Neopets is still around
dualshockers.com
dualshockers.com
It was a very simplistic market where there was a price floor of ~$5, and prices would randomly go up and down from there (it was not based on buying and selling, it was a simple random walk generator). So it taught me a very simple lesson of patience and delayed gratification, where if I simply bought stuff at 5, and waited a few weeks/months until it went up to 15-25, I could sell with a high profit.
As I acquired more "capital", I could make bigger purchases with bigger payoffs over time, and I made far more buying and selling these stocks than I could ever have performing "labor" (playing the games for points), thus teaching me the second lesson on capital leverage.
I think a few years in, they realized people were doing this, and they added a purchase floor of $15, where you couldn't buy something unless it was $15 or more, which limited my ultra-simple strategy's profitability, but I still kept doing it for a few more years before growing up and moving onto other games.
A final funny anecdote, there was this one stock called BOOM (Boom Boom Boxes), which would very regularly shoot up in value to 100s -> 1000s in price (way beyond everything else which typically topped out in the 10s). And there was this strategy to always buy BOOM when it was cheap, because it would surely multiply like crazy. And one day they announced that BOOM was the first stock to go "bankrupt", resulting in everyone losing a ton of money as it went to 0. Thus teaching me the third lesson about "bubbles".
I'm astounded I remember this much detail from a game I played when I was 10 years old.
Timing the refresh just right and grabbing a super valuable chocolate was quite a thrill, probably even more than the games themselves.
I remember there was a "secret fairy shop", which was a hidden clickable link. And the shop was usually empty, or stocked with low-worth items. But every 1 hour or so it would stock with high-value fairies that can level up the power of your neopet, and these prices were always significantly below market. Kind of reminds me of Rolex :)
I remember reading guides as to how to time the purchase. I'm kind of surprised more enterprising users didn't write bots for this, as I always remember it being possible at human reaction time to actually pick something up, which I imagine would have been impossible if bots came along.
What I'll never forget though is that they had pink, purple, and aqua colored CAT5 cables when everyone else was using your typical blue, yellow, and red. Today it's probably not a big deal, but back then it was wasn't something you saw in any other cage, everyone stopped to take a peak, new people always asked about it, and I always thought it was super cool even if they had to crimp everything themselves.
They had a fairly sizable cage and I passed by it everyday. I never played the game, and I was having my own kids by the time I started working in the DC, but that's my tiny personal Neopets nostalgia story and anytime I come across someone who also worked at 818, they remember it too.
Edit: looks like others in this post had similar experiences :)
There's also at least one grey hat (reddit user u/neo_truths) who's been able to get into Neopets' databases and expose how broken the site is and how much cheating runs rampant... real interesting stuff.
EDIT: Here's a fun example. Ancient bug where items above a certain rarity level weren't available in NPC shops, despite Neopets' staff insisting that they were... turns out r100s were in fact buyable, but not visible, so the only way to snag one was to figure out the exact URL for the item as it was generated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/npzffe/restocking_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/nu4k5o/r100_restoc...
It was a bit nostalgic for me since I originally learned HTML/CSS from Neopets over a decade back
Within 30 minutes I discovered you could create any Neopet, including the limited edition ones like Jetsam, just by setting that name in the API call
The IP has been purchased by "World of Neopia", who have $4 million to modernize and re-open Neopets.
Source: https://people.com/neopets-launches-new-era-website-7563280
Right now they have a god awful synthesis of three types of GUI wrappers for their webpages, so as you navigate across the site nothing stays consistent. Sometimes the language will randomly change to Spanish. It's website gore.
If they would spend the money to create a consistent user experience across all their pages, not introducing one page at a time, but actually biting the bullet and pushing the change across the whole site, that would be a step in the right direction.
(thank goodness for the giant omelette in dino land because my pet would have starved otherwise)
Having gone into webdev and software, I wish I could go back to then and pop the hood of the site. Maybe even generate some free neo points from the arcade games...
That one in particular actually discouraged me from learning code scripting as a kid because it requires deobfuscating PHP code which definitely was not a kid friendly thing in 2004.
https://utopia-game.com/shared/
https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/Utopia_(online_game)
I believe there is about 2000 active players still.
