What was Everything2 supposed to be? I remember it was almost like a Wikipedia thing that never really matured and it always seemed really slow. The Blockstackers guys from Slashdot built it, didn't they?
Aw, man. The perennial question of that site. What was it supposed to be, really? Roughly, it was just about anything that you could express with basic HTML and pure text. No images, no videos. It was,
* An online encyclopedia before Wikipedia
* A meme central before 4chan
* A social network before Facebook
* A blogging platform before blogs
It was a sister site of Slashdot (at a time, Slashdot would link to everything2 articles in order to define terms), and also associated to sites like the defunct JavaJunkies and the somehow still living Perlmonks, which shared the Everything engine as a codebase. The idea was to monetise the engine like Wordpress and Drupal later did, but this never happened, and Blockstackers Intergalactic folded soon after that.
Somehow, Everything2 is still up.
It was closely related to Slashdot, but when Slashdot was sold, E2 remained independent.
Some of the profits of the Slashdot sale went to Blockstackers as an investment to develop E2. Unfortunately, the dot-com crash (and, to be fair, not enough effort spent marketing the software) meant there was little market for the underlying CMS.
Had a massive community at one stage, and an active IRL scene. Some of the meetups were crazy fun. Site is still going and the code is maintained to this day.