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28 Notable Websites From The Dawn Of The Internet That Young People Surely Missed Out On
Interview With Expert
The Internet is a fascinating and mind-boggling creation that is becoming an integral part of our daily lives. But it wasn’t always this way.
Back in the day, the Internet was more like a novelty filled with odd and funny websites that nowadays either barely function or no longer exist. This means that there's a whole generation of internet users that missed out on this remarkable era. So, today let's take a trip down memory lane to see what websites older netizens think youngsters never got to experience.
More info: Reddit
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Youtube pre-ads. A magical time.
Ace 1 year ago
Less content, for sure, but not sure about better ,unless it's simply overwhelmed by the quantity of dross? Oh, and anyone who's complaining about adverts and has not worked out how to avoid ever seeing them? You need to get savvy, is all.
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Bronco Zaurus 1 year ago
I cannot understand people complaining about ads when you can get Ublock Origin and not see a single ad, as I have.
RosenCranzLives 1 year ago
Old YouTube was replaced - when it became commercialized - by TikTok, which will, in turn, be replaced by whatever comes next, which I can't even imagine. It's the nature of technology. VR comes to mind.
Steve Robert 1 year ago
Too many ads. Terrible placement. And I boycott those companies that think this is good for their business. It's not.
RELATED:
#2
When people did stuff for fun and because it was cool, not to make money. Basically, when the internet felt like it was mostly people, not mostly companies.
Andrew Keir 1 year ago
Cory Doctorow has a word for what happened - but it would be heavily censored here.
Evagating Beewolf (she/they) 1 year ago (edited)
let's see: enshittification. edit: I'll be damned, it wasn't censored!
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Reset Game 1 year ago (edited)
I miss flash mobs. Not commercial where it promoted product or service or whatever. Just a bunch of people getting together and talking into their banana phone or having a bubble battle
Ben Aziza 1 year ago
Ow Some ACTUALLY fun ones still happen to this day! Like the josh fight! The image below shows how it started and the vicious warlord and winner of the event, THE ONE TRUE JOSH! don't let his innocent looks fool you... There is a reason he is the only one left with the name... You don't wanna see what happened to spider josh and big josh...
.........Even the area 51 "invasion" happened half of it was bad but the other half went really well. I think the internet historian made a video about it. To this day I cant get over how the US MILITARY had to have a serious briefing that included the phrase "Naruto running faster than their bullets" JOSHHH-672...b0-png.jpg 
#3
Forums in general were great community spaces that you just don’t get on Reddit or Facebook groups.
Evagating Beewolf (she/they) 1 year ago (edited)
the first really noncommercial non-hypermonetized platform I hung out on was this tiny li'l thing called impish idea. I loved it. It was about writing, and there were only a few people there, only one of whom could make new posts and not just comment. then one day it just...went down. It still shows it: "Database unavailable". It's a shame; I really liked it. If you're wondering, it's at impishidea.com. (Some of it's still archived by the Wayback machine, but not the people.) edit: impishidea was the exact opposite of hypermonetized, original post gave a false impression
Andrew Keir 1 year ago
It was all friendly, free, and not very organised. Now it's all organised and not very friendly - and either we pay, or we have to endure adverts. Change is not necessarily progress...
Mark Fergel 1 year ago
Oh yeah. PHPBB. I used that as the backend for a couple different sites I had. Even with very little knowledge it was pretty easy to customize.
Apatheist Account2 1 year ago
I recall having a forum debate in which I bemoaned the lack of progress on electric cars. He came back with a very patronising "you obviously don't know anything about fuel cells" and how it was impossible. I'm guessing he didn't know anything about innovation; I believe the last laugh is mine.
The Internet's origins lie in around the 1950s, when during the Cold War, Americans realized they needed some sort of communication system that could not be affected by Soviet nuclear attack.
Yet, its official “birthday” is considered to be January 1, 1983, as about then it started to resemble the Internet we have now. Still, it was way less capable than the one we have now. To talk about the early Internet and its influence on the one we have today, Bored Panda reached out to cyberpsychologist Mayra Ruiz-McPherson, PhD(c), MA, MFA.
