What entertainment website fell the hardest this decade?

my claim to fame for trolling AICN was finding the Episode 2 thread and posting in the comment section which caused them to close all comment sections for older articles haha
 
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Hux said:
YouTube for sure. It's golden age was around the 2009-2013 time period and it all went down hill from there. I remember wasting my days in the high school library reading Cracked before it got irreversibly pozzed.

Bit of a sperg take, but I swear, starting off into the whole internet culture stuff in the mid-late 2000s, looking how it is now is basically the same feeling of the intro of Red Dead Redemption 1 where you're seeing the Wild West finally becoming tamed and civilized to the point where the frail old rich ladies now deem it safe to move in

"Our time has passed, John."
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With Cracked, the decay of its Photoshop battles (can’t remember what they were actually called) was a good representation for the site’s decay as a whole. For the longest time, they used to be funny, if shitty, Photoshops related to the topic, but there started to be a trend where people would just put a factoid over a slightly edited image. This eventually devolved into a user called “Aunty Meme” making literally every single entry and the photoshop contest basically turning into her shitty “quirky trivia” column, except for some goddamn reason they kept up the pretense of it being a contest with her winning every time.
 
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Gar For Archer said:
With Cracked, the decay of its Photoshop battles (can’t remember what they were actually called) was a good representation for the site’s decay as a whole. For the longest time, they used to be funny, if shitty, Photoshops related to the topic, but there started to be a trend where people would just put a factoid over a slightly edited image. This eventually devolved into a user called “Aunty Meme” making literally every single entry and the photoshop contest basically turning into her shitty “quirky trivia” column, except for some goddamn reason they kept up the pretense of it being a contest with her winning every time.
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You mean “Photoplasty”? Damn, those were good.
 
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RumblyTumbly said:
Has anyone mentioned The Spoony Experiment yet? Because Jesus Christ.

OK, it wasn't as big as Cracked, YouTube, or even Channel Awesome, but at one time, it was a respectable site with a thriving community, and regular content from Noah.

Now? The site and forums faded away as Noah put less and less work into creating content. The man basically let his entire life crumble around him while he sat like a bump on a log tweeting his ass away.
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We do have a thread on Noah. But yeah, Noah broke after the rape joke debacle and crystallized after Spoony got $5k a month on Patreon. Now its like a few hundred from speds wanting him to break out of his depression shell or folks who forgot they have patreon on autopay.
 
Twitter Hate Mob said:
Can we count webcomics as an entire medium for this? If so, then that's where my vote lies as they've seemingly all but vanished over the last decade.

Also, definitely adding to the calls for Cracked and AVClub
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Webcomics take a fuckton of effort, and are insanely difficult to monetize because readers have gotten used to getting the content for free. Outside of maybe Homestuck, are there any webcomics that actually ended up being independently profitable?
 
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Gar For Archer said:
With Cracked, the decay of its Photoshop battles (can’t remember what they were actually called) was a good representation for the site’s decay as a whole. For the longest time, they used to be funny, if shitty, Photoshops related to the topic, but there started to be a trend where people would just put a factoid over a slightly edited image. This eventually devolved into a user called “Aunty Meme” making literally every single entry and the photoshop contest basically turning into her shitty “quirky trivia” column, except for some goddamn reason they kept up the pretense of it being a contest with her winning every time.
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The worst part about the trivia was that it was inevitably stuff that had already been in articles on Cracked.

The ultimate Photoplasty cancer for me was when they started holding ones like “things that are overrated” or “moments when celebrities lost you,” which wound up just being a bunch of hipsters competing over who was the most quirky and self-righteous. Like, I don’t care that you don’t like beer, why is this considered worthy of publication?
Gar For Archer said:
Webcomics take a fuckton of effort, and are insanely difficult to monetize because readers have gotten used to getting the content for free. Outside of maybe Homestuck, are there any webcomics that actually ended up being independently profitable?
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A lot of artists used to make a living off them. Achewood, Scary-Go-Round and Penny Arcade, off the top of my head. I think the problem was that the old continuity-heavy webcomics weren’t very compatible with social media sharing. Now you get stuff like Webcomic Name and Sara’s Scribbles which are simple, relatable gag-a-day strips that require no commitment from the reader. No complex arcs, no controversial opinions, no swearing, gore or nudity.
 
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Draza said:
Yahoo went to shit pretty quickly this decade due terrible mismanagement by Marissa Mayer and the entire site leaning politically left. The data breaches of 2013,2014, and 2016 pretty much put the last nails in the coffin for the site.
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It's been very slow decline since the dot-com crash, I think.

BTW, did anybody make thread on the death of Yahoo Groups, and how Verizon banned anybody trying to archive it?
 
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For anyone who's mentioned the AV Club, did you just read the articles or were you part of the commenting community.

Maybe we don't want to power level about our usernames, but I'm just very curious as the site was very left leaning and it'd be nice to know if I'm not the only one from there who got disillusioned.
 
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Gar For Archer said:
Webcomics take a fuckton of effort, and are insanely difficult to monetize because readers have gotten used to getting the content for free. Outside of maybe Homestuck, are there any webcomics that actually ended up being independently profitable?
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Cyanide and Happiness seem to be doing pretty well for themselves, at least last time I checked.
 
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I knew Cracked was dead when they took down the Public Restrooms article. The comments kept on rolling for years after it was first published. It was pure gold. Then one day, poof.

I guess they finally scrubbed down the restroom
 
Oh nooooooooooo...

I got curious about what became of some of the old AV Club writing staff so I Googled Todd VanDerWerff, whose X-Files recap articles I really enjoyed as well as the "Nerd Curious" articles, all I knew was he went to write for Vox.

And now I learn that they now identify as "Emily" Todd VanDerWerff.

Before.
Panelist-Todd-VanDerWerff.jpg


After.
emily-cropped-small.0.jpg

D9JGvdpVUAEuXvP


"Seriously Good"
 
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FFShrine forums died this month, a MAJOR source of VGM and movie/television soundtracks just went belly-up due to the owners not renewing the license. Thankfully another VGM forum popped up ASAP to fill the void and a large amount of the site's links were saved but it still hurts. As to why it wasn't renewed I have a feeling the death of a lot VGM channels on YouTube may have scared them into letting go of the site.
Coke Pope said:
Imageboards- 8kun has failed as a replacement for 8ch being backstabbed by the cripplemoot himself and 4chan is extremely shitty as we speak. 4chan is filled with edgy teenagers after the creation of the SFW 4channel, gookmoot has no criteria for who he appoints as a janitor or as an admin and most of the Hot Pockets are extremely hypocritical and abusive, some boards like /biz/, /b/ and /pol/ are nothing but posts by spammers and some boards like /r9k/ and /adv/ are nothing but datafarming... let's not forget how gookmoot himself has links that point towards the yakuza.
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Don't forget that they re-wrote Global Rule 3 so that furfaggotry is TECHNICALLY allowed outside of /b/ and /trash/ just so long as it's not porn, thankfully some of the Hot Pockets there still follow its old text (RIP /vp/).
 
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Archeops said:
FFShrine forums died this month, a MAJOR source of VGM and movie/television soundtracks just went belly-up due to the owners not renewing the license. Thankfully another VGM forum popped up ASAP to fill the void and a large amount of the site's links were saved but it still hurts. As to why it wasn't renewed I have a feeling the death of a lot VGM channels on YouTube may have scared them into letting go of the site.
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That's a shame.

I registered in 2007 and while I was never a regular poster, I did pop in once in a blue moon to find some obscure soundtracks.
 
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