You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes

Hidden gems like this were one of the great things about Everything2. For those who aren't familiar with it, E2 is structured vaguely like an encyclopedia, only instead of being a shared Wiki any user can write a whole separate article. Sometimes this was helpful for learning -- having three different explanations of what a tensor[1] is, for example. Sometimes it gave a mix of informational and personal content, such as the page on Mother's Day[2], which has one article on the history of the holiday and two about the authors' attempts to cope with it despite losing or never having had a good relationship with their mothers. (Plus a summary of a Futurama episode by that name, because E2 was like that.)

It also had an accidentally-fun feature in its hyperlinking system. Hyperlinks were intended to be used to be used for words that had their own articles, but you could link to any article, and when you hovered your mouse over the link the name of the target article would pop up. This could be used to make the closest thing I've seen to an English equivalent of Japanese furigana puns. I'm having trouble finding a good example right now, sadly.

[1] https://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=tensor

[2] https://everything2.com/title/Mother%2527s+day

My uncle was the one to introduce me to everything2 back when I must have been around 12 years old, by linking me to one of his writeups. I never created an account there, but was immediately pulled in by its curious mix of geeky information and beautiful writing. I voraciously read it throughout my teen years and am convinced it helped expand my vocabulary, and also probably reinforced my habit of aimlessly exploring information repositories (e.g., Wikipedia rabbit holes). I still sometimes return to it to be mildly amused at seeing present-day content presented in the same antiquated frontend that I don't think has changed much in 20+ years, because why mess with perfection?

I don't know anyone in my life who's heard of the site besides my uncle, but I enjoy showing it to friends and coworkers as an example of the type of website I grew up with, and which stands in a class of its own, at least to me.

The other great feature were 'nodeshells' (that is, links to pages that did not yet exist). These could act as writing prompts, or just as a way to 'comment' on other nodes (pages).

Weirdly, one of the ones I liked (by adding it to my homepage) was 'AT fields cannot be penetrated spiritually fallacy' was around 20 years ago. Just this year I finally watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, and finally understood what it meant :)

I never heard of Everything2. Regretfully because it seems great. I see it has new articles and Wikipedia lists it as active though everybody here refers to it in the past tense. Why is that?

Well, it was originally very experimental and a Slashdot project -- short short stories, diary entries, poems, opinions, film reviews, whatever goes. Then someone got the bright idea that the place should be factual, and there was a big push for it to be real and grounded and not so artsy.

Then Wikipedia came along and ate. their. lunch.

The experimental folks already lit off for greener pastures, and others had been driven off by "XP Pack Rape," a practice as charming as its name, wherein a user would be targeted and just sort of ... de-karma'd or whatever you would have it.

Between those forces and the decline of Slashdot, well ...

Thanks for making me aware of the existence of furigana. Unique corners of language are a pet interest of mine and that was a fun rabbit hole to go down.

Two of my favorite E2 posts, that I think about and/or quote regularly:

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken: https://everything2.com/title/Drink+from+the+cup+as+if+it%25...

And: Bread is the staff of the proletariat. Toast is a decadent capitalist luxury https://everything2.com/title/Bread+is+the+staff+of+the+prol....

Here’s one take: https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1551144296014807040

> I don't know anyone in my life who's heard of the site besides my uncle, but I enjoy showing it to friends and coworkers as an example of the type of website I grew up with, and which stands in a class of its own, at least to me.

I came across the site when I read Daniel Rutter’s Dan’s Data(1) pre-blog blog in the early-2000s when I was devouring everything about Palm devices as a geeky teenager. Dan had a tendency to link terms and phrases to sites that discussed what he meant in detail. Everything2 was his go-to for a lot of references and it soon became mine. Before a certain point, I think I was looking stuff up on E2 before looking on Wikipedia.

A few years later, I found my group of “wholehearted geeky but well-masking” friends in university. A couple of them also read Everything2, and the discovery of this site was one of those subconscious things that nudged us closer together.

I hope this site stays up forever, and I am disappointed it does not often come up in search results for random topics.

Of note, E2 has indeed had a small change in the last decade, and that was the main interface colour going from Burnt Orange to Purple.

(1) http://www.dansdata.com/

Everything2 is one of those things that inspired near obsession for me when it was a going thing. I am glad you can still look at it, but it's a little like going to the World's Fair site in New York City. You get the impression this was pretty cool once, but that its time came and went.