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'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.
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.
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.
I don't think the banner is painful, it just needs to be balanced by other graphical elements. It can offset by liberal use of <blink> throughout the text, or by a few tasteful gifs.
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.
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.
I guess mainly because of insta, facebook and other social media platforms, but I am a fan of old days. But our numbers are pretty limited compared to the mass.
Sure, but I think it's just that internet is now used by much more non—tech-savvy people, not because people are switching from having a personal homepage to social media. The ones who know how to create a personal site still usually have one. Almost every post you see on HN is from someone's personal website.
Of the people I know in tech roles, there are far more who have no online presence at all.
Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
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.
Killed for Skype, which was already declining by that time. Microsoft was keen on unifying their IM platforms, but failed to realise that unless the migration path is incredibly smooth, people just won't do it. And the value of any chat service is that the people you want to talk to are on there. Many people didn't bother migrating from MSN to Skype and that was the end of it.
The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions.
Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams.
Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.
I was still using Skype to talk with my parents when they pulled the plug on it, too. Obviously (and unlucky for Microsoft), that conversation never moved to Teams. Curious how many users they lost with that move.
Not only I guess. I remember buying a minidisk instead of miniCD __by accident__ in the '00s in Russia. That was literally the only time I saw one in person.
My parents got me one in 1999 after years of me asking. It was such a disappointment when mp3 players like iRiver came out soon after (that should have a page on the graveyard) and then iPod came out. The iRiver and similar product used flash memory too.
Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.
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.
ICQ and 6 digit numbers? Maybe the first million users, but I had an ICQ number from... what? 1998? which was already 7 digits.
Missing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed.
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8059
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think the banner is painful, it just needs to be balanced by other graphical elements. It can offset by liberal use of <blink> throughout the text, or by a few tasteful gifs.
thank you for taking the time and giving feedback, i will fix them in no time.
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.
I agree. Painful. (Especially on a "dark mode" website)
will fix, ty for the feedback
Is the text generated by AI? Are the "eulogies" by real people or AI?
The text on all pages looks very much LLM-generated, and I think all "user comments" there are fake too.
I like the idea of the site, but not the execution.
It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.
Pangram rates it as 100% AI generated.
Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!
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.
I guess mainly because of insta, facebook and other social media platforms, but I am a fan of old days. But our numbers are pretty limited compared to the mass.
Sure, but I think it's just that internet is now used by much more non—tech-savvy people, not because people are switching from having a personal homepage to social media. The ones who know how to create a personal site still usually have one. Almost every post you see on HN is from someone's personal website.
Of the people I know in tech roles, there are far more who have no online presence at all.
Personal pages were once an option in those people's minds (i.e. get around to it later). Then it got bargained down to social media profiles. Now anything at all has become a liability and the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I think that's what they mean.
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.
Killed for Skype, which was already declining by that time. Microsoft was keen on unifying their IM platforms, but failed to realise that unless the migration path is incredibly smooth, people just won't do it. And the value of any chat service is that the people you want to talk to are on there. Many people didn't bother migrating from MSN to Skype and that was the end of it.
The Skype team at the time was also run with the mindset of "developer happiness comes first, users come second", a relatively popular mindset in the 2010s, and shipped large app rewrites with missing features and usability regressions.
Of course, they eventually killed Skype too. The MSN users never went to Skype and the Skype users just progressively jumped ship to FaceTime/WhatsApp video/Google Voice to replace video calling and VoIP, respectively. By then you had a former shell of what Skype was and Microsoft figured they should just shove the remainder of their users into Teams.
Similar to the Google Talk > Hangouts > Google Chat tragedy.
I was still using Skype to talk with my parents when they pulled the plug on it, too. Obviously (and unlucky for Microsoft), that conversation never moved to Teams. Curious how many users they lost with that move.
pebble is listed there, but it's back! https://repebble.com/
MiniDisc "ignored by the world" my ass, ignored by the USA you mean.
Not only I guess. I remember buying a minidisk instead of miniCD __by accident__ in the '00s in Russia. That was literally the only time I saw one in person.
My parents got me one in 1999 after years of me asking. It was such a disappointment when mp3 players like iRiver came out soon after (that should have a page on the graveyard) and then iPod came out. The iRiver and similar product used flash memory too.
Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.
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.
added to the roadmap, ty for the suggestion.
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.
Skype is missing?
will be added soon :) yea that is a major find.