1. Ain’t It Cool News?
There was a time when Harry Knowles, the infamous nerd-king of Ain’t It Cool News, was the Comicon set’s Perez Hilton. Knowles is now fighting to keep AICN operational.
In their earlier this year Hollywood Reporter feature on Knowles, Hal Esyn and Boris Kit got to the heart of AICN’s problems. “Is the pioneer of online nerddom still relevant in an age where there are a hundred different sites covering geek entertainment, where sneak peeks are now doled out by studio marketing divisions, where filmmakers have figured out how to use the web to their advantage rather than hide from it, and where directors like J.J. Abrams wield secrecy like Tolkien’s Ring of Power?” they asked.
The obvious response is “no.” Knowles was infamous in the 1990s for being able to penetrate the greatest blockbusters and get through studio red tape to obtain information about upcoming projects. As the Internet has advanced, studios have become significantly more web savvy, and what was previously a scoop is now promptly leaked from a hungry insider or even willingly shared by a studio’s PR department.
The well-connected Knowles is now trying to remain afloat. Despite the fact that the page still receives a quarter million unique visits every month, the Hollywood Reporter thinks that viewership were formerly “an order of magnitude greater.” While some of you may still visit AICN, the vast bulk of the audience has moved on from Knowles.
2. Hot Or Not
Unlike many of the websites on this list, Hot or Not still remains in a form that is close to what its creators envisioned. Hot or Not lacked the deep and noble goals that many digital start-ups have.
The concept behind Hot or Not was really basic, which is what made the site so addictive. You might spend hours debating if each person was attractive enough.
This was not only a welcome addition to the teenager’s regular diet of Maxim and sneaking looks at your father’s porno, but it also provided you a sense of control in the wild world of adolescence. It was hard to regulate your own hotness with your shifting weight and acne level, but dammit it, you were the ultimate judge of whether or not dozens of strangers were “hot or not.”
Whether or not you agree with Hot or Not’s superficial objectification, its initial attraction cannot be exaggerated. The site attracted 2 million visitors two days after it was launched in 2000. The site’s instant popularity prompted the future creators of Facebook and YouTube to experiment with clone sites before launching their respective cashcows.
3. Napster
We’ve gathered here today to mourn all of the websites from which we used to steal crap. Kazaa, Limewire, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, Napster, rest in peace.
To commemorate the countless music we stole with your support, we send a 21-gun salute from our Piratebay ships, with Nelly and Taking Back Sunday playing in the background. When you turned straight, like any good criminal, we all knew it was the beginning of the end. Lars Ulrich will never adore you, but we will.
4. Live Journal
Live Journal has had an intriguing run, attracting everyone from angsty teenagers to Russian politicians. Live Journal, created in 1999, was the popular way for high schoolers to express themselves in the early 2000s. Unlike many of the sites we’re revisiting, Live Journal still has a sizable user base.
There are still about two million Live Journal accounts active. Why did we list the firm here if there are so many active accounts? Despite the fact that there are several million active Live Journalers, 39,663,771 accounts have been established in the site’s lifetime, indicating that many of you have moved on.
Though the bulk of the surviving Live Journal users are Americans, there is a large Russian component. According to a 2012 research, Live Journal is used by 45 percent of the Russian blogosphere. In the old Soviet Union, Live Journal was a haven for dissidents.
Savva Terentyev, a Russian blogger, was sentenced to a year in prison for his actions on Live Journal, and the Uzbek and Kazakh governments have banned its use. It puts those high school rants about how annoying it is when females ignore you in the cafeteria into perspective, doesn’t it?
5. Angelfire
Did you know that Angelfire, the website that housed your stupid middle school fan site, was formerly a medical transcribing service? Angelfire rapidly abandoned their transcribing business in order to assist the production of some of the best fan sites and fan fiction we’ve ever seen.
Angelfire was formerly the go-to site for fans of everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to George the Animal Steele. Hold your head high if you were one among the throngs of teenagers who declared their love for their favourite pop culture figures via the animated GIF-laden sites of Angelfire. As it turns out, a teenage Mark Zuckerberg may have experimented with Angelfire himself.
6. Geocities
Geocities has followed in the footsteps of a once-popular metal band. They have declined in popularity (the site was previously the third most viewed in the world) and are now only available in Japan. Though Geocities was once a web hosting powerhouse, their design was archaic by today’s standards.
When Geocities originally began, websites were organised into “cities” based on the content of your site. For example, if you like movies, you should go to “Hollywood,” and if you only like animals, you should go to “Petsburgh.” Yahoo! abandoned this strategy after acquiring Geocities.
After buying Geocities for $3.5 billion in equity, Yahoo didn’t do anything else that made sense. With poorly accepted revisions to terms of service and bandwidth throttling, Yahoo assured Geocities’ steady collapse, which culminated in the closure of the American portion of the site in 2009.
7. Altavista
Nobody can claim Alta Vista didn’t put up a decent fight. Despite the fact that you haven’t utilised the service in over a decade, Alta Vista merely closed its doors a month and a half ago; the site legally ceased on July 11th. Despite the fact that Alta Vista was pulled onto the Internet against its will, the writing has been on the wall for almost a decade.
After Compaq purchased Alta Vista in 1998, and a later attempt to transform the search engine into a portal akin to Yahoo!, Alta Vista changed ownership four times before eventually shutting down. Despite Alta Vista’s earnest efforts, competing with Google (and, we assume, Bing) is a very challenging prospect.
8. Ask Jeeves
Where have you gone, Jeeves? Ask Jeeves, best known as one of the thousands of search engines that couldn’t compete with Google because they weren’t nearly as good, dropped its butler mascot in 2006 and became just Ask.com. By 2010, the site has ceased to be a search engine.
Ask.com still exists today, but instead of focusing on search, they use their “Q & A Service” to offer answers to user inquiries. Moving away from search has proven to be a wise decision, as the site now boasts an estimated 100 million global users every month. Kids, here’s a lesson: if you can’t beat ’em, do something different.
9. Myspace
Yes, we were aware of the major rebranding campaign. We’ve heard it’s a terrific location to learn about music or anything, but let’s be honest here. Are you planning on visiting the website? To be honest, we are more inclined to read a 3,000-word thinkpiece about Myspace than we are to visit the site.
Yes, there was a time when unique neon backdrops and the most stunning photos our preteen faces could produce were the only ways to express ourselves, but those days are long gone.
The new Myspace site, with its clean appearance, is like spending the weekend in your childhood bedroom. Yes, it’s cleaner than it was when you lived there, but it’ll never feel like home again.
10. AIM
We experience pangs of remorse when we think about how we’ve abandoned AOL Instant Messanger, which was such a crucial part of so many of our childhoods. AIM was the gateway drug that led to a life of inane talking and blatant flirtation on the Internet for many people in their late teens and twenties.
While we may wish to forget many of the things we said to our AIM buddies, not to mention the wisdom of our Away Messages, we will never forget our screennames. Whether you were RazrScootrDude89 or PowrPuffGrlFan00, your first AIM screenname was a childhood embarrassment that stuck with you like awful yearbook photographs or your first sexual encounter.