Internet culture, with the receipts.

Browse the source-led archive without JavaScript. Enable JavaScript for accounts, saved work and contributions.

Explore all records

A smile turned sideways
An ordinary zoo visit opens a video platform
ENIAC makes electronic computing public
GIF: a format becomes a language
YouTube begins sharing revenue with community creators
A small amplifier changes the scale of electronics
Dancing Baby escapes the demo
Flickr makes photography a shared online activity
Packets make shared networks practical
Hampster Dance travels by email
Flickr Commons invites the public into photo archives
A demonstration of working together on screens
All Your Base becomes a remix language
Reddit organizes conversation around communities
ARPANET connects four early sites
Strong Bad checks the audience mail
AskReddit turns a question into a collective artifact
Project Gutenberg treats literature as shareable data
Badger Badger Badger and the endless loop
Discord builds a place to stay together while playing
Ethernet imagines a local community of computers
Numa Numa brings the bedroom to the web
Twitch makes the audience part of a live event
The Altair kit recruits a community of builders
Leeroy Jenkins turns a raid into a story
Twitch gives communities a richer visual vocabulary
The Apple II packages computing for a broader audience
LOLcats give pictures a shared dialect
Musical.ly and TikTok become one global app
The IBM PC establishes an expandable platform
Rickrolling makes the link the joke
Minecraft begins a world built through play
TCP specifies a reliable conversation over unreliable delivery
Keyboard Cat supplies the exit music
Scratch puts creative programming into children's hands
DNS distributes the work of naming
Rage comics make a common cast
Scratch 2.0 brings remixing into the browser
GNU announces software freedom as a system goal
Success Kid and the changing caption
Blender becomes an open-source creative tool
NNTP makes distributed discussion a protocol
Disaster Girl and the invented backstory
Steam Workshop organizes community-made game content
A proposal connects documents across institutions
Doge turns a look into an inner voice
WordPress gives personal publishing a practical toolkit
Linux grows through distributed development
Nyan Cat combines two creative streams
Instagram builds culture around shared images
Unicode creates a shared foundation for written languages
Grumpy Cat becomes a public character
A user proposes the Twitter hashtag
Mosaic makes browsing feel approachable
Gangnam Style makes participation visible
Pinterest organizes discovery around visual ideas
CERN releases core Web software to the public domain
Harlem Shake provides a reusable script
App Inventor opens mobile creation to beginners
W3C creates a place to coordinate the Web
The Ice Bucket Challenge links imitation to action
Newgrounds grows from a personal project into a community
HTTP/1.0 documents the exchange behind a page
The Dress turns disagreement into an event
Newgrounds automates its Portal
PNG gives web images a lossless format
Distracted Boyfriend turns a photograph into a diagram
Itch.io gives independent games their own pages
CSS separates visual rules from document structure
This Is Fine and the power of a crop
Itch.io lets sellers choose the platform's share
Open source becomes an organizing label
Drakeposting makes preference visible
Patreon links creative work to direct audience support
Mozilla makes the browser a community project
Salt Bae isolates a signature gesture
Kickstarter invites audiences to help projects happen
WCAG turns accessibility into a shared authoring concern
Woman Yelling at a Cat invents a conversation
GitHub makes collaboration around code more visible
The Library of Congress begins collecting the Web
Galaxy Brain visualizes escalating absurdity
SoundCloud starts with easier audio sharing
Wikipedia invites readers to help build an encyclopedia
Loss becomes a pattern-recognition game
Bandcamp makes an independent release easier to deliver
The Wayback Machine opens a window into older websites
Kappa gives chat a sarcastic face
SVG describes images as shapes and relationships
Reddit Place makes collaboration visible
Creative Commons makes reuse permissions easier to communicate
Vine makes six seconds a creative constraint
RSS 2.0 helps readers follow publications across the Web
Duet layouts make collaboration an interface
UTF-8 connects multilingual text with existing byte-based systems
Stitch makes the reply part of the video
OpenStreetMap starts building a map people can contribute to
Ratatouille moves from shared joke to benefit performance
Git makes parallel work part of version control
Bernie's mittens become a portable seat
HTML5 records the Web as an application platform
Wordle grids turn play into a shared ritual
Let’s Encrypt opens automated certificates to the public
Skibidi Toilet grows into a serial world
W3C and WHATWG agree on one HTML development path
Pepe and the instability of a shared symbol
WebAssembly expands the browser’s computational vocabulary
Moo Deng carries animal reactions across platforms
HTTP/3 moves familiar Web semantics onto QUIC
Kurita's emoji set makes expression portable
Usenet begins under material constraints
ActivityPub gives the social web a shared delivery language
Smithsonian Open Access turns collection images into reusable material
A snapshot of public code reaches the Arctic Code Vault
A waived platform fee becomes Bandcamp Friday
Flash Player reaches the end of official support
The Internet Archive brings Flash emulation into the browser
C2PA publishes a first specification for media provenance
ChatGPT makes iterative prompting a public interface
Reddit redraws the conditions of API access
WCAG 2.2 adds practical requirements for everyday interaction
Threads launches with an existing social graph as its starting point
Bluesky opens federation to self-hosted data servers
Ozone makes community labeling a shared moderation tool
Threads begins a limited fediverse-sharing beta
YouTube adds disclosure for realistic synthetic media
TikTok begins reading Content Credentials for AI labels
Discord opens Activities to the broader developer community
Harvard's Library Innovation Lab releases a Data.gov archive
PNG's third edition brings animation and modern color into the standard
Wikimedia frames AI as assistance for human editors
Meta announces a US test of Community Notes
The Wayback Machine passes a trillion archived web pages
Wikipedia turns 25 by putting its editors in the foreground
YouTube moves AI disclosures into more visible viewing positions
GeoCities is deleted, and volunteers race to copy it
Google Reader is retired, and its feed history is copied
Orkut closes and Google promises an archive of public communities
Google+ shuts for consumers after a privacy review
Yahoo Groups stops showing its archives
MySpace loses years of uploaded music
AOL Instant Messenger signs off after twenty years
Yahoo Messenger ends, with six months to download chat history
Internet Explorer 11 is retired from Windows 10
Yahoo Answers closes without a public archive
Photobucket puts a price on images embedded elsewhere
Vine becomes an archive and a camera
Friendster announces it will delete user content and become a game site
Periscope is retired as a separate app
StumbleUpon hands its users to Mix
Digg is sold for a reported half a million dollars
Posterous shuts down a year after Twitter buys it
Imgur announces it will delete old content not tied to an account
Yahoo switches off AltaVista
Yahoo retires its hand-built directory of the Web
Windows Live Messenger is folded into Skype
Google tells Buzz users it will close in a few weeks
Google Wave goes read-only, then dark
Yik Yak closes after a small sale to Square
Google Code closes, and open-source projects move to other hosts
Yahoo Pipes goes read-only after eight years
Google retires Picasa for Google Photos
Quibi says its shows may not survive the shutdown
Google Stadia closes with refunds for hardware and games
Meerkat disappears from the App Store
Bebo files for bankruptcy five years after AOL paid 850 million dollars
Vessel is bought by Verizon and switched off within days
Microsoft closes Encarta's online encyclopedia
Napster closes its file-trading network, and a court keeps it closed