on What happened to Friendster?accepted3 votes

Friendster actually came before MySpace and Facebook, launched in 2002, and pioneered a lot of features those sites later copied. it started struggling because the site was constantly slow and buggy as it grew, and users jumped ship to MySpace which handled the same features better. Friendster tried to pivot into a social gaming platform focused on Asia around 2011, then shut down completely in 2015. one interesting twist, they sold their patent portfolio to Facebook in 2010 for about 40 million dollars.

on What happened to Anna Delvey?5 votes

the fact that she got hotels and banks to trust her purely on vibes and confidence is still baffling to me

on What happened to the Salton Sea?accepted0 votes

the Salton Sea formed by accident in 1905 when Colorado river floodwaters broke through an irrigation canal and poured into a dry desert basin in southern California for about two years before engineers managed to stop it. through the mid-1900s it actually became a resort destination, marinas, vacation homes, people called it the california riviera. but because it has no natural outlet, only agricultural runoff flowing in, salinity and pollution steadily built up, killing off fish and birds and driving away tourists by the 1970s and 80s. today it's largely an environmental and public health concern, a shrinking lake exposing toxic dust, though there's been renewed interest recently because of large lithium deposits discovered underneath it that could be valuable for EV batteries.

on What happened to the participants of the Stanford Prison Experiment?2 votes

finding out it was way more coached than presented for decades was such a gut punch for anyone who studied psych in school

on What happened to Crocs?accepted3 votes

Crocs blew up in the mid-2000s, then got mocked relentlessly for being ugly, and the stock actually crashed around 2008 after they expanded way too aggressively and got stuck with a ton of unsold inventory. a lot of people assumed the brand was basically done. but they restructured, cut costs hard, and then had a genuine comeback in the 2010s and 2020s through celebrity collabs and the Jibbitz charms letting people customize them. now it's a billion dollar company again and the ugly shoe thing became part of the appeal instead of a problem.

on What happened to the Somerton Man?accepted4 votes

an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Adelaide, Australia in december 1948, no identification, tags cut out of his clothes, and a scrap of paper hidden in his pocket reading tamam shud, persian for it is finished, torn from a rare edition of a poetry book. the case stayed unsolved for over 70 years, including an uncracked code found in the back of that book. in 2022, researchers at Adelaide university finally identified him using DNA and genealogy techniques, he was Carl Charles Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne. how or why he actually died is still debated.

on What happened to the rumors that Anastasia survived?2 votes

kind of a sad ending honestly, especially knowing an entire myth got built on hope that turned out to have zero basis

on What happened to Betamax?2 votes

wild that Sony kept making the tapes that long after everyone had moved on, gotta respect the commitment

on What happened to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)?1 votes

I still remember my screen name from like 2003, some things you never forget

on What happened to the hikers at Dyatlov Pass?1 votes

still one of those cases where the official answer doesn't fully kill the eerie factor of how it happened, even if the science checks out

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

so close to working the whole time and nobody knew for over a decade, that's such a rough near miss

on What happened to Windows Vista?1 votes

worth saying vista wasn't all bad, it introduced stuff like windows search indexing and the aero glass look that people actually liked. it just launched at a bad time with bad driver support

on What happened to the Sodder children?6 votes

the no remains found part is what keeps this one alive, that's such a specific and unsettling detail

on What happened to Tower Records?1 votes

tower records japan is honestly iconic at this point, the shibuya location is like a landmark

on What happened to the Antikythera mechanism after it was discovered?2 votes

the fact that it took modern CT scanning to even figure out what it was says a lot about how far ahead of its time it must have been

on What happened to Marion Jones after the BALCO scandal?2 votes

losing every medal going back years, not just from that one olympics, is a pretty brutal consequence

on What happened to Antoine Dodson?accepted0 votes

Antoine Dodson went viral in 2010 after a local Alabama news interview about an intruder in his sister's bedroom, his energetic delivery got remixed with auto-tune into bed intruder song by the Gregory Brothers, and it actually charted on the billboard hot 100. he made real money off the song royalties and used it to help move his family out of public housing. in the years after he kept a lower public profile, worked on a few different projects and business ventures, and has spoken openly in interviews about how the sudden viral fame affected him.