Played a few ages a couple years ago, thinking about kicking back in.
It is complete nerd warfare, imagine 25 with people warring 25 other people through spread sheets in a fantasy context.
It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.
You could submit it to HN and see if there's uptake. There's also Algolia.
The beauty of Utopia was that you start a province and you get together with max 24 other players in a kingdom. You vote which province becomes your king or queen, and you gotta work together with those other provinces. If it doesn't work out you can leave, but it comes with a penalty.
However even back then, trading, botting, and account sharing was rampant. Because it was an international game with people around the world, and sometimes you had to log in the middle of the night. And people had RL, too.
The cool thing about Utopia was the politics aspect. War, negotiations and all that. The dark side of it were pacts and people who resort to mentioned cheating but who also bullied to get on top. It is probably akin to Eve Online in that way (which seems way more complex).
> It probably has the hardest learning curves of any game ever made, but the community is really strong and encouraging.
Nah, not the hardest. Utopia Angel (which ran through Wine) made Utopia fairly easy cause it was an accurate combat sim, and later on there were Web 2.0 frontends for scraped/normalized data, and also sims available for the province non-combat features.
Neopets I started because the woman I fell in love with digged it. Honestly I thought it was kind of cute and akin to a browser-based MMO (like Utopia was, too). The market is just like in WoW auction house; a sim of its own kind. But the fondest memories I have regarding those massive puzzles they sometimes had. They were an adventure within Neopets, and an adventure into studying your browser and things like Flash. WoW also has a MMO puzzle adventure going for it right now. For WoW, my fondest memories are action related and MoP expansion (yes I played before MoP, even WC2 and WC3 when released). Although MoP also was my low: I got a psychosis from the stress related to requiring high performance.
I had friends who were super into it in the early aughts, but I mostly just bought and sold stuff on the market to make money.
Gaia has been a bizarre and largely unwelcome fixture in my life for almost 20 years. It taught me basic market fundamentals (and led to early experiments with HTML, CSS, coding, and graphic design) but it was also my first brush with internet addiction, and I suspect it contributed to the development of ongoing stimuli-related executive dysfunction. The remaining users (primarily adults) seem to exhibit similar tendencies and/or other psychological issues.
My parents hated it. Having been exposed to gambling mechanics [0][1] from a young age, I would never allow my children to be exposed to anything similar. I sometimes jokingly think of myself as an early casualty of the loot box era. Thankfully, few games have this effect on me; somehow this one remains uniquely addictive, a kind of perfect and insidious formula.
The history of the site is an interesting case study in digital currencies, user retention curves, and the collapse of early social media. After a corporate buyout and subsequent mass exodus, it was largely dormant for years until being purchased and revived by the original lead developer.
Many parts of it are completely broken and abandoned. It's a UX nightmare, extremely cringe, and basically needs to be gutted to have any hope of attracting new users. But a small, dedicated, and vocal user base remains. If the fundamentals are correct, sometimes people will stick around, even if management decisions are continually at odds with what users want. It helps that the items are also the best they've ever been, drawn by talented pixel artists who probably used Gaia when they were teenagers.
I still have immense respect for the original incarnation and vision of the site. It emerged directly from the dotcom fallout, and was created by a small group of anime artists/programmers hacking away in a communal San Diego bungalow. It's one of the few relics of my childhood left on the internet, and I suspect it will be around for years to come.
[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/835/640/c54... [1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/956/433/66c...
And also the metaverse thing and nft project has been cancelled. AFAICT this is largely due to outcry from the community.
They're working on fixing it apparently
I may not remember it correctly, but I think the two original creators of the site ran out of money and were recommended to a group of investors who happened to be Scientologists.
According to Wikipedia, he did, at one point, try to add Scientology content, but was stopped by the two main people.[0] (Doug is just the business guy.)
According to Kotaku, an anonymous ex-employee claimed that: "The negative aspects of NeoPets, all came from the side of Scientology-Oriented business structure/psyche." https://web.archive.org/web/20071115124238/http://www.kotaku...
(Link stolen from a post you made 17 years ago. :) )
This is what bothers me about criticism of Scientology. How many wars have been fought in its name? How many nations conquered and people enslaved? I'm an atheist but of all the lousy things done in the name of religions Scientology doesn't even make the top five.
