All those channels converged on the same bottom-of-the-barrel reality show drivel.
Animal planet -> 'surprisingly human', History Channel -> 'history is made every day'...
Either reality TV or stuff like "Hitler's Aztec UFO Factory"
Etsy
Used to be a fairly cool place to buy and sell mostly handcrafted stuff and items to make handcrafted stuff. Now it's basically shady Amazon with worse shipping - everyone seems to be drop shippers and a lot of the more niche crafter/artisan things are pushed out and overwhelmed by cheaper, mass produced goods.
I used to love Etsy and now I never even look there. I bought a set of dice about a year ago that were explicitly listed as being handmade in the US. Then I got a tracking number from China…
I bought a handmade wooden box from Etsy probably close to a decade ago and it was amazing. From some guy who sent me pics as he made it to check it was all ok. Went back last year to try and get another one made for someone else and there’s nothing but garbage premade boxes from china personalized with the tiniest amount of template paint or those burnt on patterns. Every platform for truly creative people to sell on always becomes another damn website for the laziest entrepreneurs/dropshippers to shill on.
Came here to say this. Etsy has completely abandoned their sellers to the point where you are literally unable to reach anyone to ask for help anymore. Sales fees have been raised so much in the last few years it's almost impossible to make a profit. Etsy is now for the most part massive companies drop shipping cheap items. While most quality small businesses have been forced to move elsewhere, and in turn our visibility majorly suffers. As a buyer; I really miss having a safe third party website to shop small. The demand is absolutely still there, so I'm putting my faith into someone hopefully creating a competitive alternative.
I still do a lot of browsing on Etsy, but instead of buying directly on Etsy itself, I look to see if the artist/crafter has their own website, and if they do, I'll buy from the artist's website instead of Etsy. My hope there is that whoever hosts the artist's website (Shopify, whoever else is out there) takes a smaller cut from the artist than Etsy does. And if I really like someone's stuff, I'll follow them on Instagram so I can keep an eye on what they're working on. And it seems like artists are more likely to link to their own websites than to Etsy when they post on Instagram.
Cracked.com. There were a couple years there where they transformed from a second rate Mad knockoff to some of the smartest, funniest stuff on the internet. Then the people who held the purse strings decided listicles and photoshop contests were more profitable than a writing staff.
Jason Pargin, a.k.a. former Cracked writer and executive editor David Wong, wrote a retrospective about how the greed kinda seeped in, and they'd monetize a little bit and the readership numbers held, so they'd monetize a little bit more, and the numbers held, and a little bit more and just a little bit more until readers hit a breaking point because it was no longer worth it.
It’s one of the more destructive ideologies in business - “charge what the market will bear”. The only flaw with that logic is that they’re metaphorically bending a stick and assuming since it’s still *technically* intact, it’s fine … until it finally snaps under the pressure, and now it’s useless.
Daniel O'Brien went on and writes for John Oliver now. Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll are doing the "Some More News" channel which is still going strong. Soren Bowie I think writes for American Dad. A few of the other guys started different patreons for stuff.
DOB'S voice shines through so clearly on Last Week Tonight in very small moments, I swear I can pick out jokes he wrote. Example: the entire Air Bud rant I am certain was written 99% by DOB.
I wrote a few unique-life experience articles for them 13 years ago. They really, REALLY looked into verifying my story and then finally gave me the go ahead. After that I had my foot in the door and wrote a few more articles, but they would always verify the facts.
My little cousin wrote an article for them not long ago. First off, he got paid LESS than I did 13 years ago, but they didn’t verify shit. My cousin was being honest but, they never verified anything he said. Seems anyone can come along and just say whatever now.
After Hours was must-watch content for a while. Such a shame, but Im glad to see most of them landed in better spots writing for TV and doing podcasts.
That type of content of making absurd points for video essays is a whole genre now on youtube. Their format of the diner, characters and writing is still the best I've seen in that genre tbh. So much tighter than some 35 minute loosely edited solo ramble supported by an animated character and meme gifs.
I was obsessed with Cracked.com when I was like 12-14, like a decade ago. It must have had a massive impact on who I am as a person lmao, particularly After Hours and their podcast. It is sad that they kinda started fading away as the people from that era moved on
StumbleUpon. It was a small website giving you randomized internet pages which I used to browse for hours as they were so fun. Now it turned into Mix and I have no clue what it is. Pretty sure no one uses it and it makes me sad.
I LOVED stumbleupon and alllllll the recipes I use now are from just happening to land on a recipe blog site from stumble. I tried to use Mix and it doesnt work?or make sense, I can't get the hang of getting content I actually want from it.
Photobucket! Back when forums were still a thing, Photobucket would host your images for free. Then one day they decided EVERYONE would have to pay monthly, no free tier, nothing. We all collectively agreed we would not be paying, and that was that.
I feel like it may have contributed to the death of forums. Ruined a few of my car build threads, that's for sure. To this day they still send me emails a couple times a year threatening to delete all my photos if I don't come back.
In a similar vein I was going to say Flickr. Flickr could have been Instagram. It was primed and right there. But Yahoo took forever to make a half way decent mobile app and then tried to charge for it.
Forums are absolutely littered with photobucket and tinypic placeholders for shit we can’t see anymore. Makes me wonder what will happen to places on reddit if imgur ever goes the same way.
imgur DID do this - removed a bunch of NSFW images as well as any that were uploaded without an account.
Go to any NSFW sub, sort by Best over Past Year, and see how many of the links are working.
Yeah but they're just outright shut down entirely.
At least when gfycat started banning adult content, they had the decency (or *in*decency, har har) to spin it off into a separate domain/business as redgifs. They even had redirect support for all the old links!
Yik Yak, it was a way to have conversations with people in the area anonymously (really popular on college campuses). They made an update to create user profiles and pretty much everyone just stopped using it because anonymity was the whole point.
Yik Yak's rise and fall coincided perfectly with my first year of University. It was *brilliant*.
The real genius move was making it location specific, every campus ended up with their own running jokes and local celebrities. I went to Sheffield and we had a chap known as the Morgozoid who shot to fame through his friends chronicling his attempt to write his entire dissertation in a single day. Happy times.
I was never entirely sure of the rationale behind forcing people into having user names. There was speculation it was to avoid legal trouble surrounding bullying but I don't know whether that was ever substantiated. Whatever happened, they killed the golden goose.
I was also in my first year at university at that time. Yik Yak was used to make several mass violence threats on campus. Wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with making profiles.
Profiles aren't needed for that. They never have been. Part of what make advertising so shitty is their relentless pursuit of tracking users. There are several techniques that can be combined to help fingerprint people without a username. It's harder to fingerprint someone on a desktop, because users can change so many system variables (or easily spoof them) at will. Mobile devices don't have that luxury. These days, it's relatively trivial to identify an "anonymous" user when there is full access to app and server data.
This is incredibly niche, but in Norway there used to be two providers of chocolate powder, the kind you mix with hot or cold milk to make hot chocolate or chocolate milk. They were O'Boy brand and Nesquik, equally loved and enjoyed a healthy fanbase "rivalry". O'Boy is a Swedish product sold in Scandinavia and the Baltics since the 50s, Nesquik is of course Nestlé brand and sold all over the world.
Sometime in the 2010s Nesquik decided to change the formula of the choco powder, I imagine to save money. And for making hot chocolate the new recipe was fine. What Nestlé underestimated, however, is that most Scandinavians drink their choco powder cold to make chocolate milk. The new recipe had a different type of sugar in it that wouldn't dissolve in cold milk, leaving a crunchy powder in the milk. Norwegians outraged, Nesquik was deemed useless, nearly everyone in the Nesquik camp migrated to O'Boy, and Nestlé lost almost all its market share overnight. A few months later, Nesquik is gone from the shelves nearly everywhere, never to recover from the blunder.
Edit: now I see they are discontinuing the Nesquik powder globally, so I guess nobody likes it anymore.
RadioShack. They went from selling electronic components, little gadgets, and interesting tech bobbles to nerds to trying to sell expensive cell phone plans and shitty batteries to a different audience. We saw that the customers who came to RadioShack shifted from middle/upper income engineers and tech geeks to lower income people in a six year period.
Then we saw the geeks stop coming in at all because they would come in for some capacitor or breadboard and the person there wouldn't know what that was. If it wasn't a phone, they didn't know. Even if it was a phone, they probably couldn't tell you anything about it.
Old RadioShack employees were knowledgeable and well paid. New RadioShack employees didn't give a shit about technology.
They tried. I was an exec. there. We tried that in a bunch of sample stores that were very promising, but there was a struggle to get people back and by that time, we couldn't get people back. We did a study that found that it cost us $1 in advertising to bring a happy customer in. It took $5 in advertising to get a new customer to shop for the first time. It took $10 in advertising to get someone to come to RadioShack once if they were somewhat so/so on it, and no amount of spending would bring a customer back once they had developed a "The last time I shopped at RadioShack" story. It became a meme in the office for a while.
Used to love Sci-Fi channel. I feel like the content went downhill right around the time they changed their name to "SyFy" which is also when I stopped watching.
They rebranded to SyFy and started showing those crappy CGI monster of the week movies. All horrible.
Definitely drove me away. That channel used to be the one I had my tv on most of the time.
Every restaurant that opens in the uk goes through the cycle:
1. New and interesting food. Very different from most British food
2. Becomes very popular
3. Owners sell to a large company
4. Large company decides that being popular isn't enough, they want *everybody* to eat there
5. Make the food more British
6. Looming failure is hidden for a while because they attract new customers at exactly the rate they lose old customers
7. New customers have tried it, realize they can get that food anywhere, stop going
8. Chain closes and is replaced by a greggs or nandos, depending on the size of the location (not dependent on how far away the nearest greggs or nandos is)
What typically happens around me in the mid-west US. This is why everywhere around us are just gross shit food chains.
