homestarrunner.com

Luckily they're still active on YouTube!

Cracked in it's prime was fucking amazing.

Like, it's the type of "just stay here" website everyone keeps trying to make.

On any random day they'd post like an article every 15 minutes. No matter when you needed to kill 15-30 there was something funny and usually informative.

There was probably 5 years straight I didn't poop without reading an article on Cracked.

There's no other quality stream of content like that since.

Stumbleupon

ytmnd. Technically it still exists but the magic is gone

Unpopular opinion: Google?

Back before it sucked.

Slashdot (still with us, but not the same)

Digg (back with us, but not the same)

Freshmeat

Kuro5hin

Unsanitized blogs where people just spilled out their thoughts. Overwhelmingly were they inconsequential, but it was still a funny little peek into the lives of people you’d never know. You can’t do that sort of thing as freely anymore, between doxxing, scraper swarms, and the abundance of lunatics online. The barrier to entry is higher and the risks greater.

Zombocom

You could do anything at Zombo-com

MySpace and Facebook from before 2010. There's not really any social media that's designed to show me posts from my friends and nothing else. Now whenever I open up Facebook I am just shown shit from people and pages I never subscribed to and ads.

Albino Blacksheep, Cracked, early message boards (/., Digg, reddit, etc, before they turned into garbage), NewGrounds, RatherGood

Original Neopets.

Stumbleupon.

Early Reddit.

Killfrog.com

Stumbleupon it was how I found Reddit

There was a website many years ago that when opened, it looked like an online retailer in Germany for all sorts of things, similar to Walmart. When you scrolled around it would behave as you'd expect, but once you left it alone for half a minute or so, suddenly every element of the page became a Rube Goldberg machine.

A stack of pots and pans or something would fall down to the next row and send something hurtling across the screen, on and on, with the page moving up and down as needed. I wish I'd had the thought to record somehow it at the time. Only other thing I've seen like it was an old Google Chrome commercial on YouTube that used the whole page and not just the video player.

I've looked a few times for some hint of what I remember, but it might only live in the archive of my memories now.

HamsterDance.com

all the piracy ones

Craigslist forums were kinda the wild west.

bash.org

Ze Frank had a great personal site with a dozen JavaScript / flash apps that let you draw with different brushes etc. fun time waster

The ones without paywalls and ads.

what.cd

kongregate. place is practically dead now

Google and youtube.

Altavista.

I'd love to have it back. I hate all the search engines right now.

&totse

The 2000s Cartoon Network US site and Nitrome ( still alive but feels like a shell of its former glory ).

I know I can still play a lot of the old CN flash games on Flash Point, but it's not as aesthetically satisfying as the old CN site.

As for Nitrome, I got a zip file that contained a lot of the games since they ain't available on Flash Point and I don't wanna use the modern site. The old games like Mutiny or IceBreakers are still kinda fun, even if games like Rubble Trouble, for some reason, don't run well on my potato desktop under Ruffle.

Those were 2 of my favorite game sites in the 2000s, before I learned about NotDoppler.

Edit:

After looking at various comments, gonna say I remember the old Pencilmation series back when there was maybe a few different shorts on their website. Back when evil blue pen man was the big bad. Before they, or whatever copycat it was, started making tons of them on yt that are nothing but mass produced slop. Lived long enough to become a villain.

I also remembered an old PopTarts website with some dumb flash game about going down the red carpet without getting toasted and/or eaten ( IIRC ) that lead to me finding Pencilmation.

The oldschool zone.com.

Neocities and just generally when it was cool for everyone to have their own personal website rather than having profiles on the major platforms.

Should be easier than ever today.

You could do anything on zombo.com.

Justin.tv