MemeStreams

» see memestreams.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Industrial Memetics registered memestreams.net on 16 August 2001 and put up a site whose header said "Information Warfare for The People!" over a grey wordmark. The company was two people, Tom Cross and Nick Levay, better known inside the hacker scene as Decius and Rattle, and the thing they built sat in a category nobody had a settled name for yet. It gave every member a weblog made out of links they had recommended, with a threaded argument hanging off each one.

The pitch was on an about page that barely changed for two decades: a web community "started in 2001 as an experiment in new kinds of online social networking technologies" with "a small but dedicated following" of computer professionals and lawyers who shared "an interest in mining the vast reaches of the Internet in search of insights about the world we live in and where its going". The missing apostrophe in that last clause was still sitting there in the 2025 captures. So was the promise underneath it, which was that the site would build your social network out of what you found interesting rather than out of who you already knew.

What it actually became was where the American computer security scene talked when it did not want to talk on a mailing list. Michael Lynn was a member, the Cisco researcher whose 2005 Black Hat talk became Ciscogate, and so was Virgil Griffith, who later wrote WikiScanner. Wikipedia still describes the site in the present tense.

Registration was free and open, so nothing kept me out of this except the entire shape of it. A room where the regulars are the people whose conference talks get subpoenaed is a room you arrive in already knowing the names, and at seventeen, with a 56k modem and a Turkish ISP bill, the names I knew belonged to the moderators of a hardware forum.

~ the record ~

~ recommend, then discuss ~

The mechanism was two bookmarklets, and the site called them favelets. You dragged Recommend and Discuss into your links toolbar, and from then on any page you were reading could be pushed into your weblog with a selection quoted, or checked against every conversation the site had ever had about that URL. The install page spent one paragraph on Internet Explorer, warning you that it "will complain that these links may be unsafe. This is because they contain JavaScript. They are perfectly safe, and you know where to reach us if you have a problem with them." Further down it explained where the links toolbar lived in Firefox.

On top of that sat the reputation system, and this is the piece that fixes the site to its year. It tracked which members you kept finding useful links through, then used that graph to decide what you saw. In 2001 this was an open research question rather than a product feature, and the site's own description of it reads like a paper abstract: social networks "based on mutual interest, rather than on prior acquaintance".

~ what the last pages looked like ~

By 2025 the front page had nothing on it. A capture of /topics/ from 14 September 2025 is 2,795 bytes and carries the login form above a directory of topic categories, with no recommendations listed anywhere on it. The about page from January that year reports six guests and zero users online. At the bottom of the HTML the page still called urchinTracker(), the legacy Google analytics function that ga.js replaced in 2009. Nobody had touched the template in the fifteen years after that.

Nick Levay died on 16 July 2021, aged 44. By then he had been chief security officer at the Council on Foreign Relations and at Carbon Black before that, and was three years into running the information-sharing center for American non-governmental organizations. The site he had co-written as a hobby in his twenties outlived him by four years and almost four months, serving the same near-empty front page.

~ the zone file ~

The archive's last successful fetches are from the morning of 8 November 2025, a run of individual thread pages collected between 09:12 and 10:37 UTC, each one a couple of kilobytes of real site. Nothing after that exists anywhere in the Wayback Machine.

The zone itself gives the same date from the other direction: memestreams.net is still delegated to GoDaddy's nameservers, and the serial on its SOA record reads 2025110800, which is how that provider stamps the day a zone was last rewritten. The A record is gone from it, so the apex resolves to nothing and www.memestreams.net is a flat NXDOMAIN.

The registration runs until 16 August 2027, exactly twenty-six years after it was taken out. The name is being renewed on behalf of a site with no address behind it, which is the cheapest possible way to keep a door you are never going to open again.

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