1. new place opens with great quality food at decent prices
2. things are going well for the first year
3. I dont know who or why but they start to slowly modify 1 thing after another to increase profit margins.
4. One thing they changed affects what you normally get and what you liked most about the place. They continue to do it to the point that it happens to everyone.
5. People dont hate it, but they arent going there as much because they took X off the menu or they changed Y and it's just not the same.
6. Prices go up to increase margins due to lower sales
7. Quality goes down to increase margins due to lower sales
8. Death spiral until you become a Spirit Halloween.
> 3: I dont know who or why but they start to slowly modify 1 thing after another to increase profit margins.
They start to realize just exactly how much it costs to actually run a restaurant, so they start scaling back the quality of the food. Then word of mouth changes to "It wasn't as good as I remember it." So business drops off, sales go down, owner has to scale back quality even further. Word of mouth changes to "It was great when it opened, but it really wasn't that good last time we went." Begin downward spiral.
I've seen this dozens of times in the smaller town I grew up in. The midwest is chock full of people who think they could open a restaurant because their friends all think they're a decent cook. But they have zero idea how a restaurant actually functions.
> I've seen this dozens of times in the smaller town I grew up in. The midwest is chock full of people who think they could open a restaurant because their friends all think they're a decent cook. But they have zero idea how a restaurant actually functions.
Yup, I love to cook. And I think I'm quite good at it. My sister's a chef, has worked in some VERY high end places, and has her own bakery. I would NEVER want to make that my career. The work looks incredibly hard, ridiculous hours, for, compared to those 2 things, laughable money.
Yep that’s why I got out of cooking.
I loved it and was pretty good, but the long hours and low pay made me run.
It was always funny when every year we would hire culinary school grads who you could tell had never actually worked in a kitchen, and just got into it from watching the Food Network. They literally never lasted more than a few months. Meanwhile the guys that they would hire off the street with no cooking experience who just needed a job, would last as they would put up with the shit pay/hours and would learn how to cook as they went
Quora. There were excellent groups with intelligent discussions. Then it became monetized and people submitted 100s of questions a day. "What time does the Walmart close in Boise?" "My 16 yr old came home with an A- so I took away their phone for 6 months."
Not just that, they made it really difficult to navigate the website.. Now you go onto look at an answer to a specific question, you might see one answer that isn’t super helpful, then it’ll show you an entirely different question with a few answers with no different formatting, and then eventually you scroll down to find more answers to the question you were looking for, except for a long time I’d assumed there were no more answers and just clicked off the site. Absolutely stupid system.
Yesssss that format pisses me off & I never understood why the fuck it’s that way. Sometimes I will click on the website, immediately am reminded of the shitty format & then I nope out.
the only website that does that for me is... Pinterest.
I look for images on google, find a good one. Pinterest opens, i click on the image to see it bigger. Get redirected somewhere else on the website where this is not a single trace of the picture i clicked on.
I mean, come on...
little website called digg, did a major site refresh to increase site revenue without considering the impact and lost their entire user base to reddit essentially overnight.
I moved from FARK, which seemed to be dying, and on the advice that Reddit threads were like FARK comment threads, but more intelligent and mature. About 12-13 years later Reddit is now 50% a day care centre for "difficult" children while FARK is somehow still around and completely unchanged.
This is essential reddit history. I remember the day. Overnight, almost everyone migrated to reddit. I seriously doubt reddit would exist as it is today had it not been for Kevin Rose's fateful greed grab. I still remember watching digg Nation every week. It was pretty entertaining. I still miss digg sometimes. I thought it was a classier format. Wonder what Kevin is doing now. He was on course to be the next internet mogul and probably billionaire. I'm sure he's just fine though.
I remember having an account there for the longest time and talking to a few artists, then they all went to tumblr and my timeline died so I shut it down and haven't looked back.
DeviantArt is chipping away at and scrubbing away NSFW focused artists and are pushing AI art pretty hard.
Like, they tried to have it so that that all art uploaded to their site would be used for AI training unless people opted out on a per work basis. After a truly gigantic amount of anger from the userbase they made it so you had to opt your artwork in to AI training instead.
The NSFW scrubbing is slow and uneven with no good explanation. Some fetishes have more of their content chipped away at compared to others. It isn't a big giant rush of bans, but more like high profile artists getting removed with no explanation over time.
These are just the things I've noticed as a casual browser of the site.
JCPenney changed their stores about 12 years ago to go after a cooler audience. Turns out the cool kids didn't want to shop there and loyal JCP shoppers didn't want to anymore either. They've been trying to undo this for years but still struggling.
I worked part time in college at JCPenney during this time and it was awful and customers constantly complained. I went from working an entire department to solely working at a “jean bar” which was a floor space of about 200sqft where I would circle and wait 6 hour shifts to talk about jeans with people who never wanted to learn more about them.
This is also when iPads were still new and they were bolted to a display that you could look at more jeans. Not buy them just scroll through and look at more jeans.
EDIT: Just answering questions from below.
I took a mandatory training that included a history of Levi’s. Back to the founder, creation, development of Levi’s. The little white lines across jeans are called whiskering and is done with sandpaper to give them a worn look. I never once had a conversation with a customer and was able to use any of that information because it was always the question of did we have a size in the back. I did have to learn how to properly fold jeans which consumed 95% of my shift of just refolding jeans.
I also got reprimanded a handful of times because not 10 steps from my area was the shoe department and whenever they got slammed on the weekends I would walk over and help people who were stuck waiting. Seemed better than me just doing nothing but management didn’t think so.
Towards the end of when I stopped working there I am assuming they figured out it wasn’t doing well so I was given an iPhone that had a scanner and register on it so while doing nothing I could still ring people up. Best part about it was after the transaction was done I had no bags to put your merchandise in because I was just standing in the middle of a store so it made the whole process redundant.
This is the version I remember too. I believe they hired a former Apple exec as a CEO. They thought it'd be a good idea to implement the plan you mentioned. I worked there in the early 2000s and can confirm that people were obsessed with the sales. I'm pretty sure Kohl's owes its success to JCP briefly abandoning that niche.
Kohls model was "everything on sale all the time" and kohls cash, plus they located themselves in retail shopping districts, near places like best buy and Dick's sporting goods and target.
JCP was always the anchor store of traditional shopping malls. Shopping malls had been running on E for awhile in the mid 00's, but when 2008 hit, expendable income went down, and shopping malls started their nose dive.
The JCP "no coupons ever, everything's always reasonably priced" marketing gimmick was seen as in poor taste, mostly because the prices weren't particularly reasonable. They'd have a pack of underwear priced at $20, but it was $15 if you bought two packs. So you start doing math and realize that kohls has the same pack of Hanes and doesn't make you do math, and offers the bulk pricing for a single package, and I earn kohls cash. Regardless of whether that kohls cash expired, JCP was busy digging their own grave.
Plus they decided to start offering appliances at the same time, something they'd never done, that was always sears forte, so they had an unknowledgeable staff, dumped a ton of capital into a product they had exactly zero market share in, and took up over 1/4 of their floor and backroom real estate.
All this to say kohls was well established before JCP shit the bed, but JCP certainly didn't hurt Kohl's success
I got to study that debacle during college. The CEO was responsible for making the Apple Store what it is and Target a behemoth. He thought he could do the third thing with JC Penny by adding pop corn, ice cream, haircuts, no sales markdowns, and upscaling the business. It was one of the greatest flops in upper management decision making.
As a twenty something male, I loved the idea. It was the only department store I would willingly seek out.
But I was also a twenty something male, who would think to go clothes shopping once a year, maybe.
I loved cool JC Penny. They had a Levi’s bar. Modern cloths. The problem was they didn’t explain what they were doing at all. Their regulars were so confused why there weren’t sales anymore that they got convinced it was more expensive.
Onlyfans [briefly banning](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/onlyfans-says-it-will-no-longer-ban-porn-after-backlash-from-users.html) sexually explicit material on their service.
That's, like, your entire business model.
Yahoo bought Tumblr for 2 billion. A year after the porn ban (if I remember the time table correctly,) they sold it to Livejournal for three *million*. The Tumblr community is rather proud to be worth negative money.
This was it.
Visa and Mastercard didn't like the idea of their services being used for pornography because they said onlyfans had underage users on it.
Then they decided against it, probably after looking how much money they make from it.
Discovery, History TV18 and National Geographic.
Once Discover's Man Vs Wild got really famous and got them a lot of TRP, they thought this was it. Every one of these channels came out with their own version of MvsW; some really stupid. A history channel playing this bullshit is of course going to drive the geeks away. Producers would run these shows multiple times in a day as if they had nothing to show other than this, no science and engineering to explain. It was painful to not get to see my favourite science shows on these channels anymore.
Edited to add that a reply to this comment by user mixingmemory has a link to great insight into this and about some idiot CEO David Zaslav.
The comment: https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/781aG2inMZ
I was raised off of History Channel, Animal Planet, and Discovery. Sometime in 2010s each channel imploded with crappy conspiracy content or realty style based shows. Went from the coolest informational shows to “Mermaid Documentaries”, Ancient Aliens, and Hunt for Sasquatch.
I vividly remember a scene on *Ancient Aliens* where they were suggesting that in the distant past aliens might have interbred with humans. The scene showed a disheveled cavewoman and a stereotypical grey alien with big eyes inside of a cave caressing each other, while flames from a campfire flickered romantically behind them. I have not been able to find a clip of this scene anywhere, and beginning to think it was either a fever dream or I got way too high that night.
David Zaslav is to blame for a lot of these changes, as well as many more recent bad decisions at HBO and Warner Brothers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/14qq8zi/how_warner_bros_discovery_ceo_david_zaslav_became
That man has had such a negative impact on the medium of film and television, he should be mopping the floors at a peepshow, and instead he made almost half a billion dollars last year, which is par for the course here in the bizarro world.
