alive against odds

the ones that should have died but did not
not every old internet thing is dead. some of them have been running, basically unchanged, for twenty or thirty years. they did not get acquired and killed. they did not pivot until they were unrecognisable. they just kept going. this list is a small companion to the graveyard.
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |1995-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
Craigslist  📖
still kicking since 1995
thriving the bare HTML classifieds site that has not changed since 1998. craig newmark made it profitable by charging only for job postings and paid sections in expensive cities, and giving everything else away. it killed the classifieds section of
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |2001-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
Wikipedia  📖
still kicking since 2001
thriving the most successful collaborative project on the internet, full stop. it should not work. anyone can edit, the editors are anonymous, the business model adds up to "ask for donations once a year." and yet it has more accurate information th
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |2001-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
VLC media player  📖
still kicking since 2001
thriving the orange traffic cone. it plays every video format you throw at it. it has not changed much since 2003 because it does not need to. videolan ships at glacial pace, the icon is the same, and it just keeps working while every commercial com
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |2007-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
Hacker News  📖
still kicking since 2007
thriving paul graham's startup news site. plain html. arc-language backend that almost nobody else uses. it has barely changed since 2007 and somehow still has all the news that matters in tech, plus more. nothing replaced it. this site (rip.so) wen
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |1988-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
IRC  📖
still kicking since 1988
hanging-on the chat protocol from 1988 that did not die. discord did not kill it. slack did not kill it. it just kept going, smaller every year, on a slowly shrinking set of networks, run by volunteers who care about decentralized communication. freen
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |1995-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
Newgrounds  📖
still kicking since 1995
hanging-on the flash games and animation site i grew up with. tom fulp founded it in 1995. it should have died with flash in 2020. instead, the team integrated ruffle (the flash emulator) and most of the games still play. that is real preservation wor
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |1997-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
Slashdot  📖
still kicking since 1997
hanging-on the original news for nerds site. it had its peak from 1999 to 2005, lost most of its audience to digg and then reddit and then hacker news, and yet you can go to slashdot.org right now and there are stories from this morning. small communi
   ___
  /   \
 |  +  |
 | OK  |
 |2004-|
 | ....|
 |_____|
    
YTMND  📖
still kicking since 2004
hanging-on youre-the-man-now-dog. the entire site format was one image plus one looping audio plus scrolling text on top. there are thousands of these pages. peak was 2004 to 2008. the site has not had real new submissions in years but the existing pa

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