This is a self-indulgent article that I probably shouldn't post. Looking back, most of my 2025 pieces fit this description. I guess that's the mood I'm in this year. I will try to make 2026 more productive.
This site turns 25 around now. I started it in approximately November 2000. I don't recall the exact date so it could be earlier. I barely noted anything when it turned 20 and 30 is not guaranteed. So this seems like a good time for reflection.
On this anniversary I'm looking back at some web sites I outlasted. Meaning sites that started in or after November 2000 and ended in or before November 2025. It therefore misses many early-early internet sites I enjoyed like Broadcast.com and Mirsky's Worst of the Web. This is not every site that came and went between November 2000 and November 2025. These are ones I remember and in most cases visited frequently. I'm not going to mention sites I know practically nothing about.
This site has no funding, no ads, and no other contributors. The sites I'm looking at had at least 2 of these 3 and most had all 3. I am not bragging nor mocking these sites. This site exists after 25 years completely out of stubborn dedication to the dream of web 1.0. If revenue was a concern this site would be long gone. If I worked with other contributors it would end badly, probably with me doing some passive-aggressive controlling thing that blew it all up. I assumed all of these sites failed for one of these two reasons but was wrong. Most had perfectly boring endings while others had wild ones.
Please feel empowered to mock this page when this site inevitably shuts down one day. I deserve it.
These are listed chronologically by launch date. I briefly debated other sorting criteria; this felt right.
This is one of my favorite sites in the whole list. It was so useful and easy to get lost clicking around on. If you're unfamiliar I'll say the title is extremely descriptive. This was a reference for which TVs shows were available on DVD. It included reviews and attempts to figure out why some shows weren't available. Before streaming, I went on a binge of buying TV shows on DVD. We all did. Not long ago I got frustrated with streaming and looked at accumulating DVDs again. I think this would still be a great reference site. The monthly hosting cost would be high, especially around the holidays when people are looking for gifts. Linking to sites selling DVDs is an obvious way to earn revenue and obviously didn't work. Although not stated, the steep decline in DVD sales would correlate to a steep decline in traffic to TVShowsOnDVD.com. A site like it could only exist as a wiki with a very dedicated unpaid staff and a way to just barely cover the bandwidth (which is the hard part). As for hoarding TV shows on DVD… the idea of going without internet access for a while grows more appealing every day. I think I'll hang on to my collection.
This site reminded me of webrings which I was a fan of. An early iteration of my Phantasy Star III site (on Classicgaming.com) belonged to a webring. Great idea until people forget to renew domains and your webring links lead to online casinos or worse. The basic premise is great, if you like the site you're reading here's a random one that is similar. I try to keep the spirit of this broad idea alive by sharing a list of sites I follow. I don't see a specific reason why StumbleUpon was shut down. It is reasonable to assume usage plummeted due to social media, leaving it financially unviable.
This is the site I miss the most on this list. If you didn't follow it when it was new then you have no idea. They did YouTube-style content and podcasting before either existed and also better. The early days were amazing but it all fell apart, slowly. The history of the site is hard to follow, it was bought & sold a number of times. I think, to oversimplify, it was difficult for other streaming sites to compete with YouTube and companies spent a lot of money trying. What you see with GameTrailers is several entities trying to create a gaming-focused alternative that failed. They bought GameTrailers for the name and library but it didn't work. Twitch ultimately succeeded at creating a gaming-focused site by copying the YouTube model of not creating content themselves.
This fits under "guilty pleasure". Gawker was trash. It was fun trash, like pro wrestling which through less than six degrees of separation killed Gawker. I'm not ashamed to admit I followed the Gawker RSS feed. It was a daily distraction and I'm not sure anyone would be brave enough to try the same concept again. The official death date is debatable. The original site ended in August 2016. I know a site named "Gawker" exists today, it's not the same. Some other sites on this list may technically exist too.
I never uploaded anything on RapidShare. Did I download anything? Hmm, perhaps it's best to move on.