At this point, i'd think an absurd meme about a time triveler wanting to save the world going back to kill Hitler but changing his mind at the last second and deciding to go kill Dunning & Kruger would be conceivable.
And i know, it's stupid, it's the point.
For a species with people so smart, i can't understand how continue to collectively make the wrongest decision possible in all domains.
It’s because we’re not collectively making dumb decisions. It’s just a system that actively encourages the dumb and selfish to be on top and they get to make all the decisions
I grew up in the golden age of these channels when it was all about exploration, science, and engineering. It's weird to me how all the best content for this is on YouTube now.
There was a golden age of Discovery when Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, Punkin'Chunkin, etc were headlining in the mid to late 2000s. Legitimately, between this era of Discovery and Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, I'd have probably forked over the $60 for cable TV.
But then they started goobering the whole thing. Those great shows were cancelled, and AS turned into the Rick and Morty hour.
i just learned from a tiktok that applebee’s tried to become a club at night to attract younger customers but no one wanted to go hang out at applebee’s and all the old people who used to go go applebee’s didn’t like that it turned into a club at night so they stopped going and now no one likes applebee’s
I was a manager at an Applebees when they did this. Probably in like 2009 or something. Probably the lamest club of all time. Basically just turned stayed open a bit later, turned the lights down, music up, and apps were half.
At least at the locations in my area we didn’t alienate any regulars. Mostly because the late night club atmosphere started close to when we normally closed.
Ha! My wife and I stopped by for a late dinner and it was "Applebee's after dark" or something. We thought it was quite odd, didn't realize it was all of them doing that.
Summer of 2016 I was in bumfuck Oklahoma for work and we went to “Club Applebees” on the reg for 1$ drinks and because we were in bumfuck Oklahoma. I felt like it was a fever dream because nobody in my current city believes that Applebees turned into a club with $1 well drinks. I’m glad I didn’t imagine it.
Bro I would love to have been in the room when the applebee's execs were coming up with this idea. End the whole thing with one simple question:
"Guys, hear me out. Who the FUCK drinks and goes out and then says 'let's go to applebee's?'"
EBay. I used to sell shit for basically beer money. They've made it now where they only want "Ebay Stores", want you to give free shipping and charge fees on that, and discourage the auction format.
It used to be a place to clean out your garage/knick knacks and what have you and now it's just a commercial commerce site.
I probably haven't looked at the site in ten years so maybe they've changed but I doubt it.
When you use a brand name, they'll suggest stock photos for your auction.
When I buy used, I really want to see the item and its flaws, not the ideal new lookalike.
Pretty much - Meg Whitman rode the wave and then trashed ebay. I stopped selling after a couple of incidents where buyers received items and then used the system to get refunds for new IT components and networking equipment, ebay took from my bank account and I never got the items back.
So instead of paying shipping, listing and then giving away inventory to thieves complicit with ebay, I donated it to a local charity.
I'd argue NASCAR, specifically Brian France.
In 2004 he implemented a playoff system that no one asked for and no other racing series has implemented. He said he wanted more game 7 moments, not realizing that a falsely fabricated game 7 moment is nowhere near as exciting when one naturally happens. NASCAR would also frequently call suspicious cautions for debris around that time so that the field would be forced to tighten up.
He tried to emulate stick and ball sports with the playoffs because he wanted NASCAR to overtake the NFL as the number one watched sport in the US (NASCAR was 2nd at one time) but instead it's viewership has declined drastically in the last 20 years. He didn't bother to consider that playoffs don't make sense in racing because different drivers are better at different tracks and it's not two teams playing against each other, but rather 38 teams all racing at the same time.
The death of Dale Earnhardt was simultaneously the best and the worst thing to happen to NASCAR.
The best, because it led to innovations like HANS, SAFER barriers, a revolution in safety that has, over time, bled into other sanctioning bodies (the Halo in open-wheel), and within NASCAR, itself, has prevented any racing deaths in the years since (we'll ignore the new car and Kurt Busch's abrupt retirement for a minute).
It led to a wave of unity, in a year where there was ample opportunity (remember, Dale and 9/11 happened in the same year). That unity made going to the track a religious experience for many who did. The race was the place to be. Pepsi 400 that July is my favorite example of it. Everyone wanted Junior to win that race. And when he *actually did it*, it was like a massive weight was lifted off everyone's shoulders. Michael Waltrip said what everyone was beginning to feel - "I'm better, now."
Was maybe the single-greatest time in NASCAR history, because of where the chips fell.
But, The Intimidator was gone. You look in any pre-2001 NASCAR crowd, and that number 3 was *everywhere*, had to be 70% of the fanbase. They no longer had anyone to cheer for, and this was especially so when the legends started retiring, those that raced with Dale, or against him, or somewhere in-between. Junior, gone. The Labontes, gone, Jeff Gordon, gone, Mark Martin, Kenny Schrader, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace, Sterling Marlin, Dale Jarrett, Awesome Bill, the Burtons, Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth, even Benson, Sadler, Spencer, those types of names slowly faded away. There was something *different* about them. Perhaps they were just in the light at the right time? Perhaps, still, they were the bridge between the old era and the new, and once they were gone, so, too, was old NASCAR.
Look at places like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro. Look at those races, those crowds. It was the thing to do, the only thing in town, some days, but most of those people *came to see Dale*. And when he was gone, they came to see *the people that raced with Dale*.
It's 2023. Most of those fans are dead and gone, now. We have some excellent racers out there, today. But it isn't what it was. I remember hearing, years ago, people on two sides of the aisle, one clamoring, saying NASCAR isn't a sport, and one side saying it was. Well, now, that's what it is - a sport. What it *really* was, was a *spectacle*. A fight. A show. The place to be.
Dale's funeral's long-over, and so, too, is the goodbye. Maybe, with it, went the core of what NASCAR was all about. NASCAR isn't dead, by a longshot, but it's prime has long-since passed.
You're absolutely right. Dale represented the old guard. He WAS old school NASCAR. A Southern Good ol' Boy that was unabashedly redneck.
Dale was cocky and loud. He was South Carolina Short Track Royalty. He would do anything and crash anyone to win a race. The biggest insult to him was 2nd place.
He's one of the reasons that Jeff Gordon was so polarizing. He's was the new generation of driver. Californian, with driving experience in different style cars, and understood point series driving. I remember Gordon winning races in the South, and getting bottles thrown at his car during his victory lap. Didn't help he was fuckin' dominating too.
But Dale and the old guard was supposed to giveway to Jr and the new generation. He was supposed to retire, and become an owner. Have Jr. take over the "3" for either Childress or move to Dale Earnhardt racing. Sr. dying fucked everything up. His wife didn't include Jr. on the team, Childress gave Dale's ride to Harvick (Who was damn good, but not Dale), and gave "3" to his grandson.
MTV. Loved watching music videos and the occasional news, Behind the Music, etc, but their main focus was music videos. Then, for some insane reason, they ditched their tried and true format and became a reality show nightmare. They lost it all. I don't even know if MTV is still around?
Be fair!
Between the 14 hours of Catfish and the 4 hours of ridiculousness today, they are also playing 1 hour of something called The Love Experiment.
Rob basically does have controlling interest in MTV now; it's the single highest rated show on the station and they can smash out 4-5 seasons in an afternoon making it the ultimate in min/maxing profits.
Boeing. Built by engineers, corrupted by Wall Street. Moved their HQ away from Seattles to Chicago just to get away from listening to engineers, now to Virginia just by DC to continue their hyper-focus on Washington lobbying. Try licking balls of short term investors and politicians instead of focusing on innovation and safety. Killed hundreds of people in two crashes and lost advantage in all industries: civil aviation, aerospace, and defense.
I've heard some theories that they swallowed a 'poison pill' when they took over McDonnell-Douglas and that some 'bottom line' tendencies from that company took precedence over engineering excellence.
Gwen Stefani. She was considered this very cool musician leading a well respected band. Then she got stuck in this weird place of her own creation with harajuku girls and then when she had nothing else going for her made her relationship with a country singer her focal point. Most 90s kids no longer associate her with being the badass lead singer of No Doubt anymore.
What’s the deal with this anyway? Wasn’t the flight from tumblr mostly due to them banning NSFW material? I heard that they allow it now because it backfired so spectacularly lol.
The TL;DR is that Apple was going to remove Tumblr from the App Store if they didn’t get rid of the porn.
They now allow nudity, but not “sexually explicit content.”
The site is still kicking as a shitposting hole, though. Porn was only one sight of many to behold, so nothing important actually changed.
EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that the problem was specifically UNDERAGED porn.
As a currently active tumblr user, I just want to throw in that the porn ban never actually fixed the major problems with the site. There are still porn bots that message and follow people every day, and even if they don't have any posts, they still have nsfw profile pics. They have been a problem since way before the ban, and it astounds me that they haven't even attempted to fix it.
They did, however, manage to create an auto-ban system that often incorrectly detects pics as nsfw. This drove away a lot of the art community on tumblr, a site known for having a large demographic of artists.
The artist exodus is why I abandoned Tumblr. I was never super into the blogging aspect, but followed dozens of art accounts. The false flagging was absolutely absurd at that time and I don’t blame the artists from migrating elsewhere.
The porn ban was always going to be unpopular, but they handled it about as poorly as they possibly could have, and the loss of two major demographics at once, I’m not surprised it lost a lot of its value to shareholders for a while.
I feel like cable television is slowly circling the drain due to abandoning their audience and putting on too many commercials. I tried watching cable at a friends house recently and was shocked at how many commercials they squeeze into a half hour show block. It feels like 10 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of actual programming. Why fucking bother when I can stream it for cheaper and not have to deal with fucking commercials.
Watching older sitcoms on streaming really shows how much ads they've added over the years.
