Museum of Pastebins

A short history of online snippet-sharing services

“Pastebins” were simple web pages where developers pasted a piece of code or text, saved it, and received a short link to share. They became especially popular in the 2000s during the era of IRC, forums, and early messengers — when attachments and formatting were still inconvenient, but a quick way to share code was needed.

no registration short link per snippet syntax highlighting temporary storage

Timeline

Early 2000s. First pastebins appear: minimal forms “paste–save–get link”.
Late 2000s. Syntax highlighting, private/public pastes, auto-expiration, password protection.
2010s. Integrations with Git/IDEs, “gists”, and lightweight self-host solutions (Hastebin, Ghostbin, etc.).
2020s. Focus on privacy, client-side apps, captchas, and spam prevention.

Dates are approximate: many services launched in different years, but these were the main trends.

How it worked

User pasted text/code and optionally chose a language for syntax highlighting.
Server stored the record (often in a database or file system) and returned a short URL.
Options included: private/public mode, password, expiration time (e.g. 24h).
Risks: spam abuse, leaks of private data, DMCA/PII complaints.

Example snippet

A simple demonstration (not functional, just static code):

# Example: word frequencies in text (Python)
from collections import Counter

def top_words(text: str, n: int = 5):
    words = [w.strip(".,!?:;()[]\"'").lower() for w in text.split()]
    words = [w for w in words if w]
    return Counter(words).most_common(n)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    sample = "pastebin museum museum code code code snippet snippet"
    for w, c in top_words(sample, n=3):
        print(f"{w}: {c}")

Screenshot artifact

Why many pastebins disappeared

Spam and abuse: without moderation, they became junkyards of ads and malicious texts.
Costs and liability: hosting, takedown requests, moderation overhead.
Better alternatives: GitHub gists, modern messengers, IDE sharing tools.

If someone launched one today

Client-side only: everything runs in the browser, no server storage.
Limits & protection: captcha, rate limits, passwords, auto-expiration.
Use cases: temporary notes, debugging logs for support, teaching sandboxes.

Conclusion: great as a museum exhibit — risky as a public service without moderation.

Other Projects

Here you can link to your current projects:

PuzzleFree.Game