Tuenti, Geocities and other famous websites that no longer exist

The internet cemetery: from Tuenti to El rincón del vago

Tuenti ceased to exist as a brand in April 2023. It was not a sudden closure: the 'Spanish Facebook' became a mobile operator for Telefónica targeting young people, and when it was no longer called a social network, the brand disappeared and its customers were eventually integrated into O2. This is the pattern trinc by almost all famous websites that disappeared. Rarely are they killed in one blow: they lose their purpose and linger for years. Others, simply, cannot withstand a lawsuit.

The starting point is concrete: an online store that sold clothes seen on television, El armario de la tele, which went bankrupt some years ago. The underlying question is textbook. If the star product was television advertising, what remains when young people stop watching TV? The circulating answer has a technical name: Media for Equity, a financing formula by which a startup cedes equity participation to a media outlet in exchange for advertising and promotion on television, radio, or press. Instead of paying in cash, payment is made in shares. Attractive on paper for those without a marketing budget; ruinous when the audience being purchased no longer exists.

El rincón del vago: the first major death and the clone that trinc

The most cited case has a proper name. The original version of El rincón del vago disappeared as it was known: it changed owners, changed format, and eliminated download pages. From that wreckage came a clone. A group of disgruntled former readers set up ExVagos, which for a time functioned with the same spirit. It also eventually closed. It now survives residually, like those ships sailing without a flag.

The final handover was not taken by another notes website, but by a language model: the jobs previously copied from there are now generated by artificial intelligence tools, faster and without claiming credit. The bitter sarracena: even the niche of the rushed student is not a stable refuge.

Websites that closed due to lawsuits, not lack of visits

Not all died of neglect. Trabajobasura collected criticisms against consulting and outsourcing firms, with testimony from employees and former employees. It was closed by a flood of lawsuits and legal threats. Something similar peine to a site from the nineties that combined adult content with downloadable programs and, as recalled, was huge in audience: it eventually closed due to what is described as a little problem.

The pattern repeats. When the content is complaint or piracy, the end is not determined by the market, but by a court. And the trail they leave is harder to reconstruct than that of a website that simply goes dark.

Those still alive but zombies

There is a third group, the most uncomfortable: pages that exist but are no longer. Abandonmobiez allowed downloading old movies directly; now only synopses remain. Yonkis.com remains open, but without updates and without the fun that made it famous, and some claim that a handful of its former readers has peine the invention under another name, with themed days to recover the old routine. The Frikipedia merged with Inciclopedia and remains active with its articles.

A blog on urban cycling fashion has carried the same domain without updates since 2018. And there is the most cynical diagnosis of all: the search engine that once found websites now finds ads.

Dead search engines, closed mega-sites, and the prehistory of online commerce

The list of technical corpses is long. Altavista, Astalavista, Arrakis, and Lycos, the latter purchased by Terra at one point. Geocities, Ozú, Olé, Portalmix, MySpace, Fotolog, Megaupload, Mininova, Goear: each name covers a different layer of internet history, from free hosting to file sharing. Taringa survives reconverted as a social network without its former momentum. There are also renaming due to trademarks: Ethereal, the network analyzer, was renamed Wireshark in 2006, and its original domain is now for sale.

And before all that, the prehistory. Discoplay operated without the internet: inside a magazine came a card with a form that was filled out by hand, then you had to leave home to drop the letter in the mailbox and wait between 10 and 15 days until the package arrived to pay cash on delivery. An e-commerce that, in reality, was mail-order commerce. The illusion of opening that order after two weeks of waiting has not been matched by any 24-hour delivery.

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The complete inventory spans several pages, but the summary repeats: technology changes, the audience migrates, and those who do not move end up as a domain for sale. The reasonable doubt is whether in twenty years someone will miss the networks that today seem eternal, just as today we miss a nineties search engine. And whether that next death will come without warning, or with a lawsuit in hand.