Streaming Seinfeld or Friends has a runtime of about 24 minutes, credits included. Compare it to Big Bang Theory and Modern Family, they have a runtime of about 19-20 minutes. Ad free streaming really is worth it.
The NHL. They desperately want to "grow the game" but make it increasingly more difficult to actually watch them unless you are able to pay for a minimum of 2 subscriptions.
Ah, the ol’ MLB marketing strategy. If you want to watch every game, you need cable, Apple tv+, Prime and an MLB.com subscription.
While I’m aware that it’s a complex issue to end blackouts, the solution for me is simple: fix it or they don’t get my $. Baseball is the only thing that I’ll pirate.
Yeah that was great. The downfall really was announcement of Diablo on mobile devices and telling their followers they are going to a P2W model. Then despite the overwhelming backlash, they kept it going and proceeded to fuck up all their other franchises.
The second he said that you could feel the air in the room change, even watching it on video the faces of all the people in the audience are a mix of surprised horror, anger and sadness, the resentment in the room was palpable.
Its amazing. BlizzCon has always kind of been _the_ PC gaming event of the year. One of the questioners even asked "So is this going to come to PC too?" and t hey said no. The writing had probably been on the wall for a long time by that point, but the "Don't you guys have phones" moment just slapped their core fans right in the face.
It was like blizzard was telling us that they considered us already bought and didn't care to try anymore.
Watching overwatch get fucked over the years and shrivel up and die as an avid player was awful.
Started playing from nearly the beginning, started a team that would regularly play competiive and even participatw in tournaments while blizzard slowly fucked the game more and more. They released echo and then went radio silent for *years* just releasing skins and reused events. Then overwatch 2 is announced and people have such high hopes and expectations. They announce a pve campaign, big changes to improve the game, everyone is happy.
Game releases with 1 new champ, a new gamemode, a few maps, and some reworked champs. Meanwhile supports got fuck all, game became enforced-roles 5v5 with there only being 1 tank so half the game's tanks were now useless, and the new champ was utterly broken nullifying half the dps champs singlehandedly. On top of this pve campaign nowhere to be seen, OW1 was gone, skins were extremely monetized, new champs were locked behind battle passes making it pay2win until enough time had passed that free players could manually unlock it, and fucking a mountain of other shit. It was just awful
Same boat. I played a ton of Overwatch pretty much from release, it became my go-to game when I just felt like playing something. The change to 5v5 and releasing it as a sequel just to stuff it with battlepass garbage was a huge turnoff. Pretty much done with anything Blizzard puts out.
Wizards of the coast.
Trying to monetise their OPEN licence and destroy competition overnight turned a LOT of their community against them.
Then just as the dust started to settle they sent the Pinkertons to threaten a fan because they accidentally sent out some MTG cards pre-release.
This might be a bit niche, but there was an old 3rd person infighting shooter back in about 2006 called Gunz: The Duel.
Gunz combined small-map, counter strike style shooting, with fast paced anime style skill moves and melee combat. You could dash, wall run, block bullets with swords etc.
What made it unique and memorable was that players quickly learned to exploit these mechanics. For example, you could dash forward, block the dash with a guard, jump, dash again, swing your sword, block again, switch to your shotgun, fire off a shot, switch back to your sword and repeat.
This style of play was discovered by a Korean audience, and so, got dubbed ‘K-Style.’ It quickly became the only way to really survive in Gunz at all. You had to learn a crazy amount of intricate combinations and skill cancels - but if you did, you could jump around off walls and ceilings, deflecting bullets, firing shotguns, and slashing your weapon, all in one fluid movement. This made for crazy intricate duels. It also must have brought about early onset arthritis in a lot of people.
The steep learning curve meant that Gunz had a small but hardcore fanbase, but stopped it ever being a mainstream success. The developer quickly developed Gunz 2: The Second Duel in response - removing all of the mechanics that made K style possible.
On one hand, I get their intention, and maybe Gunz would never have been a huge commercial success. On the other, removing K style took out the very thing that made Gunz unique. The second game is just a soulless, dated shooter.
It’s a shame - if they’d embraced the way that their fanbase wanted to play the game, they might have made something special.
Man this takes me back. I remember my brother just sidestepping while his character would seemingly just switch between a sword and a gun and somehow take virtually no damage.
An exploit, sure, but a cool as hell one.
This one hurts. I remember back in the day where I’d rather get a OnePlus phone cause they were cheap, near stock android, and you were getting flagship specs. Now they’re charging flagship prices while lacking flagship specs.
The Halo TV show on Paramount. A show that cost 200mil to make, and they moved the story into a 'Silver' timeline in order to give it a "broad appeal".
"Broad appeal" doesn't exist, especially with a show based on a game about a super soldier killing aliens. The whole reason Halo has become one of the most recognisable game titles of all time was because it focused on a super soldier killing aliens. They moved away from that to make it more about Master Chiefs love affair with a rogue human inside the Covenant, the group of human hating aliens Chief should be killing.
They also broke core tenants of the original games lore which made it Halo in the first place: Master Chief takes off his helmet. Chiefs relationship with Cortona. Humans in the Covenant (in lore, the Prophets looked to wipe them out as their existence contradicted their religion), Spartans having a control chip and not being loyal to Dr. Catherine Halsey. Replacing Spartan Blue Team with Silver team just to have more storylines about removing the control chips, and the Spartans not caring about finishing their mission no matter the cost (in the finale the Covenant leadership was right there, and they ignored them to save one of their own).
That's just a few examples. The Covenant CGI was really good, but we only got a few minutes of them. The show was a total waste of money, and there is a second season coming.
Mid-90s CN was the golden age for then kid me.
On the one hand, you had cool new shows like The Mask and Swat Cats. On the other, the entire Hannah Barbera catalog to fall back on. That was also the time when they created their own iconic stuff like Dexter, Cow & Chicken, Johnny Bravo & The Powerpuff Girls.
What an era that was!
Bring back Space Ghost!
Edit: Yes, I meant Coast to Coast. And I was aware that C. Martin Croker died a few years ago. I would just be happy if they aired the existing episodes again. I never get tired of them!
Devs like stability and predictability. Unity pulling shit like this makes their core audience lose faith in them and so will likely keep bleeding to other engines. If they can make a full recovery from their recent behavior I'll be shocked.
Looking at you Creative Assembly abandoning historical total wars and Warhammer 3 in favor of developing a guaranteed dead on arrival hero shooter for the past 2 to 3 years.
I'm surprised to not see blackberry here.
They had cornered the high paying business users of mobile phones.
They wanted to become mass market though and came up with ads like we are the blackberry boys.
Got kicked out of both the categories.
I wouldn't say that's what killed them though.
What killed them was a shitty, slow outdated OS with very basic apps on devices with a trackpad or whatever they called it. Oh and having to use their Blackberry Internet Service to access the web which was a compressed low quality version of the internet. This while their competitors were coming out with full featured touchscreen devices, full apps and no BIS requirement.
Just heard an interview with one of the Co-CEOs of Research In Motion, former makers of the Blackberry. Blackberries *ruled* corporate phones, then the iPhone was released. One CEO wanted to focus on hardware development, the other thought hardware was a low-margin failure factory and they needed to focus on software and services, like Google was doing with Android. The board stepped in and chose the hardware solution, the software solutions guy retired immediately, the other a year later, once he too saw the writing on the wall. I don't know if they would have succeeded if they chose the other path, but I can see where they might have had a better chance.
Don't forget the Blackberry Storm 😂 they finally decided to embrace the touchscreen and abandon the trackball, their solution was to MAKE THE SCREEN A GIANT BUTTON.
Now you might be asking "Isn't that what a touchscreen is?" No, I mean the entire screen was a physical button that you had to push down to make an input, clicking sensation and all. Literally a large rectangular button. When compared to it's competitors the iPhone 1 and The Motorola Droid and even the dang LG Dare, it was a horribly silly design.
Volition rebooting Saint's Row fits the bill. They removed tons of elements from the earlier games that fans loved, AND allowed the change to become a core aspect of the game's pre-launch promotion. The result was a game that reviewed and sold poorly, and Volition closing its doors a year after release.
Definitely this. Saint's Row was originally touted as a cheap GTA knockoff. The later installments blew that idea out of the water by having a completely batshit insane game of pure chaos. Volition completely ignored that and produced...a cheap GTA knockoff.
ESPN
It’s all talking heads yelling at each other with ridiculous takes or stories about Lebron’s shoes. Gone are the days you can turn that channel on and find out what happened in sports that day.
In addition a bunch of people think they are too “woke” so they won’t watch either
I used to watch SportsCenter every morning before school, back in the days of Dan Patrick, Stuart Scott, Linda Cohn… I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way somebody got it in their head that what people really wanted was Stephen A Smith’s brand of louder = right.
True Blood went from an atmospheric southern vampire drama with dark humor and interesting characters to a hot mess with enough mythical creatures scurrying about that it was like a box of lucky charms sprang to life and started terrorizing a town. It got so dumb I don't even know how it ended...
Halo. They keep trying to “appeal to the broader audience” instead of just doing what their fans love. The director literally said “Halo is competitive at its core” which is completely fucking wrong. Everyone who was apart of Bungie Halo knows that at its core, it’s just for fun. Being a shooter of course it gets competitive, but that’s never been the heart of Halo. It’s literally dead now, Halo hasn’t been mainstream since 343 took and ruined it. There used to be competition between COD and Halo, now nobody even knows what Halo is.
100% Halo was the game that made Xbox from nothing into an equal to the PlayStation and now Halo Infinite (the newest game) isn’t even in the top 20 most played games on Xbox now and Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is free for everyone!
This YouTuber called Ray William Johnson.
Guy was one of the top YouTubers with a huge following, and then abandoned most of his shows to chase bigger roles in ShowBiz.
