alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things
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I'm not sure I the Tamagotchi deserves a place on here.
Did anything really kill it? It was kind of just a fad in the late 90s and its still around, not as popular as its fad stages but still reasonably popular. We just got back from Japan last week, there is a newly opened "Tamagotchi Factory" shop which was packed. The kids each picked up one of the latest versions and have been playing with them every day.
This is missing so much things that immediately comes to my mind (such as Voilà, Caramail, Multimania, Mygale, Radio.Blog.Club, Skyblog, Motion Twin's Flash games, etc.). I think those and many others are too local in the real world to be of any significance for a mostly US-centric history (my pov is based in France). Still, this brought up a lot of memories!
Maybe there can be some kinda suggestion box and a voting system for suggestions or existing things? Like an open suggestion box, where people could submit potential entries and vote on whether they belong there and are dead or not. And for existing entries, to vote on whether something is truly dead or not, like 'yep, this is dead', or 'nope, this is still alive' (some things may be less popular, but that's not them being dead/actually completely discontinued and defunct). Not necessarily for ranking or putting it together into one score, but perhaps just showing a number of how many people think either way about something
LOVE this! I also love how concise and readable it is...
Only thing I miss (especially for people who never experienced early internet) would be a visual example, or picture of the site, etc... like this:
Is there anything out there that is the opposite of this? Like a directory of old things that are, against all odds, still alive
mp3.com should really be listed under "media & music". So much amazing music and creativity was lost when the site closed. You can apparently dig out a massive zip file or something from archive.org, but last I tried it was almost impossible to navigate.
Is the text generated by AI? Are the "eulogies" by real people or AI?
Needs Twitter on there.
Where would Prodigy, CompuServ, eWorld, MSN, and the like would fit in? Together with AOL?
Didn't know why, I jumped to check "Google Reader".. Still missing it to that day.
Missing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed.
> eBay bought it in 2005 for 2.6 billion dollars. Nobody really understood why eBay wanted it. Then Microsoft bought it from eBay in 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars.
Isn't that the reason eBay bought it? It seems a speculative acquisition on the basis that Skype might become even more valuable later and they were right!
My thought is that this is interesting, but very narrowly scoped. I thought the list would be, um, longer. By a lot. This feels like talking about all of the deaths in pre-Enlightenment Europe and coming up with a list of seven names.
I love the small web, and this is a nice project. But I won't remember to come back to it. It would be nice to have it pop up in my Mastodon or Lemmy (or Insta, or FB...) for each new addition.
Use the new web to bring people back to the old web :)
(Or a newsletter ? RSS ?)
Thank you for the "dark mode", like the old days. 2 annoyances though :
- the flashing bright yellow banner is painful to the eyes
- and the fonts are very small on a phone screen — although a 300x zoom "fixed" this.
Thanks for reminding me about RealPlayer. I remember playing flash games on it I had on a USB drive. Felt like a hacker when I downloaded them from a website and played them locally instead of having to be connected to the internet to play them :)
That big flashing yellow bar near the top makes the page _literally impossible_ for me to read. Human eyes are built to follow the fastest/flashiest thing around, and that bar takes the provierbial cake in terms of eyeball distraction.
Amazing to read through the list. I had no idea about Orkut. To kill an application with 300m users seems insane.
Anyone here knows why MSN was ever killed? The brand was so strong. I am sure usage was still there. You'd think Microsoft could still bring it back somehow. In a similar vein, it was never clear to me why hotmail was killed to make place for "live" mail.
Awesome site. I wonder how much of this is tied to the pre-mobile, desktop era. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s where a lot of early Web nostalgia comes from.
Why are "personal homepages" listed as dead? Sure, they're not as ubiquitous as they used to be, but almost every tech-adjacent person I know has one. Webrings and guestbooks are also very much still a thing. I'd say they are far from dead.
ICQ and 6 digit numbers? Maybe the first million users, but I had an ICQ number from... what? 1998? which was already 7 digits.
Was looking for MapQuest. Does it live still?
Interesting Tamagoshi story.
I didn't realize how addictive the "keep them alive" narrative was.
No wonder streaks work so well nowadays.
There is a lot to learn from the past.
pebble is listed there, but it's back! https://repebble.com/
MiniDisc "ignored by the world" my ass, ignored by the USA you mean.
This brought a lot of memories to me. Good job.
How much I miss Path…
I added 5-inch floppies and floppy disks, very very vintage.
I like this project! Would be great if you could add their logos for sentimental value.
Here's another Product Graveyard https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard.
There should be an AI graveyard, too. There are so many AI projects that are dead within an year.
Pretty much every text is slop-generated.
I like the idea, not what OP has done with it.
Talking about ICQ with zero screenshots is like talking about Hamachi without talking about LAN parties and how games were played at the time.
Pretty much all articles are just slop-text. Not even talking about alternatives or what has been done in the meantime. For example, ICQ led to AIM and Trillian, which led to pidgin/libpurple, then to jabber/xmpp etc.
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This is a fascinating project. I’ve noticed a major shift in how we handle digital assets—we moved from hard-coded absolute paths to 'permalinks,' yet the 'perma' part of that word is increasingly a lie. I’m curious, how do you handle the archival of assets that were originally hosted behind auth-walls or CDNs that have since changed their CORS policies?