At first, the Internet was mostly used by institutions and universities rather than regular people. Then in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW), which fast-tracked the public’s usage of the Internet too.
#4
All the old Macromedia Shockwave / Flash sites before Adobe bought Flash and it became the internet’s favorite malware vector.
#5
Icanhazcheezburger.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 year ago
I still have some Demotivational posters and a bumper sticker from Despair.com! It was the polished version of those memes XD
Load More Replies... Carl Roberts 1 year ago
Cheezburger back in the day was pretty fun.Now it's, well, Buzzfeed, mixed with TMZ, mixed with Reddit. Just like Bored Panda
Robert Beveridge 1 year ago
Cheezburger is still around, though it's now mostly turned into a listicle site like, uh, some other animal-named website I occasionally use whose name is currently escaping me.
Freya the Wanderer 1 year ago
I can confirm. I used to be on it all the time and made quite a few LOLs. Quite a few? Hundreds! Now that it is so different, I rarely visit, let alone contribute.
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Travelling Stranger 1 year ago
the site and its family (failblog, memebase, etc) are still around
#6
Thinkgeek dot com
They used to have the coolest s**t ever.
Kristal 1 year ago
I miss this site SOOOOO much. Had the best stuff that was also practical. They also had amazing black Friday deals. It all went downhill when Gamestop bought them.
ZestyBison 1 year ago
I'm so upset I never had the opportunity to shop there.
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Combfish McComish 1 year ago
Me too...I bought my scientist mum gonorrhea and she proudly showed it off at work
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As our interviewee pointed out, compared to the modern Internet, the beginning of the World Wide Web was painfully slow. Plus, it was capable of way less than it is now. As an example, she gave photo and video sharing: “These activities and behaviors ‘were possible’ back in the ’90s but were quite challenging depending on connectivity, file sizes, limited tools, and limited hosting.”
Still, people were eager to use it and pretty soon a bunch of websites and chat rooms started being created, which brings us to our main topic. It was inspired by a Reddit user, u/milamccormick7, whose account is currently suspended, asking the question “What ‘early internet’ website did Gen Z really miss out on?” on r/AskReddit.
People didn’t shy away from answering this question and the post on the platform got over 15K replies. So, we picked out the most interesting ones and compiled this list. In it, you can find people being straightforward and naming the sites that in their eyes Gen Z missed out on.
#8
Yahoo answers
"Im 13 yrs old . Am I pregunt? " .
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 year ago
When my old gray kitty was diagnosed with kidney failure at age 14, most of the vets in my area wouldn't even help with any treatments and told me just to euthanize her. I did some research online and found a Yahoo group for kidney failure in cats (CRF/CKD) and that led me to Tanya's CRF/CKD site (felinecrf.org). The help and advice from the people in that Yahoo group gave me the strength to find a new vet and try out treatments for my kitty. SubQ fluids and a change in diet and my girl and I got to have 6 more wonderful years together. She died of a stroke two months shy of her 20th birthday. I owe a lot to that Yahoo group.
Robert Beveridge 1 year ago
Yahoo Answers was one of the greatest auto wrecks in internet history. I'm so sad they took down the archives. Endless entertainment.
Roxy222uk 1 year ago
Used to spend the odd evening trying to answer as many as I could. At least half would be telling someone claiming "I am 12 year old, I have very big breast, shuld i let my boyfrend finger me?" that they were very clearly male.
Load More Replies... ZestyBison 1 year ago (edited)
I f*****g love these am I pregerante questions. Perhaps not from a 13 year old, but they slayed me.
Sven Grammersdorf 1 year ago
They need to do way instain mother> who kill thier babbys, becuse these babby cant fright back? It was on the news this mroing a mother in ar who had kill her three kids, they are taking the three babby back to new york too lady to rest. my pary are with the father who lost his chrilden ; i am truley sorry for your lots"
fly on the wall 1 year ago
What are you trying to say? Write it in your native language and we can run it through a translator.