on What happened to Hashima Island after it was abandoned?1 votes

the skyfall connection is what put it on a lot of people's radar who'd never heard of it otherwise

on What happened after Lonesome George died?0 votes

at least he's preserved and on display rather than just gone, feels like a small mercy for how significant he was

on What happened to the Georgia Guidestones?0 votes

getting blown up and the case staying unsolved is such a strange, fitting end for a monument that was mysterious from day one

on What happened to RadioShack?2 votes

they tried so many rebrands and relaunches, it just never stuck once the core hobbyist customer base aged out

on What happened to the man who invented the Big Mac?2 votes

wild that one franchise owner's local idea became one of the most recognizable food items on the planet

on What happened to Skylab when it fell back to Earth?accepted5 votes

Skylab was NASA's first space station, launched in 1973 and hosted three crewed missions through 1974, then sat unoccupied afterward. its orbit gradually decayed faster than expected, and it made an uncontrolled reentry on july 11, 1979. most of it burned up, but debris scattered over the Indian Ocean and parts of Western Australia, near a town called Esperance. the local council there actually issued NASA a 400 dollar fine for littering, which went unpaid for decades until a California radio station paid it off on NASA's behalf in 2009.

on What happened to Pets.com?-1 votes

the sock puppet was genuinely more famous than the company itself at this point, it's still referenced as pop culture shorthand for dot-com excess

on What happened to Tay Zonday?3 votes

genuinely has more longevity as a working musician than people probably expected from a viral moment that old

on What happened to the cast of The Blair Witch Project?0 votes

joshua leonard is honestly the one who kept the most visible acting career going of the three

on What happened to Kaycee Nicole?accepted4 votes

Kaycee Nicole was one of the earliest big internet hoaxes, back in 2000 and 2001 on early blogging platforms, she was presented as a teenage girl blogging about fighting leukemia, and built up a large and genuinely emotionally invested online following. her death was announced in may 2001, which is when things started unraveling, people noticed inconsistencies and eventually traced the whole persona back to a woman in Kansas named Debbie Swenson, who had fabricated the entire thing, including fake photos borrowed from someone else. it predates the term catfish by about a decade but it's basically the same phenomenon.

on What happened to Chris Crocker?accepted0 votes

Chris Crocker went viral in september 2007 with a tearful leave britney alone youtube video defending britney spears after a heavily criticized VMA performance, becoming one of the first people to become famous purely through youtube. the fame led to a longer career in online media and entertainment, appearances in documentaries about internet culture, and continued content creation over the years since.

on What happened to Circuit City?accepted1 votes

Circuit City went bankrupt in 2008 and fully liquidated all around 567 US stores by early 2009, right in the middle of the financial crisis. part of it was self inflicted too, in 2007 they laid off thousands of their most experienced, and highest paid, salespeople to cut costs, which tanked customer service right before the recession hit. Best Buy ended up absorbing a lot of their market share. the brand has been revived a few times since as an online only retailer.

on What happened to Gary Coleman after Diff'rent Strokes?accepted4 votes

Gary Coleman dealt with a chronic kidney condition for his entire life that required dialysis and multiple transplants, and it's also part of why his growth was stunted, which affected the kinds of roles he could get as an adult. on top of that, he discovered his parents and business manager had mismanaged and spent a huge chunk of the money he earned as a kid, he sued them in 1989 and won a judgment of over a million dollars, but by then a lot of the damage was done. he worked a mix of small acting roles and other jobs later in life, including a widely publicized stint as a security guard, and passed away in 2010 at 42 after a fall caused a brain hemorrhage.

on What happened to Pete Rose after he was banned from baseball?0 votes

he got banned for life in 1989 for betting on games while managing the Reds, including games he was involved in. he applied for reinstatement multiple times and got denied every time.

on What happened to Blockbuster Video?3 votes

the last store (Bend, Oregon) basically survives now on tourism and airbnb bookings of the actual store, plus merch. it's become a whole nostalgia thing.