Websites That Changed the World (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Websites That Changed the World (2006)

theguardian.com

46 pointsbookofjoe34 comments

easyjet is a pretty odd inclusion on this list. They weren't the first, biggest, or most innovative budget airline website - even in the UK.

The contributor (Carole Cadwalladr) wrote a puff piece [1] about easyjet a few months before, so she is obviously a big fan.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/may/08/transport.world1

After the whole Easy Life situation[1] I'm completely over them. What scummy business practices.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/03/easyjet-own...

I seem to recall that when EasyJet showed up, they really popularized the concept of budget airlines. The idea of being able to travel to mainland Europe for less than it would cost to buy lunch was a game changer.

I think arguments could be made for MSN, Geocities and maybe even MapQuest as honorable mentions.

It's not necessarily that whey were groundbreaking as much as extremely popular. The design and content and strategy decisions influenced others to come.

A friend and I had a discussion today, whether Amazon was a small internet company among many, back when it IPOed in 1997. Or if it already stood out as one of the biggest IPOs of that time.

To our surprise, we did not find a list of dotcom IPOs from the 90s together with their IPO market cap.

If someone here knows about such a list, I would love to see it.

I’m certainly in the 99th percentile of early tech adopters and I didn’t place my first Amazon order until 2000.

Digg, Delicious, Technorati, ICQ, Stumbleupon, Astalavista, eMule and many file hosters have been critical and changed the world as well at that time. ;)

Remember the digg / Reddit wars? Ironically I check dig multiple times per day and haven’t been on Reddit in ages except when digg sends me there.

Of all listed many are dead/irrelevant now:

   * napster.com - Now Spotify, streaming music have taken its place.
   * blogger.com - Blogging is dead for general public. Medium, Substack have captured some space.
   * friendsreunited.com
   * drudgereport.com
   * myspace.com
   * slashdot.org
   * salon.com
   * yahoo.com

You might claim Yahoo! is irrelevant, but it still gets 3.6 billion visits a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/yahoo.com/#overview

Drudgereport gets 57 million visits a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/drudgereport.com/#overvie...

Blogger gets 38 million vists a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/blogger.com/#overview

Salon gets 8.4 million visits a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/salon.com/#overview

So, not totally irrelevant to the overall social conversation, but getting there. Except for Yahoo.

Me thinking about 2006,

digg.com was something I went to every day. Found it more entertaining than slashdot.

craigslist was something I used a lot, finding dates, things to buy, a place to rent.

for downloading stuff, if I recall I used kazaa

instant message: msn messenger

Please don't mention msn messenger. It brings sorrow to my soul that the best we have now is discord in terms of a communication platform that allows you to spread media with ease. YIM! too.

Sigh, may have to down another cider now. I want to be 15 again dammit.

For my world, personally (in no order), my top four:

1. Geocities is where I built my first website and got me started in web design.

2. DailyKos got me interested in local political blogging and got me started in politics as a career.

3 and 4: twelve years ago, I met my fiancee and we became friends on Facebook, and then moved to different cities for a decade. And two years ago, after moving back, we matched on OKCupid and I alluded to us being FB friends to get a reply.

I don't see any newspaper sites there, and I can't make a strong case for a newspaper now.

For all the pleading to save journalism to content walls that do nothing but self silo and isolate their voice, I feel big newspaper journalism has consistently dropped the ball so much it's rolled into an entirely different ballpark. The 4th estate is failing.

The list:

* 1 EBay

* 2 Wikipedia

* 3 Napster

* 4 YouTube

* 5 Blogger

* 6 friendsreunited

* 7 Drudge Report

* 8 MySpace

* 9 Amazon

* 10 slashdot

* 11 salon

* 12 Craigslist

* 13 Google

* 14 yahoo

* 15 easyjet

c2.com changed some world

and symbolics.com didn't change it enough

GitHub would certainly be on the list now. Not from the public psyche, but in terms of actual impact.

Wow, very interesting to see this list from 2006. What are the sites that would be in the top 15 now?

Facebook

Twitter

Netflix

ChatGPT?

+s for:

GitHub (influence).

Reddit (despite spez, it has a handful more years).

YouTube (remaining video king).

Signal and Tiktok if apps are allowed.

I don't know anybody who uses Signal and isn't a programmer (on the cryptography/security side) or journalist that needs it in order to work. Anybody else uses Telegram, WhatsApp, or both. SMS if you're in the USA.

My family all use signal as to an compromise of one that I refuse to use WhatsApp.

Add WhatsApp to the list.

I have an idea for a free speech website, which could be called as TalkingPoints.org

Basically today, idea wars are being faught in Tiktok and Instagram and Reddit and each such website has a distinctive flavour and their own hive mind. To allow better outside ideas, opinions and facts to infiltrate such closed walled gardens, this website would collect "talking points" from all around the web which users of such networks could just copy paste and ask influencers peddling a particular narrative to explain their stand on other side's best facts.

Consider two opposing sides A and B of a particular issue. There will be two boards : Pro-A and Pro-B. People in favour of Pro-A would collect self-contained talking points of A and there will be rating system and so on. Similarly for Pro-B.

I remember there was a nice website (don't remeber the name) which was build with a very complex UI to discuss complex issues. Basically there was a top level statements in blue, and one can expand statments in favour of it (or against it would be in green) and that new statement will be come a blue statement. I liked the motive of that website. Instead of wikipedia's neutral point of view principle[0], this should allow best framing of any side to be represented, sort of like steelmanning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

The website you mention might be kialo.com?

Yes, thank you.

The problem is that people writing in support of the positions that they believe often unintentionally elide things that they consider obvious, which, from the perspective of the other group, sounds like nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, resulting in derisive assessments of the first group as “idiots”, “lunatics” and so on.

Further, people also like staying in their ingroup, so while a flat-earther can already look up evidence and statements supporting a spherical Earth, they often choose to remain in their ingroup to avoid the cognitive dissonance from contradictory information.

See also: the anti-AI debate, where most discussion has devolved into either how "AI bros" are evil or artists are all "dumb luddites."

Both sides believe all their points to be so obvious that the only explanation for why someone could disagree is that they're either stupid or malicious.

People don't even have the same facts to base distinct opinions from. If one side's collection of facts differ from another, there is no hope to reach any sort of agreement. The whole propaganda thing is orchestrated to convince bystanders, a large silent majority, so having them all the facts is what this process about. The influencers might not change their position but the bystanders will not be enthusiastic to the same degree especially when they have both sides's facts. If this happens consistently, the debate would have advanced to a more nuanced take. It is hard to be violent and morally upright about it when you also know about your own shortcomings.

You’ve exactly described why internet public forums are dead for at least the next half century.

It's somewhat different, but reminds me of some of the aspirations of Brigade years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_Media

Facebook is not in the list. Edit: I see it is from 2006.

The list is from 2006, back then Facebook was rising, but not yet big-big.

Specifically, it's from a month before Facebook opened to everyone with an email address.

Ok I see. A Top 15 for our times would also be very interesting

The list would need to incorporate apps because a lot of 'websites' that are extremely popular in use are more typically used as apps (e.g., Instagram).

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