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385 points colinprince | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.221s | source
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AdamH12113 ◴[] No.32254184[source]
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

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gilleain ◴[] No.32255166[source]
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 :)

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pluijzer ◴[] No.32257114[source]
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?
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