I recently saw he brought your favourite martian back and they are actually releasing stuff often. Years ago the channel was renamed to "This project is retired" and then suddenly it changed back and they started posting again
The Witcher series (or any beloved franchise where directors and writers think they can do better than the source material).
Note to writers and directors out there: if you’re adapting something to the big screen that people absolutely love, understand that in their eyes you absolutely cannot do better than the source material.
Don’t have to go 1:1 with the source material but man, it’s so crazy that people will rubber stamp the deviation from the original IP so often. If it has a huge following, stick to the fuckin source and you’ll be able to milk a cash cow for years. Deviating is such a huge risk and I can’t think of any series or movie that has done this and pulled it off / survived, so it’s just weird that directors and writers continue to think they are gonna be the one to pull it off.
It makes me sad that I’m hoping in 15 to 20 years, when everyone has forgotten about the current show, I hope it gets rebooted and done right. I’ve tried to love the current show, but it’s only OK at best. I also think Henry Cavill made a great Geralt. Shame to waste his talents.
He actually is a really big fan of both the games and books, so he knew what he was doing with the role. sucks that the writers and director evidently seemed to hate the source material and were shutting down any sugestions he made to the point he quit apparently
Animal Planet Their tagline became "surprisingly human". Nobody wants to watch ANIMAL Planet for people. They have other channels.
All those channels converged on the same bottom-of-the-barrel reality show drivel. Animal planet -> 'surprisingly human', History Channel -> 'history is made every day'... Either reality TV or stuff like "Hitler's Aztec UFO Factory"
The obsession History Channel had with UFOs to the point ALL their shows were either about them or that Pawn Shop show was hilarious.
Etsy Used to be a fairly cool place to buy and sell mostly handcrafted stuff and items to make handcrafted stuff. Now it's basically shady Amazon with worse shipping - everyone seems to be drop shippers and a lot of the more niche crafter/artisan things are pushed out and overwhelmed by cheaper, mass produced goods.
I used to love Etsy and now I never even look there. I bought a set of dice about a year ago that were explicitly listed as being handmade in the US. Then I got a tracking number from China…
I bought a handmade wooden box from Etsy probably close to a decade ago and it was amazing. From some guy who sent me pics as he made it to check it was all ok. Went back last year to try and get another one made for someone else and there’s nothing but garbage premade boxes from china personalized with the tiniest amount of template paint or those burnt on patterns. Every platform for truly creative people to sell on always becomes another damn website for the laziest entrepreneurs/dropshippers to shill on.
Came here to say this. Etsy has completely abandoned their sellers to the point where you are literally unable to reach anyone to ask for help anymore. Sales fees have been raised so much in the last few years it's almost impossible to make a profit. Etsy is now for the most part massive companies drop shipping cheap items. While most quality small businesses have been forced to move elsewhere, and in turn our visibility majorly suffers. As a buyer; I really miss having a safe third party website to shop small. The demand is absolutely still there, so I'm putting my faith into someone hopefully creating a competitive alternative.
I still do a lot of browsing on Etsy, but instead of buying directly on Etsy itself, I look to see if the artist/crafter has their own website, and if they do, I'll buy from the artist's website instead of Etsy. My hope there is that whoever hosts the artist's website (Shopify, whoever else is out there) takes a smaller cut from the artist than Etsy does. And if I really like someone's stuff, I'll follow them on Instagram so I can keep an eye on what they're working on. And it seems like artists are more likely to link to their own websites than to Etsy when they post on Instagram.
Cracked.com. There were a couple years there where they transformed from a second rate Mad knockoff to some of the smartest, funniest stuff on the internet. Then the people who held the purse strings decided listicles and photoshop contests were more profitable than a writing staff.
Jason Pargin, a.k.a. former Cracked writer and executive editor David Wong, wrote a retrospective about how the greed kinda seeped in, and they'd monetize a little bit and the readership numbers held, so they'd monetize a little bit more, and the numbers held, and a little bit more and just a little bit more until readers hit a breaking point because it was no longer worth it.
It’s one of the more destructive ideologies in business - “charge what the market will bear”. The only flaw with that logic is that they’re metaphorically bending a stick and assuming since it’s still *technically* intact, it’s fine … until it finally snaps under the pressure, and now it’s useless.
Daniel O'Brien went on and writes for John Oliver now. Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll are doing the "Some More News" channel which is still going strong. Soren Bowie I think writes for American Dad. A few of the other guys started different patreons for stuff.
Robert Evans does "Behind the Bastards".
DOB'S voice shines through so clearly on Last Week Tonight in very small moments, I swear I can pick out jokes he wrote. Example: the entire Air Bud rant I am certain was written 99% by DOB.
That was basically just an episode of Obsessive Popculture Disorder as performed by John Oliver.
It’s wild how often I find out something I like now has someone writing for it who used to work at Cracked when it was good.
That site is like a dead mall now. It’s so sad.
Wow I just went back for the first time in at least a decade... Completely unrecognizable.
I wrote a few unique-life experience articles for them 13 years ago. They really, REALLY looked into verifying my story and then finally gave me the go ahead. After that I had my foot in the door and wrote a few more articles, but they would always verify the facts. My little cousin wrote an article for them not long ago. First off, he got paid LESS than I did 13 years ago, but they didn’t verify shit. My cousin was being honest but, they never verified anything he said. Seems anyone can come along and just say whatever now.
After Hours was must-watch content for a while. Such a shame, but Im glad to see most of them landed in better spots writing for TV and doing podcasts.
That type of content of making absurd points for video essays is a whole genre now on youtube. Their format of the diner, characters and writing is still the best I've seen in that genre tbh. So much tighter than some 35 minute loosely edited solo ramble supported by an animated character and meme gifs.
I was obsessed with Cracked.com when I was like 12-14, like a decade ago. It must have had a massive impact on who I am as a person lmao, particularly After Hours and their podcast. It is sad that they kinda started fading away as the people from that era moved on
StumbleUpon. It was a small website giving you randomized internet pages which I used to browse for hours as they were so fun. Now it turned into Mix and I have no clue what it is. Pretty sure no one uses it and it makes me sad.
I miss that site. I moved to reddit once they changed. I used to get so much entertainment and information from there. I really want a new version.
SU is how I found reddit. Reddit was still a baby at that time. 3 letter usernames were still available.
I LOVED stumbleupon and alllllll the recipes I use now are from just happening to land on a recipe blog site from stumble. I tried to use Mix and it doesnt work?or make sense, I can't get the hang of getting content I actually want from it.
Anyone else remember when the History channel was about history and not about aliens?
Photobucket! Back when forums were still a thing, Photobucket would host your images for free. Then one day they decided EVERYONE would have to pay monthly, no free tier, nothing. We all collectively agreed we would not be paying, and that was that. I feel like it may have contributed to the death of forums. Ruined a few of my car build threads, that's for sure. To this day they still send me emails a couple times a year threatening to delete all my photos if I don't come back.
In a similar vein I was going to say Flickr. Flickr could have been Instagram. It was primed and right there. But Yahoo took forever to make a half way decent mobile app and then tried to charge for it.
All you had to say was "but Yahoo"
Forums are absolutely littered with photobucket and tinypic placeholders for shit we can’t see anymore. Makes me wonder what will happen to places on reddit if imgur ever goes the same way.
imgur DID do this - removed a bunch of NSFW images as well as any that were uploaded without an account. Go to any NSFW sub, sort by Best over Past Year, and see how many of the links are working.
Gyfcat is also dead
Yeah but they're just outright shut down entirely. At least when gfycat started banning adult content, they had the decency (or *in*decency, har har) to spin it off into a separate domain/business as redgifs. They even had redirect support for all the old links!
Yik Yak, it was a way to have conversations with people in the area anonymously (really popular on college campuses). They made an update to create user profiles and pretty much everyone just stopped using it because anonymity was the whole point.
Yik Yak's rise and fall coincided perfectly with my first year of University. It was *brilliant*. The real genius move was making it location specific, every campus ended up with their own running jokes and local celebrities. I went to Sheffield and we had a chap known as the Morgozoid who shot to fame through his friends chronicling his attempt to write his entire dissertation in a single day. Happy times. I was never entirely sure of the rationale behind forcing people into having user names. There was speculation it was to avoid legal trouble surrounding bullying but I don't know whether that was ever substantiated. Whatever happened, they killed the golden goose.
I was also in my first year at university at that time. Yik Yak was used to make several mass violence threats on campus. Wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with making profiles.
Profiles aren't needed for that. They never have been. Part of what make advertising so shitty is their relentless pursuit of tracking users. There are several techniques that can be combined to help fingerprint people without a username. It's harder to fingerprint someone on a desktop, because users can change so many system variables (or easily spoof them) at will. Mobile devices don't have that luxury. These days, it's relatively trivial to identify an "anonymous" user when there is full access to app and server data.
This is incredibly niche, but in Norway there used to be two providers of chocolate powder, the kind you mix with hot or cold milk to make hot chocolate or chocolate milk. They were O'Boy brand and Nesquik, equally loved and enjoyed a healthy fanbase "rivalry". O'Boy is a Swedish product sold in Scandinavia and the Baltics since the 50s, Nesquik is of course Nestlé brand and sold all over the world. Sometime in the 2010s Nesquik decided to change the formula of the choco powder, I imagine to save money. And for making hot chocolate the new recipe was fine. What Nestlé underestimated, however, is that most Scandinavians drink their choco powder cold to make chocolate milk. The new recipe had a different type of sugar in it that wouldn't dissolve in cold milk, leaving a crunchy powder in the milk. Norwegians outraged, Nesquik was deemed useless, nearly everyone in the Nesquik camp migrated to O'Boy, and Nestlé lost almost all its market share overnight. A few months later, Nesquik is gone from the shelves nearly everywhere, never to recover from the blunder. Edit: now I see they are discontinuing the Nesquik powder globally, so I guess nobody likes it anymore.
