What entertainment website fell the hardest this decade?

[FireGod365]

So many to choose from, actually. From Gawker, to TGWTG, to Cracked. A lot of entertainment websites that turned over the years.

 

[MrJokerRager]

YouTube has to be the hardest. It's now a full shadow of itself, it's sold out.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

Oh jeez...I forgot Cracked was a thing until I saw the OP, lol.

I used to love their list articles. Yeah they were clickbait-y, but they were also oddly unique and felt like they had some thought put into them.

For example: Top 5 Cobra Commander terror plots that could have worked, and then the article goes on to cite real world examples that tie into those seemingly wacky cartoon plots to show that they could have actually worked.

Stuff like that made for fun reads.

Then I noticed they started drinking from the cup of social justice...never a good sign. They started uploading videos of what looked like beta hipsters sitting in a coffee shop and talking about movies. It was like Seinfeld if Seinfeld was devoid of charm and actual humor...and that sort of became Cracked's content...yikes.

 

[Pixy]

We all know about SA's fall from grace and it's slow, but eventual, death-spiral, but it's still worth mentioning.

 

[Red Hood]

Netflix is currently getting the Julius Caesar treatment after Disney and NBC pulled out.

Cracked used to be occasionally funny, then they turned into finger wagging nannies.

Gawker was always a huge bag of shit, but now it's a zombie bag of shit.

 

[CheezzyMach]

I used to use Bleeding Cool so them?

 

[BlueSpark]

Obligatory Something Awful mention.

 

[Rice Is Ready]

Used to go on this site all the time and somehow just forgot about it. Then one day it popped into my head so I went back and discovered the owner had been gone for a while too because his girlfriend killed herself. He wrote a really depressing piece about it and it's even sadder because I've only ever seen the goofy side of him.

Please Read.

www.i-mockery.com

 

[friedshrimp]

Deviantart, in the early days, was where most of the cool artists hung out, even if there were still fetish loons hanging around. Once tumblr and twitter became popular they all migrated and DA turned into the ghost town of only furries and piss-lovers.

 

[Marco Fucko]

You know, outside The Escapist (which I haven't touched since I was in middle school), I'm pretty sure I've never used a gaming forum. Well, there was the Nintendo forums back in the day, before they closed down.

I'll say NeoGAF is a contender for having a massive staff and user fallout and resulting in the creation of ResetEra, a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

 

[Ghost of Wesley Willis]

Tumblr: Yeah, tumblr was a shitty site from its inception, but I met plenty of cool people from there, plus it was insanely fun to fuck with people on that site, especially from 2011-2016. After the election, it just got worse and worse until the inevitable porn ban just caused the exodus of the worst people.

YouTube: Probably had it worse than any other site. When this decade started, all the drama and shit with Viacom was dying down and become a distant memory, then google+ happens, then adpocalypse. Only good call they made was removing their slogan "broadcast yourself". I honestly don't see YouTube doing so well in the 2020s with the way things are going,

Reddit: Like tumblr, reddit always was shit. But since the death of Aaron Swartz in 2013, its become an even bigger cesspool. Reddit used to pride itself on freedom of speech in the early days, but they're now one of the most heavily moderated sites I've ever come across. But it should come as no surprise when most your staff consists of troons and living examples of the soyboy meme.

Facebook: Facebook in just 9 years went from being the site that many people wasted their teenage years on to having the largest population of boomers outside of the State of Florida, who could also not forget the Zucc as well?

Flickr: In a single decade, it went from being a reasonably decent photosharing website to be an unusable piece of junk that flip flops consistently on everything.

Imgur: Much like reddit, its a victim of overmoderation and a terribly shitty community.

Not a website, but IDC. Discord has really gone downhill lately. It's still a much better alternative to teamspeak and skype, but the way its managed and the large amount of insanely exceptional individuals moderating as well make me see them not lasting much longer. Also their program is far buggier now.

 

[Coke Pope]

My top 5:
Something Awful- Co-opted by trannies from Discord, Lowtax has allowed authoritarian mods and powerusers to abuse their positions while he spends all the money from donations on opiods. Lowtax got divorce-raped and cannot even JUST pay alimony, he claims he is using the donations to pay for the servers and the DDOS protection while he confessed on Facebook he uses it to fuel his drug habits and the debt he has towards his former wife.

SCP foundation- A Russian scammer copyrighted the brand of the SCP foundation and he is suing the Russian branch of the website. The website has now intrusive ads. Discord trannies have also co-opted the site and tried to change the lore of the SCP foundation so it is LGBT-friendly. Ironically, if you know jack-shit about the lore of the SCP world you will notice how the SCP foundation is an extremely evil, fascistic, nepotistic, corrupt and ill-intentioned organization, so yeah...