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Robert Beveridge 1 year ago
My favorite racetrack (Assiniboia Downs in Winnipeg) uses it as loading music for the last race every night. It's one of the reasons they're my favorite racetrack.
Fai 1 year ago
The song is from Disney's Robin Hood cartoon movie, only sped up!
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Will Cable 1 year ago
You know how some vehicles beep when reversing I want the hamster dance music instead.
Joanne Mendonza-Earle 1 year ago
I LOVED THIS! The song immediately popped into my head when I saw this! Back in 1999 I had a job I just HATED. So I made this my screensaver with the volume on, password protected the computer so it couldn't be turned off, and went to lunch.
Like MySpace, which still technically works, but it’s way past its peak. Or various forums where people would go when they needed advice on something, like Yahoo Answers, which was shut down back in 2021. Of course, Reddit or other social media can be used for that nowadays, but the vibe is not the same.
At the same time, some people didn’t name specific websites, just the concepts of the internet they miss.
For example, when people created sites for fun and not to make money. Ms. Ruiz-McPherson also indicated that the ability to monetize content used to be initially non-existent, which is a very big contrast to today’s social media.
She voiced that “Modern social media users are inundated, in between clicks, posts, shares, swipes, and content consumption with a tsunami of targeted ads, based on their user engagement patterns.”
#10
YTMND
Flash games
How easy it truly was back in the day to download music/tv/movies through Napster or Kazaa lite.
Ash 1 year ago (edited)
aw man the agony of downloading music on Napster over dial-up. It took ages, and it could be 95% downloaded and then something would happen and it would lose the whole thing.... Also all the legal drama around Napster. Man, I haven't thought of that in years. (Tho I think I actually still have a song on my phone I downloaded through Napster! I can tell because the audio quality is so fvcked up lol)
Sue User 1 year ago
The day they invented " you can stop a download and then just resume" was great.
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#11
Cracked.com - so much great content back in the day.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 year ago
I'm old enough to remember that Cracked was a magazine back when I was a kid. I used to buy it and MAD magazine occasionally. I didn't always understand most of it because I was a kid (and I hadn't seen most of the movies they spoofed/parodied), but they were hilarious.
Pyla 1 year ago
I was all about MAD magazine. Crack was too weird for my 7th grader brain
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detective miller's hat 1 year ago
Now Cracked has so many ads it just crashes whatever browser I'm using.
MedusaWasBeautiful 1 year ago
Nearly every other article on it are Always Sunny, Seinfeld, or SNL.
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#12
The prime of MySpace.com.
The Redhead 1 year ago
I miss MySpace, I never understood how Facebook knocked it out. I loved designing my own page.
Sue User 1 year ago
I used to use Facebook to keep up with friends far away. But no matter what setting i set, all i see are adverts and group ( tinyhouseliving ) postings. All i had to do was read a couple of posts and boom.. i am trapped in an echo chamber.
Load More Replies... Joanne Mendonza-Earle 1 year ago
I found MySpace to be a creepy, dark place on the internet, the few times I looked at it.
Granted, she said that these ads are what make social media look free, as they work as the price we pay for it. “It would make the early internet almost unrecognizable to many social media users of today.”
Others said that the early Internet was filled with people who genuinely were interested, which made building bridges way easier than with the modern Internet. Again, our interviewee added some insight to this observation too. Back in the day, people could use anonymity to communicate and exchange ideas, while today users tend to have more visible and branded personal identities.
So, it could be said that the Internet culture has drastically changed since its early days. Due to the increase in speed, in the 2010s social media and smart technologies flourished, and e-commerce and streaming services disrupted the areas they were in, bringing the service itself to the online world. All this led to over 5 billion people being connected to the Internet in the 2020s.
#13
Stumbleupon.
Andrew Keir 1 year ago
I still rate 'stumbleupon' - for letting me find out things I'd never have found without it.
#14
Just, sort of, the concept of websites. Yes we obviously have them today, but everything is just extremely condensed in terms of traffic. Everyone's on Google, Amazon, and reddit. It used to be that you actually had fun "surfing" the web (yeah I just now at this instant realized this isn't really a term anymore), finding nifty different sites, telling your friends of your findings and adventures, etc.
