exists purely as a frontend to that search. It's not exactly like the old Google, it's still too ready to throw Youtube videos at the top of the results, but it's still much easier to find interesting websites that way than Google's default search.

Yes! I know Jeremy Parish of 1up and Retronauts, he rues 1up's passing as well.

Also good was Joystiq, which was one of the best game news and culture sites. And recently I was reminded of Happy Puppy, the first really big gaming trailer and demo site, now dead for many years and barely remembered.

Joe Cartoon

You can do anything at zombo com... anything at all... the only limit is yourself

AND at their website, which now uses Ruffle as its Flash player!

it does! And they even had a new sbemail fairly recently! https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/210-robots

It's working again, through the power of Ruffle!

DigDoug? Here? MeFi DigDoug? How are ya!

MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs and MUSHes.

Usenet in general

sodaconstructor.com

memepool

ectoplasmosis

Boing Boing when it was great

An early virtual world called WorldsAway, technically still exists at VZones but I don't think it's possible to make an account now

Hotwired

Suck.com and early discussion side adjunct Plastic.com

TimmyBigHands, short-lived humor magazine from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 people shortly after the show folded the second time.

The Sci-Fi Channel's website and MTV.com, both started with the hopes of becoming a substantial part of the World Wide Web by getting in early, then shuttered when owners lost interest or believed the lies that social media was where the only thing that mattered any more. Also Cartoon Network's website, which was once a joy. Adult Swim's website hangs on, but is a shadow of its former self, and doesn't host forums any longer.

The Usenet MSTing archives at pinky.wtower.com

One thing that still exists is WWWF Grudge Match, a likely inspiration for MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, a crowdsourced humor site where they put different pop culture figures against each other in textual battles and people contributed their takes and votes on who would win. It hasn't updated in over two decades though. It even spawned a book!