Youtube- Susan, the CEO of alphabet inc, and top youtubers just keep fucking up when it comes down to advertisers, the reputation of the site and intellectual property laws. The new European law about content for minors is fuckin them up.

Facebook- Facebook always had shady practices, but if after the Cambridge Analytica scandal you still use Facebook you are either a moron or a boomer, or both.

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.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

Deviantart, in the early days, was where most of the cool artists hung out, even if there were still fetish loons hanging around. Once tumblr and twitter became popular they all migrated and DA turned into the ghost town of only furries and piss-lovers.

I think the first nail in the coffin was when DA admins decided to stop policing the people who use their site like a dumpster for re-re-re-recompressed, ripped-off content. The site immediately started filling up with a completely different culture of lower functioning people. The final nail was when they decided to become facebook for "fandom" instead of a site for digital art.

 

[friedshrimp]

Also shit but add youtube to the list. I'll take 200000 anime shipping AMVs and Doug Walker copies over this sea of scatterbrained youtubers unboxing and pedophilic Spider-manxElsa videos.

 

[Next Task]

Pretty much all of them, as far as I can tell, but the one that hit me the hardest was Onion's The AV Club. It used to be a great place to go for well written reviews of movies big and obscure, and had one of the most comprehensive TV review/recap collections that were actually worth reading.

Now, at best you'll get a smug, pretentious review from someone who has to compare everything to an obscure Polish film from the 60s, but you're much more likely to get everything heavily filtered through TDS, lots of aggressive wokeness, and a lot of 'male fans are manbaby racist sexist pigs, female fans with their shipping and slash fiction are pure goodness and light'.

It's just frustrating when it was so good and did things you couldn't find anywhere else, and now it's an unreadable trashfire filled with discussing how much everything is 'problematic'.

 

[verissimus]

I was going to say Polygon or Kotaku, assuming you can qualify them as entertainment, but I definitely second youtube. It is easily has fallen the hardest and will continue to fall.

 

[Syaoran Li]

YouTube has declined in the worst possible way, hands down. YouTube in the era of "Current Year" has somehow become even more bland and restrictive than cable TV, despite its initial draw being a freewheeling alternative to cable TV.

Second place would probably go to Cracked. They were one of the funniest websites of the 2000's and one of the worst in the 2010's.

Third place would go to both 4chan and 8chan, for a wide variety of reasons.

Special mention goes to TV Tropes for their spectacularly awful downfall. While TV Tropes was never really all that good to begin with, they used to be mildly entertaining as long as you stayed on the Wiki and just avoided the forums like the plague. The Wiki was autistic as fuck, but mostly harmless.

Now the forums are worse than ever and the Wiki is nearly as bad, with Fighteer achieving the impossible and becoming worse than Fast Eddie in every way imaginable.

 

[Revo]

8chan because of recent mass shootings of this year (ex:Nz, Dayton, Helle, etc)

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Drew Curtis' FARK always had exceptional individuals but it just stopped being a remotely decent source to .m.ilk potential cows from.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Oh jeez...I forgot Cracked was a thing until I saw the OP, lol.

I used to love their list articles. Yeah they were clickbait-y, but they were also oddly unique and felt like they had some thought put into them.

For example: Top 5 Cobra Commander terror plots that could have worked, and then the article goes on to cite real world examples that tie into those seemingly wacky cartoon plots to show that they could have actually worked.

Stuff like that made for fun reads.

Then I noticed they started drinking from the cup of social justice...never a good sign. They started uploading videos of what looked like beta hipsters sitting in a coffee shop and talking about movies. It was like Seinfeld if Seinfeld was devoid of charm and actual humor...and that sort of became Cracked's content...yikes.

I distinctly remember the article that made me stop. It was something about the harsh realities of being an undercover crack whore and all I could think of was, "how is this in any way shape or form supposed to be funny?" In fact, that's when I began to notice that the site had quietly removed the "humor website" moniker, which was just as well since the site had stopped being funny. I also remember some asshat telling me the site didn't have to be funny when I questioned another article and why there was a distinct lack of jokes.

And it sucks because some of the older Cracked articles are legitimately hilarious, especially Seanbaby's older stuff, like the food mascots article that birthed Popsicle Pete. Cracked was at its best when it was just trying to be absurd. Now the funny shit's gone away and we get morons trying to politicize everything and act like high and mighty pricks.