Not too early web but stumbleupon was big for that.
I think this condensation started with Facebook. A friend and I had a realization at one point that we didn't really use "websites" anymore, but that even "websites" for companies or ideas or whatnot were just Facebook pages. Since then Facebook is now not as popular, but the point remains. .
Alyssa Phillips 1 year ago
I loved stumble... Id fall into a black hole of randomness
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Stephanie Did It 1 year ago
I loved Stumbleupon, until the day it landed me on a corrupt page and destroyed my laptop's hard drive. The best support in the city couldn't repair it.
Robert Beveridge 1 year ago
The major catalyst was the beginning of Web 2.0 and the whole "interactivity" revolution--when web sites became less static. Facebook happened along at just the right time to be an early adopter.
Kristal 1 year ago
Huh? I still use websites and go directly to websites. Particularly when booking flights. Always best to go directly through the airline
Ash 1 year ago
No, but like, this kind of surfing was saying, "Oh hey, I like tigers! I'm going to search for 'tigers'!" and then putting that into a Lycos search engine, and ending up on somebody's personal webpage all about tigers, and then going through their guestbook or webring and finding 5 other really cool sites about tigers, and then eventually making your way around to this REALLY COOL personal website about VOLCANOES! And writing down the url on a piece of paper and giving it to your friend to check out lol We also used to type in the URLs for things like PBS shows and stuff from TV or the dilbert site to play flash games, or or or.... Now we tend to stick to just a few centralized websites, FB being one of them. Can you IMAGINE going on an adventure through a bunch of people's personal websites these days? You'd never even be able to find them in the first place because Google will have buried them so deep.
Load More Replies... Apatheist Account2 1 year ago
It was actually "cerfing", named after the internet pioneer, Vint Cerf.
#15
The separation of Google and Froogle. If I wanted to search for things and info, use Google. If I wanted to search for products to buy, use Froogle. Now the top hits on Google are all just things for sale.
Apatheist Account2 1 year ago
And of course, if you were looking for 80s bands, you'd use Kajagoogle.
Roxy222uk 1 year ago
If you were looking for animations about short sighted men you would use Mr McGoogle
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This led to something Ms. Ruiz-McPherson referred to as a “weight loss” journey of the Internet. New features and trends started making the web more and more user-friendly.
She said that "The internet became far leaner, more agile, robust, and much faster than its previous versions. With each milestone, processes became streamlined with increasingly frictionless UX journeys whereby it took far fewer clicks to get to your online destinations. And an exciting array of content options and commercial possibilities."
Unfortunately, all these advancements also led to many websites being taken down or simply getting stuck in time. The cyberpsychologist mentioned that people who used to become hosts of these sites had the required technical knowledge of HTML and FTP servers, and sometimes even had to know CSS and understand SEO.
#16
EbaumsWorld, AlbinoBlacksheep, Newgrounds, Homestar Runner, and Xanga were where I spent a good chunk of my early teens.
Weasel Wise 1 year ago (edited)
Homestar Runner, spreading worldwide awareness of Trogdor, The Burninator! Watch out! "He's burninating all the people abd their thatched roof cottages!! Thatched roof cottages!!" ❤️
#17
Rotten.com.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 year ago
I spent WAY too much time on this site as a teenager/young adult. ...that probably explains a lot of things XD
Bartlet for world domination 1 year ago
Probably :) A few of their images are still etched in my brain.
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Ian Webling 1 year ago
I miss Rotten dot com. My favourite article was one entitled something like: "At we don't show pictures of people eating babies. Wait..."
Kaedyn Walsh 1 year ago
DocumentingReality.com has been around for decades. It's prolly worse than rotten was. They don't allow any uploads of deceased children which is good.
#18
The original addictinggames dot com.
Now, some of them are still keeping up their creations as archives rather than as working sites, while others closed them for many reasons – from copyright issues to simply not seeing the point of keeping them up anymore.
