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.
Is the text generated by AI? Are the "eulogies" by real people or AI?
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!
Missing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed.
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
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 :)
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.
It's a good start. Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin brought back the good old days playing as a kid. Honestly, I thought they were still around.
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.
There's revivals of a few of the services here. Off the top of my head, myspace has spacehey which is moderately popular. AIM and MSN messengers have revivals out there but I forget the details. Neocities certainly isn't geocities but it has a similar vibe and name. They mention winamps resurrections, and at least in the unix world we have a few players compatible with the skins (which lets be honest here, why else would you want to use winamp today). Pebble came back recently. Dial up exists as well, but is mostly relegated to the extremely rural and will probably die out when satelite internet like starlink gets more popular. And of course, homepages never died for anyone moderately interested in computers
Minidisk is technically dead, but it still occasionally gets new releases, particularly from the vaporwave/y2k scene and needlejuice (they have Lemon Demon and the Friday night Funkin' soundtrack)
One question, quoting the site: https://rip.so/tamagotchi.html "Banned from: Most schools (1997-1999), some commercial flights, the Pope's car"
Pope's car?? I need a wiki to that information.
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.
Cuecat? Though I'm not sure if that ever really got big enough to warrant a spot, but it was a thing for a hot minute.
HomeRF - The wifi contender that was supposed to unify wireless networks across multiple device types.
Tivo - technically still around, but pretty much a zombie version of their former selves. (Maybe make an "I'm not dead yet!" section).
Gateway 2000 PCs -Their support line had a DJ, and they were everywhere until all of a sudden they were nowhere.
Optical Drives
Zip Drives - 100MB on a floppy! OMFG!!!11
Slashdot - Digg and Reddit's funky uncle.
The top of the page starts great, but then it goes to grey on grey on the item descriptions for that low contrast Apple like feeling.
Firefox/mac os, dark mode on.
Edit: no, dark/light doesn't seem to matter.
Edit 2: Time to go on a tangent.
I opened the site experimentally on my oled phone and while the grey on grey is still too low contrast, it's significantly more readable than on either my desktop or laptop monitor.
Is all this grey on grey fad a consequence of "designers" switching to 4k oleds even on the desktop?
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?
Is there anything out there that is the opposite of this? Like a directory of old things that are, against all odds, still alive
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:
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.
> 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!
Do Nabaztags qualify to be added? There seems to be a workaround to make them work again.
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.
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.
MiniDisc "ignored by the world" my ass, ignored by the USA you mean.
This is oddly nostalgic.
Is there any plan to let users contribute entries or memories?
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.
This is weirdly charming and a little sad in the best way. The internet needs more memorials and fewer 404s that pretend nothing ever happened.
pebble is listed there, but it's back! https://repebble.com/
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.
How does one "pour a 56k modem out"? This is the sort of nonsensical turn of phrase that AI writes.
This brought a lot of memories to me. Good job.
ICQ and 6 digit numbers? Maybe the first million users, but I had an ICQ number from... what? 1998? which was already 7 digits.
Didn't know why, I jumped to check "Google Reader".. Still missing it to that day.
Where would Prodigy, CompuServ, eWorld, MSN, and the like would fit in? Together with AOL?
ICQ being first hurts
Thanks to people I met there, I started tinkering more with computers. I had a lot of fun there when everyone else went to sleep.
> "uh-oh." its sound was a generation's text notification before texts existed
Be around me when I get a text... I have gotten some really wild looks when people recognize it. It's a bit of wtf which shifts to woah when it clicks in their head.
Fun chat with CEO last week
...now, the typewriter when you turned on the keyboard sound. Maybe that has to do with why I like mechanical keyboards.
I like this project! Would be great if you could add their logos for sentimental value.
This would be great if it had screenshots of each dead thing
I added 5-inch floppies and floppy disks, very very vintage.
vibe coded and all the content is LLM generated
Zenbe ~ 2008-2010 :(
How much I miss Path…
Anyone remember The Palace? 1996 to uhm. Early 2000s they went bankrupt. Some people made their own clients to various degrees. The two popular ones being PalaceChat(still around, barely) and Phalanx(dead.)
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.
You should add Minitel on the list.
I love how it has an under construction banner, a guestbook, a webring, and a page visit counter. This is what the internet is all about.
Though it's still missing the Amiga, and macOS <10...
This is fun, but I think the site needs a clearer distinction between “dead”, “declined”, and “still alive but culturally moved on”.
Tamagotchi is a good example: it’s no longer the late-90s phenomenon, but it’s definitely not dead.
A small status tag could help:
- shut down - zombie / technically alive - niche but active - spiritual successor exists
That would make the debates part of the site instead of just corrections in the comments.