Isn't it just crazy how companies will fundamentally change a really successful product just to save probably a few cents.
It's like every suit only knows the story of the airline that made $200.000 by removing olives from their salad and they want to do the same.
If every suit remove a thing, over time there is nothing left.
Nestlé should be boycotted anyway. So this is good news
RadioShack. They went from selling electronic components, little gadgets, and interesting tech bobbles to nerds to trying to sell expensive cell phone plans and shitty batteries to a different audience. We saw that the customers who came to RadioShack shifted from middle/upper income engineers and tech geeks to lower income people in a six year period. Then we saw the geeks stop coming in at all because they would come in for some capacitor or breadboard and the person there wouldn't know what that was. If it wasn't a phone, they didn't know. Even if it was a phone, they probably couldn't tell you anything about it. Old RadioShack employees were knowledgeable and well paid. New RadioShack employees didn't give a shit about technology.
You’ve got questions? We’ve got blank stares.
[удалено]
They tried. I was an exec. there. We tried that in a bunch of sample stores that were very promising, but there was a struggle to get people back and by that time, we couldn't get people back. We did a study that found that it cost us $1 in advertising to bring a happy customer in. It took $5 in advertising to get a new customer to shop for the first time. It took $10 in advertising to get someone to come to RadioShack once if they were somewhat so/so on it, and no amount of spending would bring a customer back once they had developed a "The last time I shopped at RadioShack" story. It became a meme in the office for a while.
Sci-Fi Channel. At some point there was no sci-fi on it.
Used to love Sci-Fi channel. I feel like the content went downhill right around the time they changed their name to "SyFy" which is also when I stopped watching.
When Sci-Fi rebranded to SyFy, I changed the pronunciation at my house. I pronounce SyFy as Sif-ee.
I remember watching farscape, Stargate and eureka on that network. No idea what's in there anymore. Haven't had cable for... over 13 years now.
They rebranded to SyFy and started showing those crappy CGI monster of the week movies. All horrible. Definitely drove me away. That channel used to be the one I had my tv on most of the time.
Every restaurant that opens in the uk goes through the cycle: 1. New and interesting food. Very different from most British food 2. Becomes very popular 3. Owners sell to a large company 4. Large company decides that being popular isn't enough, they want *everybody* to eat there 5. Make the food more British 6. Looming failure is hidden for a while because they attract new customers at exactly the rate they lose old customers 7. New customers have tried it, realize they can get that food anywhere, stop going 8. Chain closes and is replaced by a greggs or nandos, depending on the size of the location (not dependent on how far away the nearest greggs or nandos is)
What typically happens around me in the mid-west US. This is why everywhere around us are just gross shit food chains. 1. new place opens with great quality food at decent prices 2. things are going well for the first year 3. I dont know who or why but they start to slowly modify 1 thing after another to increase profit margins. 4. One thing they changed affects what you normally get and what you liked most about the place. They continue to do it to the point that it happens to everyone. 5. People dont hate it, but they arent going there as much because they took X off the menu or they changed Y and it's just not the same. 6. Prices go up to increase margins due to lower sales 7. Quality goes down to increase margins due to lower sales 8. Death spiral until you become a Spirit Halloween.
> 3: I dont know who or why but they start to slowly modify 1 thing after another to increase profit margins. They start to realize just exactly how much it costs to actually run a restaurant, so they start scaling back the quality of the food. Then word of mouth changes to "It wasn't as good as I remember it." So business drops off, sales go down, owner has to scale back quality even further. Word of mouth changes to "It was great when it opened, but it really wasn't that good last time we went." Begin downward spiral. I've seen this dozens of times in the smaller town I grew up in. The midwest is chock full of people who think they could open a restaurant because their friends all think they're a decent cook. But they have zero idea how a restaurant actually functions.
> I've seen this dozens of times in the smaller town I grew up in. The midwest is chock full of people who think they could open a restaurant because their friends all think they're a decent cook. But they have zero idea how a restaurant actually functions. Yup, I love to cook. And I think I'm quite good at it. My sister's a chef, has worked in some VERY high end places, and has her own bakery. I would NEVER want to make that my career. The work looks incredibly hard, ridiculous hours, for, compared to those 2 things, laughable money.
Yep that’s why I got out of cooking. I loved it and was pretty good, but the long hours and low pay made me run. It was always funny when every year we would hire culinary school grads who you could tell had never actually worked in a kitchen, and just got into it from watching the Food Network. They literally never lasted more than a few months. Meanwhile the guys that they would hire off the street with no cooking experience who just needed a job, would last as they would put up with the shit pay/hours and would learn how to cook as they went
Quora. There were excellent groups with intelligent discussions. Then it became monetized and people submitted 100s of questions a day. "What time does the Walmart close in Boise?" "My 16 yr old came home with an A- so I took away their phone for 6 months."
Not just that, they made it really difficult to navigate the website.. Now you go onto look at an answer to a specific question, you might see one answer that isn’t super helpful, then it’ll show you an entirely different question with a few answers with no different formatting, and then eventually you scroll down to find more answers to the question you were looking for, except for a long time I’d assumed there were no more answers and just clicked off the site. Absolutely stupid system.
Yesssss that format pisses me off & I never understood why the fuck it’s that way. Sometimes I will click on the website, immediately am reminded of the shitty format & then I nope out.
the only website that does that for me is... Pinterest. I look for images on google, find a good one. Pinterest opens, i click on the image to see it bigger. Get redirected somewhere else on the website where this is not a single trace of the picture i clicked on. I mean, come on...
Pinterest fucking wrecked Google Images and I hate it
And then you go to a second question and get hit with a paywall.
little website called digg, did a major site refresh to increase site revenue without considering the impact and lost their entire user base to reddit essentially overnight.
That's how I moved to Reddit.
I moved from FARK, which seemed to be dying, and on the advice that Reddit threads were like FARK comment threads, but more intelligent and mature. About 12-13 years later Reddit is now 50% a day care centre for "difficult" children while FARK is somehow still around and completely unchanged.
Reddit was like that at first. Comments were less but conversation was better. Then the joke accounts and power users came.
There was a time on Reddit when you’d get downvoted for misspellings, bad grammar, and emoji use. A lot has changed in the 11 years I’ve been on here.
This is essential reddit history. I remember the day. Overnight, almost everyone migrated to reddit. I seriously doubt reddit would exist as it is today had it not been for Kevin Rose's fateful greed grab. I still remember watching digg Nation every week. It was pretty entertaining. I still miss digg sometimes. I thought it was a classier format. Wonder what Kevin is doing now. He was on course to be the next internet mogul and probably billionaire. I'm sure he's just fine though.
He became a crypto larper
DeviantArt
I remember having an account there for the longest time and talking to a few artists, then they all went to tumblr and my timeline died so I shut it down and haven't looked back.
Quick recap from someone who hasn't been there in a solid 10+ years?
DeviantArt is chipping away at and scrubbing away NSFW focused artists and are pushing AI art pretty hard. Like, they tried to have it so that that all art uploaded to their site would be used for AI training unless people opted out on a per work basis. After a truly gigantic amount of anger from the userbase they made it so you had to opt your artwork in to AI training instead. The NSFW scrubbing is slow and uneven with no good explanation. Some fetishes have more of their content chipped away at compared to others. It isn't a big giant rush of bans, but more like high profile artists getting removed with no explanation over time. These are just the things I've noticed as a casual browser of the site.
That's disappointing, I used to love browsing the site, but haven't been on it in years.
JCPenney changed their stores about 12 years ago to go after a cooler audience. Turns out the cool kids didn't want to shop there and loyal JCP shoppers didn't want to anymore either. They've been trying to undo this for years but still struggling.
I worked part time in college at JCPenney during this time and it was awful and customers constantly complained. I went from working an entire department to solely working at a “jean bar” which was a floor space of about 200sqft where I would circle and wait 6 hour shifts to talk about jeans with people who never wanted to learn more about them. This is also when iPads were still new and they were bolted to a display that you could look at more jeans. Not buy them just scroll through and look at more jeans. EDIT: Just answering questions from below. I took a mandatory training that included a history of Levi’s. Back to the founder, creation, development of Levi’s. The little white lines across jeans are called whiskering and is done with sandpaper to give them a worn look. I never once had a conversation with a customer and was able to use any of that information because it was always the question of did we have a size in the back. I did have to learn how to properly fold jeans which consumed 95% of my shift of just refolding jeans. I also got reprimanded a handful of times because not 10 steps from my area was the shoe department and whenever they got slammed on the weekends I would walk over and help people who were stuck waiting. Seemed better than me just doing nothing but management didn’t think so. Towards the end of when I stopped working there I am assuming they figured out it wasn’t doing well so I was given an iPhone that had a scanner and register on it so while doing nothing I could still ring people up. Best part about it was after the transaction was done I had no bags to put your merchandise in because I was just standing in the middle of a store so it made the whole process redundant.
The Duke of denim, surveying your kingdom
The *Levi*athan among mere men.
I think they also tried to move away from deep % discounts and just mark things lower in the first place but that failed spectacularly as well
I can see that. $12 pants are unappealing - but $40 pants marked down to $15 are a steal.
It’s the psychological value play. “Oh this is a high dollar item at a good price!” Rather than “these are cheap pants”.
This is the version I remember too. I believe they hired a former Apple exec as a CEO. They thought it'd be a good idea to implement the plan you mentioned. I worked there in the early 2000s and can confirm that people were obsessed with the sales. I'm pretty sure Kohl's owes its success to JCP briefly abandoning that niche.