Well, it’s sad that we can no longer experience websites that were once entertaining for us or others, but that’s just the price we have to pay to have the Internet we have now, which as Ms. Ruiz-McPherson specified, includes “Real-time access and interactions, insanely fast speeds [that] facilitate content spreadability and ease of digital interactions.”
Is there any early internet website you think the younger generations are missing out on? Share with us in the comments! Also check out the Instagram and LinkedIn profiles of our interviewee, cyberpsychologist Mayra Ruiz-McPherson, PhD(c), MA, MFA!
#19
Neopets and Homestar Runner! those were such a vibe back in the day.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 year ago
My Neopets account still exists. My original Lupe, Amaranth, is almost 25 years old. I have friends younger than my virtual pet XD amaranth-6...caaf60.jpg 
PeepPeep the duck 1 year ago
I’ll add you next time I’m on 😂 I still play now and then also
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ZestyBison 1 year ago
Neopets, as an adult a few years ago I made an account with the goal to find a faerie paint brush and to hit Ultimate Riches. Well, I found a Strawberry Fields Forever paintbrush and made it to Diamond Deposit Gold. x
Lauren Caswell 1 year ago
Faerie PB was impossible to get due to rarity until now. Latest Neopets plot re released heaps of valuable old retired items ^-^ Now is the time!
Load More Replies... Robert Beveridge 1 year ago
I wonder if I could still pull up my account. Good lord, what would I have used as a password 22 years ago...?
#20
Home star runner.
It's still up and running, nothing is stopping kids now a days from going and looking at it but I've never met anyone born in 2000 or after who has ever even heard of it.
LakotaWolf (she/her) 1 year ago
I still have a The Cheat plushie that makes sounds if you smack in on the head XD
Evagating Beewolf (she/they) 1 year ago
I have, admittedly on the earlier end of that range, but hey, I have (maybe I look at TVTropes too much...)
#21
Bonsai Kitten
People were so gullible and convinced it was real that the FBI got involved.
_-DungeonKeeper-_ 1 year ago
Yall every heard of Furnetics? Fake site which offers to turn people into furries. Pretty cool concept tbh but would be very illegal
#22
Not so much a specific site, but the fact that the early internet (talking 1990s here) was a “high trust society”. The only people online were university students and relatively well off people who were genuinely interested in this new technology. So you could meet people on a random IRC channel or telnet talker or whatever and within days or hours you may have swapped real life phone numbers and addresses with them so you could send each other cool stuff in the mail. I got so many cool packages from various overseas countries back in the day and made genuine friendships online in a way that you just couldn’t do today. It wasn’t filled with scammers and the like. You could safely give your actual street address to someone you’d only talked to for a week (especially if they were on a different continent, like what are they gonna do?)
Incidentally I met my wife this way. We were online friends for a while, living on opposite sides of the planet. We sent each other presents in the mail etc. Eventually in the late 90s decided to pay the thousands of dollars to fly to meet in person and the rest is history.
Back then, relationships that started online were super rare, but now I think the majority do, thanks to dating sites and the like.
#23
Googling "French military victories" and then hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button.
Georgy 1 year ago
No. Just lazy. https://www.militaryfactory.com/battles/french_military_victories.php
Load More Replies... #24
Habbo hotel.
ZestyBison 1 year ago
F**k yes bro. I loved Habbo Hotel, all of the foreign hotels, and the Retros. x
#25
Digg back when Digg was relevant. It was my homepage for YEARS and how I discovered new stuff across the internet before Reddit came along.
#26
GaiaOnline, even though it still exists today.
Lost Panda 1 year ago
The last I checked (about 3 years ago) my old one still worked. Didn't stay too long though, guess I grew up XD
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#27
Something Awful, though the forums are still going strong. On that note: G****e.
What do you think ?
Philly Bob 1 year ago (edited)
https://we.tl/t-AouLcWvFAi - All the Elfbowls, Hangaroo, Punt The Geek & Frogapult - Link good to 11/18/24
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Arthur Waite 1 year ago
I remember when the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) had a forum. Watch a movie, then go in and analyse it to bits. And see what a million other people thought of Pierce Brosnan's singing in Mamma Mia.
