Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things
86 points
3 hours ago
| 32 comments
| rip.so
| HN
sinqlo
4 minutes ago
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This is a fascinating project. I’ve noticed a major shift in how we handle digital assets—we moved from hard-coded absolute paths to 'permalinks,' yet the 'perma' part of that word is increasingly a lie. I’m curious, how do you handle the archival of assets that were originally hosted behind auth-walls or CDNs that have since changed their CORS policies?
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ElCapitanMarkla
1 hour ago
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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.

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andypiper
3 minutes ago
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Hobbycraft in the local retail park has them by the tills. Definitely still around.
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prmoustache
36 minutes ago
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I saw some brand new tamagotchis in the toy alley of a supermarket while looking for a gift as recently as a few weeks ago.

People may be not crazy about it as they used to but they are definitely still a thing.

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Waterluvian
1 hour ago
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And the concept is still alive and well. My kids each got a Bitzee for Christmas which is basically the same thing.
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pxoe
1 hour ago
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Maybe there can be some kinda suggestion box and a voting system for suggestions or existing things? Like an open suggestion box, where people could submit potential entries and vote on whether they belong there and are dead or not. And for existing entries, to vote on whether something is truly dead or not, like 'yep, this is dead', or 'nope, this is still alive' (some things may be less popular, but that's not them being dead/actually completely discontinued and defunct). Not necessarily for ranking or putting it together into one score, but perhaps just showing a number of how many people think either way about something
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bozdemir
9 minutes ago
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this is a great suggestion, added to the roadmap.
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pxoe
1 hour ago
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also, 'Coming up in the graveyard' makes it sound like something's gonna arrive here like it's newly dead, like it's about to be shutdown with a deadline, when it's just anniversaries, which really should be clearer at the top of that box
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bozdemir
9 minutes ago
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same, added to the roadmap, thank you.
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andypiper
3 minutes ago
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Needs Twitter on there.
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ramblin_ray
24 minutes ago
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LOVE this! I also love how concise and readable it is...

Only thing I miss (especially for people who never experienced early internet) would be a visual example, or picture of the site, etc... like this:

https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/space-jam/

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Edd314159
13 minutes ago
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Is there anything out there that is the opposite of this? Like a directory of old things that are, against all odds, still alive
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yreg
6 minutes ago
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ytmnd, hackernews. Regarding software, perhaps vlc?
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mrweasel
12 minutes ago
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mp3.com should really be listed under "media & music". So much amazing music and creativity was lost when the site closed. You can apparently dig out a massive zip file or something from archive.org, but last I tried it was almost impossible to navigate.
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bozdemir
8 minutes ago
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will be added soon.
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p4bl0
35 minutes ago
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This is missing so much things that immediately comes to my mind (such as Voilà, Caramail, Multimania, Mygale, Radio.Blog.Club, Skyblog, Motion Twin's Flash games, etc.). I think those and many others are too local in the real world to be of any significance for a mostly US-centric history (my pov is based in France). Still, this brought up a lot of memories!
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bozdemir
10 minutes ago
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thnx for the feedback, will be adding them too.
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davidcollantes
15 minutes ago
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Where would Prodigy, CompuServ, eWorld, MSN, and the like would fit in? Together with AOL?
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bozdemir
11 minutes ago
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will be adding them too, thnx for the feedback.
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chordbug
1 hour ago
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Is the text generated by AI? Are the "eulogies" by real people or AI?
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a57721
1 hour ago
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The text on all pages looks very much LLM-generated, and I think all "user comments" there are fake too. (Edit: I mean "what people said" sections.)

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.

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Scaevolus
1 hour ago
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Pangram rates it as 100% AI generated.

Heartwarming: even if you die and nobody cares, an AI can write your eulogy!

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fazgha
17 minutes ago
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Didn't know why, I jumped to check "Google Reader".. Still missing it to that day.
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Jtarii
1 hour ago
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Missing Games for Windows Live, perhaps the worst games platform ever made, you will not be missed.

https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=8059

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dainank
44 minutes ago
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> eBay bought it in 2005 for 2.6 billion dollars. Nobody really understood why eBay wanted it. Then Microsoft bought it from eBay in 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars.

Isn't that the reason eBay bought it? It seems a speculative acquisition on the basis that Skype might become even more valuable later and they were right!

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jottinger
1 hour ago
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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.
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mlok
2 hours ago
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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.

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specproc
1 hour ago
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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.
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bozdemir
2 hours ago
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thank you for taking the time and giving feedback, i will fix them in no time.
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asimovDev
2 hours ago
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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 :)
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sgbeal
2 hours ago
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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.
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mlok
2 hours ago
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I agree. Painful. (Especially on a "dark mode" website)
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bozdemir
2 hours ago
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will fix, ty for the feedback
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kaon_2
2 hours ago
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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.

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disruptiveink
2 hours ago
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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.

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sev_verso
2 hours ago
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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.
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us-merul
1 hour ago
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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.
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flexagoon
2 hours ago
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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.
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myself248
33 minutes ago
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They used to be part of your ISP. You got a usenet server, and a mail server and a web server with a certain amount of space, just as part of signing up.

This meant that everyone had one, you didn't have to go sign up somewhere else. You still could if you wanted to have a URL that didn't have your ISP's name in it.

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malfist
26 minutes ago
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Did they? I've been around for ages (I know the dial up tone by heart). My early ISPs at best offered a mailbox (not a mail server), no web server, Usenet was extra.

And few people used the ISP mailbox because you couldn't take it with you when you left. Hell, I got my gmail during the invite only era

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bozdemir
1 hour ago
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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.
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flexagoon
1 hour ago
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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.
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sublinear
1 hour ago
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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.

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JKCalhoun
36 minutes ago
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Was looking for MapQuest. Does it live still?
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darkwater
1 hour ago
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ICQ and 6 digit numbers? Maybe the first million users, but I had an ICQ number from... what? 1998? which was already 7 digits.
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hugobeey
1 hour ago
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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.

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mkozak
1 hour ago
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pebble is listed there, but it's back! https://repebble.com/
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michaelcampbell
53 minutes ago
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The trust is dead, though. Not by all, but not by none either.
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blae
2 hours ago
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MiniDisc "ignored by the world" my ass, ignored by the USA you mean.
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d-lowl
2 hours ago
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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.
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jbjbjbjb
1 hour ago
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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.

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shahabebrahimi
1 hour ago
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This brought a lot of memories to me. Good job.
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peterpommes
39 minutes ago
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How much I miss Path…
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aledevv
2 hours ago
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I added 5-inch floppies and floppy disks, very very vintage.
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jaspervanderee
2 hours ago
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I like this project! Would be great if you could add their logos for sentimental value.
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bozdemir
2 hours ago
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added to the roadmap, ty for the suggestion.
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stanislavb
1 hour ago
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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.

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DimitriBouriez
2 hours ago
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Skype is missing?
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bozdemir
2 hours ago
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will be added soon :) yea that is a major find.
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cookiengineer
32 minutes ago
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Pretty much every text is slop-generated.

I like the idea, not what OP has done with it.

Talking about ICQ with zero screenshots is like talking about Hamachi without talking about LAN parties and how games were played at the time.

Pretty much all articles are just slop-text. Not even talking about alternatives or what has been done in the meantime. For example, ICQ led to AIM and Trillian, which led to pidgin/libpurple, then to jabber/xmpp etc.

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malfist
30 minutes ago
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Ai slop with the "I model myself after the AI greats" and most everything except the into is in lowercase
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