on What happened to Friendster?3 votes

didn't know about the patent sale to facebook, that's a wild little footnote

on What happened to the Salton Sea?1 votes

the lithium angle is such an unexpected twist for a place mostly known as an environmental disaster now

on What happened to the participants of the Stanford Prison Experiment?1 votes

still get taught sometimes as an example, just now alongside a whole section on why the methodology was bad, which is honestly a more useful lesson

on What happened to Crocs?3 votes

I resisted for like 15 years and then bought a pair last year, they're just really comfortable, I get it now

on What happened to the Somerton Man?3 votes

the tamam shud detail is what makes this case so haunting, it just feels like a deliberate message even though nobody fully knows what it meant

on What happened to the rumors that Anastasia survived?accepted0 votes

Anastasia was the youngest daughter of the last Russian tsar, executed along with her family in 1918. for decades afterward, persistent rumors claimed she'd somehow survived, the most famous claimant was a woman named Anna Anderson, who insisted she was Anastasia from the 1920s until her death in 1984. DNA testing done in the 1990s on preserved samples definitively proved Anderson had no genetic relation to the family at all. the mystery was fully closed out in 2007, when the remains of the two Romanov children missing from an earlier 1991 grave discovery were finally found in a second grave nearby, and DNA testing in 2008 confirmed all family members were accounted for, meaning no child, including Anastasia, actually survived.

on What happened to Betamax?0 votes

this is basically the textbook business school example of better tech doesn't always win, licensing strategy mattered way more than picture quality here

on What happened to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)?accepted2 votes

AIM was basically THE way an entire generation talked to friends after school in the late 90s and 2000s, complete with away messages and buddy lists. it slowly lost users through the 2010s as texting and then facebook messenger took over, and AOL, by then owned by Verizon, officially shut it down on december 15, 2017. there was a genuine wave of nostalgia online that day.

on What happened to Anna Delvey?accepted2 votes

Anna Delvey, real name Anna Sorokin, posed as a wealthy german heiress in New York between roughly 2013 and 2017, scamming hotels, banks, and acquaintances out of a lot of money by convincing everyone she was about to inherit a huge fortune. she was arrested in 2017 and convicted in 2019 on multiple counts of theft, and served time in prison. her story became the netflix series inventing anna in 2022. after being released she ran into trouble for overstaying her visa and spent time fighting deportation proceedings, eventually being allowed to remain in the country under certain conditions, and has continued doing interviews, art projects, and public appearances since.

on What happened to the hikers at Dyatlov Pass?accepted0 votes

nine experienced hikers died in the Ural Mountains in february 1959 under bizarre circumstances, their tent was found cut open from the inside, and they'd fled into extreme subzero cold, some barefoot, and a few had severe injuries with no obvious cause. for decades this fueled every theory imaginable, military testing, infrasound induced panic, even more out there ideas. Russian authorities reopened the case in 2019, and a 2021 scientific study concluded a slab avalanche combined with poor visibility and terrain was the most likely explanation, even though no obvious avalanche debris was found at the time, the type of slab release involved wouldn't leave much visible trace.

on What happened to the Beagle 2 Mars lander?0 votes

makes you wonder how many other failed missions were actually this close to functioning

on What happened to Windows Vista?1 votes

the UAC thing genuinely broke my brain as a kid, every single click was do you want to allow this program to make changes to your computer lol. windows 7 fixed like 90 percent of the annoyance without changing much under the hood

on What happened to the Sodder children?0 votes

the billboard staying up for literal decades says a lot about how convinced the parents were, that's not just grief, that's genuine belief something else happened

on What happened to Tower Records?accepted5 votes

Tower Records filed for bankruptcy in 2004, reorganized, then filed again in 2006 and liquidated all its US stores that same year, crushed by debt and the shift to digital music. the twist is the international licensed stores kept operating independently since they were separate companies, and Tower Records Japan is still alive and thriving today, it's actually a huge chain there with dozens of stores.