Traveling Lady Railfan 1 year ago
Back almost 18 years ago or so, you could write reviews / guides on ebay. I don't think that's what they called it, it probably had a different name. But they were short little forums that you could write that were informative, you could include photos, and I used to write hem all the time to help people to learn how to complete certain toy lines/which accessories they needed for each figure to make it a complete figure (so for instance if you had the figure and it needed three accessories, tell you which accessories they were and how hard they were to find or if they were things like got broken easily or whatever) That was neat. It was nice to be able to share your informative content and help people. There was nothing monetarily attached to that except of course if people thought you were knowledgeable in the field they might want to check your store. They got rid of that a long time ago.
Pamacious 1 year ago
Boxerjam games like Strike A Match and Out of Order. I've not found anything comparable. Woot before Amazon purchased it was great, too.
Traveling Lady Railfan 1 year ago
I didn't realize that Amazon purchased woot way back in 2010!! (Heck I didn't even know that Amazon purchased woot at all until you mentioned it) Woot was fun back in the early days.
Load More Replies... Bartlet for world domination 1 year ago
When did "the early internet" end? I'd say 20 years ago, when Youtube and Facebook came along.
Traveling Lady Railfan 1 year ago
Although the internet was around earlier than this, and other people would give different answers, I feel "early internet" was approximately 1993 to 2003.
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Evagating Beewolf (she/they) 1 year ago
many of these are just enshittification repackaged. On that note, I recommend reading cory doctorow at pluralistic.net (or mastodon, or horrid other sites, or via newsletter)
Ariom Dahl 1 year ago
Anyone remember the Harper Collins sponsored site authonomy which encouraged budding writers to post their masterpieces and receive feedback from others on the site? HC ended it in 2015.
Philly Bob 1 year ago (edited)
https://we.tl/t-AouLcWvFAi - All the Elfbowls, Hangaroo, Punt The Geek & Frogapult - Link good to 11/18/24
Load More Replies... Arthur Waite 1 year ago
I remember when the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) had a forum. Watch a movie, then go in and analyse it to bits. And see what a million other people thought of Pierce Brosnan's singing in Mamma Mia.
Traveling Lady Railfan 1 year ago
Back almost 18 years ago or so, you could write reviews / guides on ebay. I don't think that's what they called it, it probably had a different name. But they were short little forums that you could write that were informative, you could include photos, and I used to write hem all the time to help people to learn how to complete certain toy lines/which accessories they needed for each figure to make it a complete figure (so for instance if you had the figure and it needed three accessories, tell you which accessories they were and how hard they were to find or if they were things like got broken easily or whatever) That was neat. It was nice to be able to share your informative content and help people. There was nothing monetarily attached to that except of course if people thought you were knowledgeable in the field they might want to check your store. They got rid of that a long time ago.
Pamacious 1 year ago
Boxerjam games like Strike A Match and Out of Order. I've not found anything comparable. Woot before Amazon purchased it was great, too.
Traveling Lady Railfan 1 year ago
I didn't realize that Amazon purchased woot way back in 2010!! (Heck I didn't even know that Amazon purchased woot at all until you mentioned it) Woot was fun back in the early days.
Load More Replies... Bartlet for world domination 1 year ago
When did "the early internet" end? I'd say 20 years ago, when Youtube and Facebook came along.
Traveling Lady Railfan 1 year ago
Although the internet was around earlier than this, and other people would give different answers, I feel "early internet" was approximately 1993 to 2003.
Load More Replies... Evagating Beewolf (she/they) 1 year ago
many of these are just enshittification repackaged. On that note, I recommend reading cory doctorow at pluralistic.net (or mastodon, or horrid other sites, or via newsletter)
Ariom Dahl 1 year ago
Anyone remember the Harper Collins sponsored site authonomy which encouraged budding writers to post their masterpieces and receive feedback from others on the site? HC ended it in 2015.
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