I'm too young to remember any specific website, but I'd like to know about your old internet habits, webrings and such. I wonder how many of them are still active.
Everything2.com. Yes, it's still around, yet I've always found that the really interesting, amusing posts are from circa 2000, so that would appear to be its golden age.
I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link.
What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique.
The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.
slashdot.org (before it went completely downhill with synthetic, commercial stories much like reddit is today, or at least the top subreddits)
dejanews.com (before it was bought/killed by Google and when Usenet used to carry interesting discussions; interestingly, Usenet seems to occasionally have new good content in recent years after spammers and whackos have left)
Readit News
I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link.
What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique.
The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.
dejanews.com (before it was bought/killed by Google and when Usenet used to carry interesting discussions; interestingly, Usenet seems to occasionally have new good content in recent years after spammers and whackos have left)
A cavernous den of practical info, and mystery!
I was sad to hear that Fravia passed away - they were such an inspiration to a kid learning about computers.
also https://www.bluesnews.com, which I am astounded still looks about the same.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
geocities' taxonomies where amazing to both find and get your content found. so many x-files fan pages under area51.