Digital Folklore
GeoCities: The Digital Town That Died Twice
GeoCities was the early web's first mass platform. When Yahoo pulled the plug, millions of personal pages vanished and a fragile internet culture began to feel haunted.
#internet history
8 items
Digital Folklore
The Door Sound: How AIM Invented Social Media and Then Disappeared
AOL Instant Messenger taught a generation how to have a digital identity. When it shut down in 2017, almost nobody noticed. That's the story.
Digital Folklore
Most of the internet is talking to itself — the folklore of the ghost web.
Between 30 and 50 percent of all web traffic is not human. The internet built for people is now mostly machines talking to machines — and has been for years.
Digital Folklore
The Invisible Persuader: How AI Became the Internet's Favorite Explanation for Everything
The belief that AI is secretly managing your opinions has become one of the internet's most viral ideas. It spreads through the same feeds it claims to be warning you about.
Digital Folklore
The Internet's Favorite Thief: eBaum's World
Before the algorithm, eBaum's World was where the internet went to find funny things. It was also where the internet's content went to lose its name.
Rabbit Holes
The Board That Built the Story: Jeffrey Epstein, 4chan, and the Architecture of Online Conspiracy
Jeffrey Epstein met 4chan's founder the month /pol/ launched. A documented look at how online conspiracy culture built a mythology around a real scandal.
The Oldest Open Question on Hacker News Has Gone Unanswered for 11 Years
Rabbit Holes
The Forum That Documented Something It Shouldn't Have
An obscure forum archive reveals discussions that stopped mid-conversation — what digital archaeology reveals when communities vanish without goodbye.