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Posted by u/Yawrehto a year ago
Ask HN: What websites that were sold/abandoned/don't work anymore do you miss?
Basically that.

Mine is this tiny old community. It was called Impish Idea, and it was a writing criticism thing. I joined it late in its lifetime, after watching for a long time. I had maybe a few months of active commenting on it. I was commenting as 'Brooklyn', not my real name.

Once it had been bigger, but when I joined it was tiny. Me, someone who could make new posts and not just comments, and a few other people. But I loved it. It felt like the sort of place where I could actually have discussions. It was far away from SEO-optimized stuff. It was real. Genuine.

And then one day, it showed a 'database unavailable' thing. As I'm writing this, it still does. No explanation, no nothing. Just 'database unavailable'. All of it that wasn't archived is gone, including the last post (I think--I don't know) that was made to it.

I have no way of contacting anyone on it. It's just gone. And I miss it. It was one of the first communities I joined that wasn't Facebook-y social media.

I was just wondering what other sites like that you guys have, small communities or sites that vanished. Or ones that haven't been updated in ages. Or ones that were sold off and became different.

thorin · a year ago
I hope this community continues for a long time. A similar one I was involved with was ukriversguidebook. It's still up, but barely gets any posts anymore. It was a forum for collecting river guides and information as well as a phpbb for discussing kayaking and canoeing. I used to read it every day and contribute guides sometimes, but this kind of thing has all gone to Facebook which is ok for transitory discussions but doesn't work as a historical document for discussions or information.

Incidentally after all the furore on here I'd assume reddit was largely dead now, but since starting playing console games this year I've realised how heavily used it is for gaming tips.

solardev · a year ago
Old Facebook, when the Wall was just recent posts from real friends, not whatever level of hellish crapvertisement propaganda it is today.
h2odragon · a year ago
Dont howl over the joys that were; fire up a forum and make those joys live again.
nicbou · a year ago
Not on Google’s watch
jmstfv · a year ago
https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm - a forum for small internet business owners. we still have the archive tho!
danschuller · a year ago
Business of Software forum, as far as I can tell there's nothing similar anymore for a group of small one-person commercial software devs discovering how, and helping each other, to be successful.

There used to be cool art forum called eatpoo that lots of nice art and tigsource is no longer anywhere near what it was.

admissionsguy · a year ago
Luboš Motl's blog The Reference Frame .. it was a unique resource of awesome quality for its physics content ... He may have been rather toxic in certain contexts, but not even close to the limits of what a rational society would accept from someone this good.
brudgers · a year ago
Geocities.
meiraleal · a year ago
Orkut, a real social network that connected us to friends and family, before the newsfeed ruined everything