[themagician]

Pre-YouTube internet largely didn't exist anymore. Flash is gone and one-by-one the old sites fall with no usable archive.

A lot of the old culture is just GONE. It is now myth or legend. The stories only exist verbally. Stile, Encyclopedia Dramatica, LiveJournal, Geocities. Much of the culture content from the early internet is just gone.

[dontupvoteme]

Geocities at least is archived and fairly easy to torrent the whole thing.

There is definitely the desire to memoryhole a lot of this though. I'm surprised motherless is still around but i guess it's just a porn site now (was it always?)

[selfhoster11]

I think you're a touch overestimating the degree to which everything is lost. The Internet Archive has some coverage (though admittedly, not all), and the Flashpoint Project has decent coverage of Flash games and animation. It's not as dire, IMO. A large part of the culture has been saved, enough to give people who put in some effort to access it, a gist of what it was like.

[doublerabbit]

YTMND is still around-ish.