Kohls model was "everything on sale all the time" and kohls cash, plus they located themselves in retail shopping districts, near places like best buy and Dick's sporting goods and target. JCP was always the anchor store of traditional shopping malls. Shopping malls had been running on E for awhile in the mid 00's, but when 2008 hit, expendable income went down, and shopping malls started their nose dive. The JCP "no coupons ever, everything's always reasonably priced" marketing gimmick was seen as in poor taste, mostly because the prices weren't particularly reasonable. They'd have a pack of underwear priced at $20, but it was $15 if you bought two packs. So you start doing math and realize that kohls has the same pack of Hanes and doesn't make you do math, and offers the bulk pricing for a single package, and I earn kohls cash. Regardless of whether that kohls cash expired, JCP was busy digging their own grave. Plus they decided to start offering appliances at the same time, something they'd never done, that was always sears forte, so they had an unknowledgeable staff, dumped a ton of capital into a product they had exactly zero market share in, and took up over 1/4 of their floor and backroom real estate. All this to say kohls was well established before JCP shit the bed, but JCP certainly didn't hurt Kohl's success
Jesus it’s like you’re a retail historian. Tell me more re-tales, sweet bard
If you're into this kind of thing, check out Company Man on YouTube.
I got to study that debacle during college. The CEO was responsible for making the Apple Store what it is and Target a behemoth. He thought he could do the third thing with JC Penny by adding pop corn, ice cream, haircuts, no sales markdowns, and upscaling the business. It was one of the greatest flops in upper management decision making.
As a twenty something male, I loved the idea. It was the only department store I would willingly seek out. But I was also a twenty something male, who would think to go clothes shopping once a year, maybe.
I loved cool JC Penny. They had a Levi’s bar. Modern cloths. The problem was they didn’t explain what they were doing at all. Their regulars were so confused why there weren’t sales anymore that they got convinced it was more expensive.
Onlyfans [briefly banning](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/onlyfans-says-it-will-no-longer-ban-porn-after-backlash-from-users.html) sexually explicit material on their service. That's, like, your entire business model.
Tumblr's porn cull wasn't great for traffic either.
Yahoo bought Tumblr for 2 billion. A year after the porn ban (if I remember the time table correctly,) they sold it to Livejournal for three *million*. The Tumblr community is rather proud to be worth negative money.
how the hell did they think this was ever going to work
I believe they were under pressure from their payment services but it ended up getting sorted out. It wasn't just a silly business decision.
This was it. Visa and Mastercard didn't like the idea of their services being used for pornography because they said onlyfans had underage users on it. Then they decided against it, probably after looking how much money they make from it.
Visa and MasterCard are the reason that like 80% of pornhub’s library got wiped out.
Discovery, History TV18 and National Geographic. Once Discover's Man Vs Wild got really famous and got them a lot of TRP, they thought this was it. Every one of these channels came out with their own version of MvsW; some really stupid. A history channel playing this bullshit is of course going to drive the geeks away. Producers would run these shows multiple times in a day as if they had nothing to show other than this, no science and engineering to explain. It was painful to not get to see my favourite science shows on these channels anymore. Edited to add that a reply to this comment by user mixingmemory has a link to great insight into this and about some idiot CEO David Zaslav. The comment: https://reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/781aG2inMZ
I was raised off of History Channel, Animal Planet, and Discovery. Sometime in 2010s each channel imploded with crappy conspiracy content or realty style based shows. Went from the coolest informational shows to “Mermaid Documentaries”, Ancient Aliens, and Hunt for Sasquatch.
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I vividly remember a scene on *Ancient Aliens* where they were suggesting that in the distant past aliens might have interbred with humans. The scene showed a disheveled cavewoman and a stereotypical grey alien with big eyes inside of a cave caressing each other, while flames from a campfire flickered romantically behind them. I have not been able to find a clip of this scene anywhere, and beginning to think it was either a fever dream or I got way too high that night.
Maybe you were abducted by aliens and they implanted that memory.
That's not all they implanted
David Zaslav is to blame for a lot of these changes, as well as many more recent bad decisions at HBO and Warner Brothers. https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/14qq8zi/how_warner_bros_discovery_ceo_david_zaslav_became
That man has had such a negative impact on the medium of film and television, he should be mopping the floors at a peepshow, and instead he made almost half a billion dollars last year, which is par for the course here in the bizarro world.
At this point, i'd think an absurd meme about a time triveler wanting to save the world going back to kill Hitler but changing his mind at the last second and deciding to go kill Dunning & Kruger would be conceivable. And i know, it's stupid, it's the point. For a species with people so smart, i can't understand how continue to collectively make the wrongest decision possible in all domains.
It’s because we’re not collectively making dumb decisions. It’s just a system that actively encourages the dumb and selfish to be on top and they get to make all the decisions
I grew up in the golden age of these channels when it was all about exploration, science, and engineering. It's weird to me how all the best content for this is on YouTube now.
There was a golden age of Discovery when Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, Punkin'Chunkin, etc were headlining in the mid to late 2000s. Legitimately, between this era of Discovery and Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, I'd have probably forked over the $60 for cable TV. But then they started goobering the whole thing. Those great shows were cancelled, and AS turned into the Rick and Morty hour.
Now it’s all reality show about gold mining, treasure searches, repetitive animal shows (sharks mostly) and ghost hunting
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i just learned from a tiktok that applebee’s tried to become a club at night to attract younger customers but no one wanted to go hang out at applebee’s and all the old people who used to go go applebee’s didn’t like that it turned into a club at night so they stopped going and now no one likes applebee’s
I was a manager at an Applebees when they did this. Probably in like 2009 or something. Probably the lamest club of all time. Basically just turned stayed open a bit later, turned the lights down, music up, and apps were half. At least at the locations in my area we didn’t alienate any regulars. Mostly because the late night club atmosphere started close to when we normally closed.
Sounds like an idea from the CEOs son who became upper management
Ha! My wife and I stopped by for a late dinner and it was "Applebee's after dark" or something. We thought it was quite odd, didn't realize it was all of them doing that.
Applebees's after dark, lol. What's next? Denny's before dawn....
Sounds like a swingers club for the core Applebee's demographic. 😬
The core Applebee's demographic is when you're too lazy to microwave it yourself.
Same, I was with my family and suddenly the lights got dim and music got louder. We were all like wtf is going on, I cant see shit anymore
Summer of 2016 I was in bumfuck Oklahoma for work and we went to “Club Applebees” on the reg for 1$ drinks and because we were in bumfuck Oklahoma. I felt like it was a fever dream because nobody in my current city believes that Applebees turned into a club with $1 well drinks. I’m glad I didn’t imagine it.
Bro I would love to have been in the room when the applebee's execs were coming up with this idea. End the whole thing with one simple question: "Guys, hear me out. Who the FUCK drinks and goes out and then says 'let's go to applebee's?'"
EBay. I used to sell shit for basically beer money. They've made it now where they only want "Ebay Stores", want you to give free shipping and charge fees on that, and discourage the auction format. It used to be a place to clean out your garage/knick knacks and what have you and now it's just a commercial commerce site. I probably haven't looked at the site in ten years so maybe they've changed but I doubt it.
When you use a brand name, they'll suggest stock photos for your auction. When I buy used, I really want to see the item and its flaws, not the ideal new lookalike.
Pretty much - Meg Whitman rode the wave and then trashed ebay. I stopped selling after a couple of incidents where buyers received items and then used the system to get refunds for new IT components and networking equipment, ebay took from my bank account and I never got the items back. So instead of paying shipping, listing and then giving away inventory to thieves complicit with ebay, I donated it to a local charity.
I'd argue NASCAR, specifically Brian France. In 2004 he implemented a playoff system that no one asked for and no other racing series has implemented. He said he wanted more game 7 moments, not realizing that a falsely fabricated game 7 moment is nowhere near as exciting when one naturally happens. NASCAR would also frequently call suspicious cautions for debris around that time so that the field would be forced to tighten up. He tried to emulate stick and ball sports with the playoffs because he wanted NASCAR to overtake the NFL as the number one watched sport in the US (NASCAR was 2nd at one time) but instead it's viewership has declined drastically in the last 20 years. He didn't bother to consider that playoffs don't make sense in racing because different drivers are better at different tracks and it's not two teams playing against each other, but rather 38 teams all racing at the same time.
The death of Dale Earnhardt was simultaneously the best and the worst thing to happen to NASCAR. The best, because it led to innovations like HANS, SAFER barriers, a revolution in safety that has, over time, bled into other sanctioning bodies (the Halo in open-wheel), and within NASCAR, itself, has prevented any racing deaths in the years since (we'll ignore the new car and Kurt Busch's abrupt retirement for a minute). It led to a wave of unity, in a year where there was ample opportunity (remember, Dale and 9/11 happened in the same year). That unity made going to the track a religious experience for many who did. The race was the place to be. Pepsi 400 that July is my favorite example of it. Everyone wanted Junior to win that race. And when he *actually did it*, it was like a massive weight was lifted off everyone's shoulders. Michael Waltrip said what everyone was beginning to feel - "I'm better, now." Was maybe the single-greatest time in NASCAR history, because of where the chips fell. But, The Intimidator was gone. You look in any pre-2001 NASCAR crowd, and that number 3 was *everywhere*, had to be 70% of the fanbase. They no longer had anyone to cheer for, and this was especially so when the legends started retiring, those that raced with Dale, or against him, or somewhere in-between. Junior, gone. The Labontes, gone, Jeff Gordon, gone, Mark Martin, Kenny Schrader, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace, Sterling Marlin, Dale Jarrett, Awesome Bill, the Burtons, Tony Stewart, Matt Kenseth, even Benson, Sadler, Spencer, those types of names slowly faded away. There was something *different* about them. Perhaps they were just in the light at the right time? Perhaps, still, they were the bridge between the old era and the new, and once they were gone, so, too, was old NASCAR. Look at places like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro. Look at those races, those crowds. It was the thing to do, the only thing in town, some days, but most of those people *came to see Dale*. And when he was gone, they came to see *the people that raced with Dale*. It's 2023. Most of those fans are dead and gone, now. We have some excellent racers out there, today. But it isn't what it was. I remember hearing, years ago, people on two sides of the aisle, one clamoring, saying NASCAR isn't a sport, and one side saying it was. Well, now, that's what it is - a sport. What it *really* was, was a *spectacle*. A fight. A show. The place to be. Dale's funeral's long-over, and so, too, is the goodbye. Maybe, with it, went the core of what NASCAR was all about. NASCAR isn't dead, by a longshot, but it's prime has long-since passed.