on What happened to the Antikythera mechanism after it was discovered?accepted1 votes

the Antikythera mechanism is an ancient greek device recovered from a shipwreck near the island of Antikythera in 1901, and for decades nobody fully understood what it actually was, just a heavily corroded lump of bronze gears. modern imaging techniques, especially x-ray and CT scanning done in the 2000s, revealed it was an incredibly sophisticated analog calculator used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses, essentially a mechanical computer over 2000 years old, way more advanced than anything else known from that era. it's now on permanent display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and researchers are still studying it to fully understand every function it had.

on What happened to Marion Jones after the BALCO scandal?accepted-1 votes

Marion Jones won five medals, three of them gold, at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and was one of the biggest stars in track and field at the time. years later she admitted to using performance enhancing steroids supplied through the BALCO doping scandal, and in 2007 she was stripped of all her medals and results going back to september 2000. she pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about it and served about six months in federal prison in 2008. after her release she tried a brief comeback in professional basketball, playing for the WNBA's Tulsa Shock in 2010, and has since worked as a motivational speaker, openly discussing her mistakes and working in coaching and mentoring roles.

on What happened to Antoine Dodson?1 votes

using the money to move his family is honestly one of the better outcomes of an early 2010s viral moment

on What happened to Hashima Island after it was abandoned?accepted3 votes

Hashima Island, often called Battleship Island because of its shape, was a densely packed coal mining facility off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, that at its peak in the mid-20th century had one of the highest population densities ever recorded anywhere. Japan shifted away from coal toward petroleum in the 1970s, and the mine closed in 1974, the entire population left almost overnight, leaving buildings and belongings behind. it sat abandoned for decades, becoming a genuine ghost island, before eventually opening to tourists and gaining UNESCO world heritage status in 2015 as part of a set of Japanese industrial sites, a designation that's been debated given the island's wartime labor history. it also got international attention as a filming inspiration for the villain's lair in the james bond movie skyfall.

on What happened after Lonesome George died?5 votes

the decades of trying to find him a mate and it just never working is genuinely sad in retrospect

on What happened to the Georgia Guidestones?2 votes

the fact that the person who commissioned it never revealed themselves even decades later is honestly the wildest part to me

on What happened to RadioShack?2 votes

the smell of a radioshack is a core memory for me, all those little plastic drawers of resistors and wires

on What happened to the man who invented the Big Mac?accepted0 votes

the Big Mac was actually invented by Jim Delligatti, a McDonald's franchisee running restaurants in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, back in 1967. he came up with it at the franchise level to compete with bigger burgers from local competitors, it did so well locally that McDonald's corporate rolled it out nationally in 1968. Delligatti kept running his McDonald's franchises for decades afterward, ended up owning dozens of locations and doing very well financially, and passed away in 2016 at age 98.

on What happened to Skylab when it fell back to Earth?-1 votes

the littering fine getting paid off 30 years later by a random radio station is such a perfect ending to this story

on What happened to Pets.com?2 votes

shipping economics for pet food specifically was just never going to work at those prices, heavy and bulky and low margin is a brutal combo

on What happened to Tay Zonday?accepted0 votes

Tay Zonday, real name Adam Bahner, blew up in 2007 with the youtube video chocolate rain, mostly because of the surprising contrast between his deep baritone singing voice and his younger looking appearance. it led to real mainstream attention, tv appearances included. he kept making music and youtube content in the years after, working as a musician and content creator, and has stayed active online in various forms well beyond the original viral moment.

on What happened to the cast of The Blair Witch Project?6 votes

the fake missing persons site is such an insane marketing move looking back, that would not fly the same way today

on What happened to Kaycee Nicole?0 votes

the part that gets me is how many real people got emotionally attached and grieved a person who never existed

on What happened to Chris Crocker?0 votes

still holds up as a genuinely emotional, unfiltered moment, which is probably why it hit so hard back then

on What happened to Circuit City?-1 votes

there was a circuit city near me growing up, remember it just being gone practically overnight

on What happened to Gary Coleman after Diff'rent Strokes?1 votes

the child star finances getting mismanaged thing happened to so many kids from that era, his case is just one of the more publicized ones

on What happened to Amelia Earhart?0 votes

honestly kind of wild that with modern tech we still can't find a whole plane, ocean search is just brutal at that depth and area

on What happened since Mount Everest was first summited?0 votes

it's become way more commercialized, guided expeditions now cost tens of thousands of dollars and there are literal traffic jams near the summit on good weather days.