There's a lot to say about 1Up and I will neglect to cover most of it. I remember 1Up most as an early podcast hub. Like the dream of web 1.0, the dream of early podcasting was all about random people trying ideas for fun. The 1Up podcasts were more well polished than the average early podcast. They had no path for earning revenue other than maybe occasionally driving some people to the main site. This is likely why a corporate overlord canceled them. The site produced great content too, the podcasts are what I remember and miss the most. There's so much more content I'm skipping. Ziff-Davis would come to own 1Up, and some other very similar gaming sites. They decided to consolidate everything under IGN. GameSpy was a victim of this too. It's another site I remember fondly but it started before November 2000, excluding it from this recap.
I only received one invite to Friendster. It was from a former co-worker I hadn't seen in a while. It would have been early in the site's existence, possibly even in 2003. I looked at it for a minute and thought "why?" - which is how I feel about social media today. I should have stayed with that first impression. "First thought, best thought" right? I ignored my instinct and had a few social media pages for a while. I never liked any of them and deleted all my accounts. I do not miss any of them. Friendster was my introduction to this concept, even though I never created a profile there. Friendster would eventually pivot to being vaguely gaming focused before running out of money.
I don't know what the definition of "indie" is. Joystiq felt like a collection of "indie" blogs unlike, gaming sites owned by media companies or venture capitalists. There were a few rounds of leadership changes and eventually their business grew unsustainable. The last company to own Joystiq was AOL which axed it due to falling readership (and therefore revenue).
I don't know if this really qualifies as a web site. I tried this out for about a week. It was too much clutter and I moved on. Although I briefly considered writing a gadget for it just to see how that worked. Google Desktop felt an awful lot like the Windows ME experience, the idea that the desktop should be a living entity. Looking back at Google Desktop, the similarities to Android can't be ignored. Google Desktop was included in a purge of 10 projects that didn't fit Google's priorities.
I hosted my various applications on Google Code and it was a perfectly adequate source control system. Everyone uses GitHub now instead. Microsoft owns GitHub and LinkedIn, maybe they'll find a way to link them. Source code + social media seems like something with potential. Google at one point had Google Code and Google+. They could have done something interesting by combining those properties first. Google explicitly listed the popularity of GitHub as a major reason for retiring Google Code.
I also never uploaded anything on Megaupload... and I think I never downloaded anything from there either. It seemed too sketchy. I included this because of how crazy of a story it is. If you aren't familiar, please read it.
The questions on Yahoo! Answers were completely deranged and the responses were never disappointing. There's no real advice there, just hours of entertainment. I wish someone would print a coffee table book of the "best" Yahoo! Answers. I'd buy a coffee table just for it. I can't find a formal explanation for why Yahoo! decided to rid themselves of Answers. The company was sold (again) merely 3 months after the Answers closure. I can only assume it was a cost-cutting move to make themselves more appealing to a potential buyer.
I did not host projects on CodePlex but pulled down a ton from it (for both personal and professional projects). If you worked on .NET projects in this timeframe it was unavoidable. It was another adequate source control host that also lost out to GitHub. Microsoft discontinued CodePlex in 2017 out of a preference for GitHub, which they purchased a year later. CodePlex was left in read-only mode for a few years after that.
Reminder that this site is 100% personal opinion and does not reflect anything by whoever owns the AddThis IP today... I liked the concept of AddThis and even used it in its early days. When I had social media accounts I wanted an easy way for people to repost articles from here. AddThis accomplished that. It was awesome until I had one piece go so viral it caused my (terrible) web host at the time to suspend this site. This quickly caused me to stop caring about social media or whether anyone shared anything on this site. I think it was a convenient tool all the same. As I understand it was impossible to make AddThis GDPR compliant and have it generate revenue at the same time.
