Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

The information superhighway

The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.

That’s the internet before commercialisation and silos.

AKA "back when Marc Andreessen had hair and not enough money to build an apocalypse bunker on a personal island."

And when no one knew you were a dog and neither did they care.

Animated gifs of cat, banner bars and pixels cost one dollar, until a one million were sold.

And it all ran on Chuck Norris' personal computer.

That part of the Internet still exists, it's just nobody visits those sites anymore.

Communities are moving back to early Internet-like chatrooms like IRC, but now it is Slack, Discord, and the like. Everything private.

Under construction gifs

I mean, they're intentionally buried in the name of capital. If you need more than a Google search to find them, of course no one will go to them.

I don't like the siloing our information to Discord being a comparison to old internet. We had indexable information in forums that is "lost", not in the literal sense, but because you wouldn't be able to find it without obsessive digging to find it again. Conversations in Discord communities are very surface level and cyclical because it's far less straight forward to keep track of and link to answers from last week let alone two years ago. It is profoundly sad, to be honest.

I really miss the like 8 year ago push where a lot of major projects were moving to IRC. It's too bad Freenode took the opportunity to jump the shark and killed the momentum.

I guess my abandoned/dead project might be Usenet. Sure, there were very dark places, and a lot of it was just a way to distribute porn, but that pretty much describes the Web. Usenet was like Reddit not controlled by a single company; like the Fediverse with infinite channels; like all of the world's threaded web fora displayed in exactly the way you want. We had that in the 1990s, and we're slowly groping toward getting it back.