So answer your own question: "How many wars have been fought in its name? How many nations conquered and people enslaved?" for other religions? (People organizing along existing religions groupings during a war doesn't count.)
It's certainly not many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war#Modern_period Seems like: Sudan, Yugoslav, Lebanon is debatable. Could maybe add ISIL.
On the other hand Scientologists have enslaved 5,000 to 10,000 today, right now.
See also: the slavish devotion to maintaining the Palestinian peoples' suffering. A people deemed inferior by religious institutions which have their grasp deep, deep within the American ruling classes' psyche ..
Lots of awful acts happen all over the world, but most of them are not occurring with impunity under functional legal regimes.
The time in which the Catholic church itself acted like an international paramilitary/intelligence organization is largely over, but that may or may not be the case with regards to certain other religions.
Hubbard founded it on a bet and then it took on a mind of its own with his death, becoming a tax haven and a cult - one of the most dangerous, prolific, and virulent cults there is.
Stop and consider for a moment that someone who is nose-deep in such an organization is aggressively expanding into literacy and education platforms for young children - the age where religious and cult indoctrination is most successful. Recruitment plunges when the age of exposure is after critical thinking skills are developed.
Obviously he would not directly attempt recruitment, but I guarantee there's more than just "he wants to be a good dude" going on. As another commentor noted, he tried to get scientology shit into Neopets.
Managements' religious preferences can have a meaningful influence on how an organization operates, e.g. Hobby Lobby. I don't see why it'd be out of bounds here when it's legitimately relevant to how Neopets was run.
[0] https://theoutline.com/post/4190/neopets-was-run-by-scientol...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/neopets/comments/26fwhh/i_am_donna_...
Would be neat to see data on it. I certainly don't like the behavior. Doesn't feel uncommon, though.
I definitely had some concerns about the Scientology stuff going into that job, but I never heard a word about it the entire time I worked there. The vibes were definitely a little weird, but nothing overt. The bigger problems were that they were a mess in terms of engineering - for example they didn't even use version control for the first few years that ABCMouse was in business.
Have you heard of any other "religion" that charges huge amount of money for access to their teachings?
Scientology is verifiably and comprehensively different from most other non-cult religions by virtue of how it treats it's members and encourages them to act. Only one other religion of note has such "High control group" style features as discouraging psychiatry, discouraging interaction with non-Scientology family members, forcing through threat of blackmail members to do things, threatening the IRS and getting away with it, and generally treating members as resources.
edit: It could also have to do with Scientology’s history of child sex abuse
Nowhere near 100%, but my partner was able to play some of the old games recently.
Neopets was how I learned HTML and CSS. As a kid I just thought that this weird language was how you make pages in Neopets, but then I learned that this stuff works all over the web! Fun times
I found a flaw in an archery game that would allow me to always bullseye. It would only work in Firefox. I didn't have to do anything outside the normal interface.
I guess they decided to ban every archer that did too well. It was fine. I didn't feel compelled to try and return.
I never got banned from it though. But I later forgot my password and moved on from my comcast.net email address (there were no password managers back then), and grew up, so effectively the same thing.
It is blatantly illegal of course, by giving the user no way to simply disagree to all with a single click (one has to instead select "purposes" and save & close from there). And it also does the usual misreading of the GDPR where the purposes dialog offers you to individually opt out of "legitimate interests" (which is not a thing: legitimate interest is not consent-based so if it can be opted out of, it's not a legitimate interest by definition). It also front-loads a ton of analytics and other garbage that the GDPR clearly requires consent for and it should therefore not load before you opt in.
However if you just save & close the purposes dialog without opting out of anything else, the site will simply not serve you any ads. Instead all ads just show a placeholder. So despite all the attempted dark pattern shenanigans and half-assed consent seeking the site doesn't even benefit from it properly because it will apparently do almost everything the GDPR is meant to protect against but then not show you ads.
I doubt this is intentional, but it seems like the worst way to implement this in terms of profit. The lack of ads means no monetization and the fraudulent consent dialog means it's deliberately violating the GDPR. All the risk for no reward.
Some more recent neopets discussion:
Neopets is finally in its revival era