I never understood Twine. I figured I wasn't smart enough. Maybe it's simply a confusing concept. Whatever, it's gone now. If you're unfamiliar with Twine, it was an early representation of "web 2.0". Or it was the vision of what some thought "web 2.0" would be. By coincidence I worked on a portal system around this time and content management was a major feature. It meant I had several coworkers who were hyped about things like the "semantic web", Twine was one site doing the "semantic web" (whatever that was). I still don't understand any of it. This is not through lack of trying or having people in 2007 explain it to me. Twine was purchased by a search engine called Evri; who would also make this list of sites if I heard of them before this very moment. This Evri entity folded in 2010 and someone uses the name today for a delivery company.
I rarely play games on my phone but followed TouchArcade. It was fun to see what people were releasing for mobile phones. I was mostly interested in RPGs or ports of 1980s-1990s games. I found everything else interesting to learn about too. It was unable to find a way to fund operations. Between ad revenue and crowdfunding there just wasn't enough money coming in. I can imagine the monthly bandwidth costs being at least 5 figures. I miss this site, I read it daily and there isn't a substitute today.
I assume everyone remembers this as a political site. Their election projections were certainly interesting. I also liked their NFL projections and weekly puzzles. It was acquired by ABC News who axed it in 2025 as a cost-cutting measure.
I already covered this one here.
The timing on this one was all wrong. When this launched it was already obsolete due to general social media sites where people shared literally everything they did. That's how people preferred to chronicle their travels. I did not use this site because the concept terrifies me. It was acquired by TripAdvisor and closed shortly after. Some of the technology may exist behind the scenes now.
I'll say I don't care about achievements in games but in some games I enjoy trying to track down most of them. I thought the concept of Achievement Hunter was fine, even though I didn't use it. The site grew like crazy until the parent company failed.
This site was started by an experienced team that didn't find a way to earn revenue. I visited it a few times. I thought the content was duplicative of other sites. There was nothing wrong with Crispy Gamer, there wasn't anything unique about it either.
I only heard about this because WWE promoted it for a short time then stopped caring. It was like TikTok maybe? From the history it looks like they raised a lot of money but nobody was watching.
Of all the social networks, Google+ was my favorite because it had the best visibility controls. Also virtually no one used it so there wasn't much junk. It failed because most were already happy with the social networks they already used. Google obviously scraps a lot of ideas before they really have time to cook. Maybe Google+ could have grown, but when it was cancelled it didn't seem any more popular than it was at launch. That's all it was, not enough people used Google+ to justify investing more in it.
I'm not really sure why this didn't succeed since it had a headstart on TikTok. I'm not personally a fan of short form social videos but understand why others are. Video hosting is very, very expensive and the parent company of Vine has never been profitable. As competitors appeared many Vine content creators switched to them, taking advertisers along. So it had to be a rather simple financial decision to discontinue it.
The Wii U was not a smash hit in its generation. I have a difficult time reconciling this with the fact that the Wii U is the best "Zelda system" to date. I did not use Miiverse more than a couple times but thought it was a fun concept. Nintendo scrapped Miiverse with the Switch. The Mii concept was dormant until they announced a new Tomodachi Life game. I think Miis are limited to that series now.
This site had a couple writers whose work I thought was OK, or I thought their articles on other sites were OK. I try to read articles of different perspectives even if (or especially if) other perspectives feel uncomfortable. If a group of writers with the opposite views of The Toast started a similar site I would give it a read. Anyway, The Toast was not the kind of writing I'm into. I visited once or twice, and judging from the short lifetime, that was probably an average experience. I think this was one of those ideas that sounded fun in concept to the creators but actually doing it was a chore. Some authors cited being unable to keep up with their other obligations while also producing content for The Toast. Ultimately the site as a whole couldn't produce enough content to earn ad revenue.
Long time site followers, if there are such a thing, maybe wondered if I'd bring up other sites I started during this timeframe that also vanished. That will have to wait for when I'm in that kind of mood.
Thank you for humoring me by reading this far. I had fun remembering these sites, or most of them, and maybe someone else did too.
Related
