Boredom was something you had to solve yourself before anyone made a bait to solve boredom for you.
You’ve opened a browser, typed something in the address bar, or gone to a place you already know or come across something you’ve never heard of.
Viewing was active. You went looking for something. There was no algorithmic current to carry you; you had to paddle. These were the websites people turned to in those years before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube reoriented the entire experience of being online around content designed to keep you going.
Some are gone. Some of them still exist in forms that are technically unrecognizable to their original users. All of them kept time in a way that felt different from the one that replaced them, though it took a while to figure out exactly how.
New places
Tom Fulp launched Newgrounds in 1995 as a personal website for his games, and it grew into something that has no real-world equivalent: a user-submitted portal for Flash animations and games, where almost anything can be posted and the community votes for those who rise to the top.
The content ranged from really over-the-top animation to extremely violent games designed mostly to be transgressive, and the mix was basic. Newgrounds was where a generation of animators learned their craft and built early audiences, including people who would later work on shows like Eddsworld and pre-YouTube animation.
The site is still active, which is more than most of its contemporaries can say. But in its peak years in the early 2000s, it was one of those places where you’d spend two hours for nothing.
Homestar Runner
Brothers Matt and Mike Chapman launched homestarrunner.com in 2000, and within a few years it was one of the most enduringly funny things on the Internet. The centerpiece was Strong Bad Emails: visitors asked questions to Strong Bad, a masked villain with no arms, and the brothers acted out the answers.
The emails ran for more than 200 episodes over nearly a decade and created a vocabulary that really permeated the way people talked online at the time, like a catchphrase from a TV show might now.
The site worked without ads, without a subscription model, without a platform, it was simply updated when the brothers updated it, and they did not ask the audience for anything in return. When Flash went into decline in 2010, it went quiet, although it was later revived for occasional new content. The powerful Bad Email archive is pretty well maintained.
Neopets
Neopets launched in 1999 and within a few years had tens of millions of registered accounts, most of them children and teenagers who spent hours controlling virtual pets, playing Flash mini-games and collecting Neopoints, the world’s currency.
The economy of Neopets was really complex: there were exchanges, auction houses, shops and a lottery. The site also had hidden areas that rewarded exploration, and a lore that was surprisingly deep for something aimed at children.
The site has drawn controversy over the years for its advertising practices aimed at young users, and has changed hands and lost functionality several times since the end of Flash. But for those who were around him during his peak years, memory tends to be specific and detailed in a way that suggests he did something truly absorbing.
Miniclip and addictive games
These two were the mainstays for browser-based games in the early to mid-2000s.
Founded in 2001, Miniclip focused on sports and multiplayer games; Addicting Games, which started under Nickelodeon in 2002, had a more extensive and chaotic library. Both sites featured a variety of Flash games ranging from almost completely polished to barely functional, and both attracted the attention of someone with a computer and forty-five minutes.
Games were by design disposable and forgotten soon after playing, but some titles have extended their lives. 8 Ball Pool on Miniclip has had a really competitive community for years.
These sites were also where many people played games they probably shouldn’t on school computers, using URLs that content filters didn’t yet catch.
StumbleUpon
Launched in 2001, StumbleUpon had a truly original premise: you told it your interests, and it picked a random website from the web and loaded it for you. Click Stumble again and you’ve got another one.
The site didn’t have an algorithm that optimized for time or engagement metrics to determine the next cycle of the web. It was closer to channel surfing, except the channel was the entire internet.
You might land on a photography portfolio, an obscure reference site, a long essay, a recipe page, or something you wouldn’t have found otherwise. The site was acquired by eBay, sold to investors and closed in 2018. Something called Mix briefly tried to replace it and didn’t. The specific quality of this kind of serendipitous discovery, which is purposeless and truly accidental, has not really been replicated.
eBaum World
eBaum’s World was controversial for the right reasons: its founder, Eric Bauman, built a large audience by reposting other creators’ videos, images, and Flash files, usually without credit and often adding his own watermark. The early content community of the Internet had mixed feelings about this, and for a time there was a period of organized pushback from Something Terrible and sites that objected to both piracy and profiting from it.
None of this changed the fact that eBaum’s World was one of the most visited humor and viral content sites on the internet for several years in the early 2000s. It was where many people first saw what would later be called internet classics.
The site is still available in a reduced form. How Internet content has changed and who takes credit for it is much more interesting than it seems at the time.
Cool Math Games
Cool Math Games occupies a distinct category: there were fewer websites than people chose for fun because it existed. In the 2000s, school content filters blocked most gaming sites, but Coolmath-games.com, launched in 1997 and designed to appear educational, was often bypassed.
This made it the default game destination on school computers for nearly a decade, probably because its memory tends to be so specific and shared among people with otherwise internet experiences. Run 3, Bloxorz, Papa’s Freezeria: the games themselves weren’t necessarily better than those on Miniclip or Newgrounds, but they were there on the available PC for the time it took to fill.
The site has moved away from Flash games and still works with HTML5 games, making it one of the more durable survivors of that era.
GeoCities
Founded in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, GeoCities is organized around the idea that the Internet is more of a place where you live than a place you go. Users created personal pages organized into themed neighborhoods: Hollywood for entertainment, Heartland for family content, Area51 for science fiction. The pages themselves were visually striking in a way that was difficult to describe in a neutral way: tiled backgrounds, animated GIFs, visitor counters, auto-playing MIDI files, guest books where outsiders could comment.
There was no design system or template matching. Each page reflected the unique taste and technical knowledge of its creator. Yahoo shut down GeoCities in 2009, and the Archive Team worked urgently to preserve as much as possible before it was deleted.
Protected pages are still available and worth an hour if you want to understand what the pre-social media internet was really about.
to conclude
What I think of when I think of these sites is the lack of the next thing.
There was no recommended content waiting when you finished. No notifications that take you elsewhere.
You closed the tab or opened another one and wrote something new. The experience of being bored enough to find something was part of the experience itself. Boredom was what made the find feel like a find.
I’m not sure if a better algorithm could return this.
