Ten years later, the story of Suck.com (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Ten years later, the story of Suck.com (2005)

keepgoing.org

57 pointspavel_lishin21 comments

Since it died suck.com has been my canonical "poke the public-access WiFi gateway so it'll send me to its clickthrough agreement page" URL, since at least at one point that usually worked via DNS poisoning and I wanted to make sure it didn't poison a domain I actually wanted to visit for real. So I wound up seeing the page relatively often even recently. I was very sad when I saw it had turned into a parking spot sometime earlier this year. :/

I use asdf.com for that. It's just a simple HTML page without a lot of trash and there's nothing there that I care about visiting.

purple.com is also good for this purpose (and others, like just seeing if you can get through a proxy or whatnot), and has been for decades.

Purple.com is too limiting. I prefer Zombo.com. You can do anything there.

Huh, the whois hasn't changed. I think Wired's shifted it to the "buy this domain" thing before, and shifted it back, so perhaps this isn't permanent?

foo.com user here. It's nice because it doesn't have an HTTPS redirect, so it always works.

http://example.com seems like a good alternative.

Why not example.com?

For all those suggesting that you migrate to example.com, I'll note that lots of ISPs and even companies hijack example.com directly.

I ran into this running our little test suite that hit example.com to test that we were able to make http requests and get the right output. One day on a different network the test failed ;).

I just found my "suck.com" tee shirt, the one with the stylized fish holding a gun. I'm afraid to wear it in public, because I imagine people will associate me with some crap amateur porn website.

A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun.

Inventor of snake text, which is now so ubiquitous it doesn't have a name.

So ubiquitous that Google can't define it for me, either, it seems. What is it?

I'd never heard of it either. This is one of the results my search yielded: http://longform.org/stories/web-dreams-the-story-of-suck

>HotWired's Flux, a weekly gossip column from the pseudonymous Ned Brainard, was close. The column was the first example of what the Web magazine Salon (www.salon1999.com) dismissed as "snake text," meaning the story ran in one long, narrow column.

So it sounds like the linked article would itself be an example.

Way worse than that: https://web.archive.org/web/20060127002252/http://www.suck.c...

Sadly, we lost suck.com in March 2015, so all we have is the Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060202003608/http://www.suck.c...

Oldest version: https://web.archive.org/web/19961220211802/http://suck.com/

Carl Steadman on twitter: https://twitter.com/guydeboredom

Suck was one of my favorite websites of that time! Thanks for the reminder. Too bad it didn't last.

(2005)

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