The origins of Rantlister can be traced back to a project known simply as “The List.”
The List was originally created by Jake the Drake, author of DrakeGTA.com, as a blogroll to share the growing number of rant sites popping up across the internet.
Eventually Drake stepped away from maintaining the project, and responsibility for The List was passed to Prophet, author of The Big Rip Off, who had been helping Drake maintain it. Prophet hosted The List on his own site for a period of time before unexpectedly deleting his website, which in turn caused The List to disappear along with it.
Rather than allow The List to vanish completely, Bob Smash of BobSmash.com recovered The List from archived copies that remained in Google’s cache. By that point, a small but dedicated community had already formed around the group of rant sites, and efforts began to rebuild and maintain The List.
Over time the project continued to grow. Bagoda, author of The Cesspool, joined the effort and proposed giving The List a permanent home rather than allowing it to move from site to site whenever the person maintaining it moved on with their life. Bagoda secured the domain name Rantlister.com, while Bob Smash arranged hosting for the site.
The earliest version of Rantlister closely resembled the design previously used by Prophet’s site. Later, the site was redesigned with assistance from Thilo, author of The Second Best Page In The Universe, to improve navigation and make joining The List easier. Additional contributions were made by several members of the rant community, including Andrew Laporte and Angry_Jerk, who both played a role in helping guide the direction of the project as it evolved.
As Rantlister grew, it expanded beyond simply maintaining a blogroll. The site began publishing original content and encouraging guest rants from members of the community, while continuing to serve as a directory of rant sites.
Unfortunately, like many things from that era of the internet, the sites that once made up The List slowly disappeared. One by one, domains expired, hosting accounts were shut down, and years of writing quietly vanished as sites went offline.
The List now serves as a record of a small but memorable corner of the early internet. A time when writers built their audiences through links, conversations, and shared communities across small personal websites.
Today, almost every site that once appeared on The List is effectively gone. But using the magic of the Internet Archive, we have recreated The List using links to archived copies of the sites. Some of these archives are incomplete. Others preserve entire pages exactly as they appeared when the sites were still active. In many cases, these archived pages represent the only surviving record of the writers and the communities that once existed there.
The Internet Archive has its limitations though, and for the sites that aren’t archived, their names remain listed under “Cemetery”, serving as digital tombstones for sites that once formed part of the rant community. While not every site from The List can be fully recovered, our goal is to preserve as much of that early internet community as possible and document the writers who helped shape it.
So step into the Rantlister time machine and take a look back into the past. Then weep as you realize that the internet kind of sucks now.
The Original List
Cemetery
