A memorial site cataloging shut-down or culturally dead internet services: messengers, social networks, browsers, gadgets, and games from the 1990s-2020s.
Key Takeaways
Covers ~50 entries across six categories: messengers (ICQ, AIM, MSN, BBM, Google Talk), social networks (MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Google+, Vine, Path), websites/hosts (GeoCities, Digg, Google Reader, Delicious), browsers/search (Netscape, IE, AltaVista), media (Flash, Napster, Winamp, Grooveshark, Rdio), and devices (Zune, Palm Pilot, Pebble, Symbian, Windows Phone).
Each entry includes lifespan dates and a short eulogy; tone is irreverent and specific – ICQ numbers as “first online identities,” Digg v4 as the actual death event, not the shutdown date.
Google appears five times as killer or failed product: Wave (dead in 14 months), Reader (killed for no clear reason), Hangouts (“rest in the merge”), Orkut (300M users, still shut down), Google+ (forced YouTube login).
Adobe Flash gets its own entry: described as the substrate for “the entire weird and wonderful internet of the 2000s,” killed by Apple’s 2010 no-Flash stance; Steve Jobs is noted as still smiling.
The site explicitly marks itself “UNDER CONSTRUCTION,” signaling active expansion rather than a finished archive.
Hacker News Comment Review
Core taxonomy debate: commenters want a formal status distinction between “shut down,” “zombie/technically alive,” “niche but active,” and “spiritual successor exists” – several entries (Tamagotchi, Angelfire, RealPlayer) sit in gray zones the current design ignores.
Eurocentrism and local memory: French commenter called out US-centric selection, naming Voilà, Caramail, Skyblog, and Motion Twin Flash games as obvious omissions with no representation.
Community-driven curation was the main feature request: open suggestion box plus voting on whether entries belong or are actually dead, paralleling how Wikipedia handles notability disputes.
Notable Comments
@Xiaoher-C: Proposes four concrete status tags (shut down, zombie, niche but active, spiritual successor exists) to make the definitional debate a site feature rather than a comment-section correction loop.
@chordbug: Directly asks whether eulogies are AI-generated – a signal that the copy reads synthetic to at least some readers, which is a trust and credibility risk for a nostalgia-driven project.