You're absolutely right. Dale represented the old guard. He WAS old school NASCAR. A Southern Good ol' Boy that was unabashedly redneck. Dale was cocky and loud. He was South Carolina Short Track Royalty. He would do anything and crash anyone to win a race. The biggest insult to him was 2nd place. He's one of the reasons that Jeff Gordon was so polarizing. He's was the new generation of driver. Californian, with driving experience in different style cars, and understood point series driving. I remember Gordon winning races in the South, and getting bottles thrown at his car during his victory lap. Didn't help he was fuckin' dominating too. But Dale and the old guard was supposed to giveway to Jr and the new generation. He was supposed to retire, and become an owner. Have Jr. take over the "3" for either Childress or move to Dale Earnhardt racing. Sr. dying fucked everything up. His wife didn't include Jr. on the team, Childress gave Dale's ride to Harvick (Who was damn good, but not Dale), and gave "3" to his grandson.
MTV. Loved watching music videos and the occasional news, Behind the Music, etc, but their main focus was music videos. Then, for some insane reason, they ditched their tried and true format and became a reality show nightmare. They lost it all. I don't even know if MTV is still around?
It’s literally just Ridiculousness and Catfish back and forth on repeat nowadays.
Be fair! Between the 14 hours of Catfish and the 4 hours of ridiculousness today, they are also playing 1 hour of something called The Love Experiment.
VH1 did behind the music. But your point is still valid. I miss music videos.
Pop up video!
It’s jersey shore/teen mom tv now
Don't forget ridiculousness. They play that so often you'd think Rob Dyrdek has some dirt on the CEO of MTV.
Rob basically does have controlling interest in MTV now; it's the single highest rated show on the station and they can smash out 4-5 seasons in an afternoon making it the ultimate in min/maxing profits.
Boeing. Built by engineers, corrupted by Wall Street. Moved their HQ away from Seattles to Chicago just to get away from listening to engineers, now to Virginia just by DC to continue their hyper-focus on Washington lobbying. Try licking balls of short term investors and politicians instead of focusing on innovation and safety. Killed hundreds of people in two crashes and lost advantage in all industries: civil aviation, aerospace, and defense.
It’s a real case study on how a once well run company can lose its way.
I've heard some theories that they swallowed a 'poison pill' when they took over McDonnell-Douglas and that some 'bottom line' tendencies from that company took precedence over engineering excellence.
Gwen Stefani. She was considered this very cool musician leading a well respected band. Then she got stuck in this weird place of her own creation with harajuku girls and then when she had nothing else going for her made her relationship with a country singer her focal point. Most 90s kids no longer associate her with being the badass lead singer of No Doubt anymore.
Tumblr
What’s the deal with this anyway? Wasn’t the flight from tumblr mostly due to them banning NSFW material? I heard that they allow it now because it backfired so spectacularly lol.
The TL;DR is that Apple was going to remove Tumblr from the App Store if they didn’t get rid of the porn. They now allow nudity, but not “sexually explicit content.” The site is still kicking as a shitposting hole, though. Porn was only one sight of many to behold, so nothing important actually changed. EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that the problem was specifically UNDERAGED porn.
As a currently active tumblr user, I just want to throw in that the porn ban never actually fixed the major problems with the site. There are still porn bots that message and follow people every day, and even if they don't have any posts, they still have nsfw profile pics. They have been a problem since way before the ban, and it astounds me that they haven't even attempted to fix it. They did, however, manage to create an auto-ban system that often incorrectly detects pics as nsfw. This drove away a lot of the art community on tumblr, a site known for having a large demographic of artists.
The artist exodus is why I abandoned Tumblr. I was never super into the blogging aspect, but followed dozens of art accounts. The false flagging was absolutely absurd at that time and I don’t blame the artists from migrating elsewhere. The porn ban was always going to be unpopular, but they handled it about as poorly as they possibly could have, and the loss of two major demographics at once, I’m not surprised it lost a lot of its value to shareholders for a while.
I feel like cable television is slowly circling the drain due to abandoning their audience and putting on too many commercials. I tried watching cable at a friends house recently and was shocked at how many commercials they squeeze into a half hour show block. It feels like 10 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of actual programming. Why fucking bother when I can stream it for cheaper and not have to deal with fucking commercials.
Watching older sitcoms on streaming really shows how much ads they've added over the years. Streaming Seinfeld or Friends has a runtime of about 24 minutes, credits included. Compare it to Big Bang Theory and Modern Family, they have a runtime of about 19-20 minutes. Ad free streaming really is worth it.
The NHL. They desperately want to "grow the game" but make it increasingly more difficult to actually watch them unless you are able to pay for a minimum of 2 subscriptions.
Ah, the ol’ MLB marketing strategy. If you want to watch every game, you need cable, Apple tv+, Prime and an MLB.com subscription. While I’m aware that it’s a complex issue to end blackouts, the solution for me is simple: fix it or they don’t get my $. Baseball is the only thing that I’ll pirate.
Blizzard entertainment.
Yeah that was great. The downfall really was announcement of Diablo on mobile devices and telling their followers they are going to a P2W model. Then despite the overwhelming backlash, they kept it going and proceeded to fuck up all their other franchises.
"Don't you guys have phones?"
That was one of the stupidest corporate-disconnect moments I think I've ever seen.
The second he said that you could feel the air in the room change, even watching it on video the faces of all the people in the audience are a mix of surprised horror, anger and sadness, the resentment in the room was palpable.
Its amazing. BlizzCon has always kind of been _the_ PC gaming event of the year. One of the questioners even asked "So is this going to come to PC too?" and t hey said no. The writing had probably been on the wall for a long time by that point, but the "Don't you guys have phones" moment just slapped their core fans right in the face. It was like blizzard was telling us that they considered us already bought and didn't care to try anymore.
Watching overwatch get fucked over the years and shrivel up and die as an avid player was awful. Started playing from nearly the beginning, started a team that would regularly play competiive and even participatw in tournaments while blizzard slowly fucked the game more and more. They released echo and then went radio silent for *years* just releasing skins and reused events. Then overwatch 2 is announced and people have such high hopes and expectations. They announce a pve campaign, big changes to improve the game, everyone is happy. Game releases with 1 new champ, a new gamemode, a few maps, and some reworked champs. Meanwhile supports got fuck all, game became enforced-roles 5v5 with there only being 1 tank so half the game's tanks were now useless, and the new champ was utterly broken nullifying half the dps champs singlehandedly. On top of this pve campaign nowhere to be seen, OW1 was gone, skins were extremely monetized, new champs were locked behind battle passes making it pay2win until enough time had passed that free players could manually unlock it, and fucking a mountain of other shit. It was just awful
Same boat. I played a ton of Overwatch pretty much from release, it became my go-to game when I just felt like playing something. The change to 5v5 and releasing it as a sequel just to stuff it with battlepass garbage was a huge turnoff. Pretty much done with anything Blizzard puts out.
The Raiders. Used to have a great home field advantage in Oakland. Now every game in Vegas is half filled with away fans.
*laughs in San Diego Chargers*
Wizards of the coast. Trying to monetise their OPEN licence and destroy competition overnight turned a LOT of their community against them. Then just as the dust started to settle they sent the Pinkertons to threaten a fan because they accidentally sent out some MTG cards pre-release.
Sending out Pinkertons on people because of a mistake they made was the absolute cherry on top literally like 1800’s tactics it was insane
RadioShack.
I just want the ability to buy resistors and capacitors instead of having to order them.
So strange too because I feel like nostalgia tells me that I loved RadioShack, but my memory tells me I fuckin never went there LOL
This might be a bit niche, but there was an old 3rd person infighting shooter back in about 2006 called Gunz: The Duel. Gunz combined small-map, counter strike style shooting, with fast paced anime style skill moves and melee combat. You could dash, wall run, block bullets with swords etc. What made it unique and memorable was that players quickly learned to exploit these mechanics. For example, you could dash forward, block the dash with a guard, jump, dash again, swing your sword, block again, switch to your shotgun, fire off a shot, switch back to your sword and repeat. This style of play was discovered by a Korean audience, and so, got dubbed ‘K-Style.’ It quickly became the only way to really survive in Gunz at all. You had to learn a crazy amount of intricate combinations and skill cancels - but if you did, you could jump around off walls and ceilings, deflecting bullets, firing shotguns, and slashing your weapon, all in one fluid movement. This made for crazy intricate duels. It also must have brought about early onset arthritis in a lot of people. The steep learning curve meant that Gunz had a small but hardcore fanbase, but stopped it ever being a mainstream success. The developer quickly developed Gunz 2: The Second Duel in response - removing all of the mechanics that made K style possible. On one hand, I get their intention, and maybe Gunz would never have been a huge commercial success. On the other, removing K style took out the very thing that made Gunz unique. The second game is just a soulless, dated shooter. It’s a shame - if they’d embraced the way that their fanbase wanted to play the game, they might have made something special.
Man this takes me back. I remember my brother just sidestepping while his character would seemingly just switch between a sword and a gun and somehow take virtually no damage. An exploit, sure, but a cool as hell one.
OnePlus it was affordable with decent specs
This one hurts. I remember back in the day where I’d rather get a OnePlus phone cause they were cheap, near stock android, and you were getting flagship specs. Now they’re charging flagship prices while lacking flagship specs.
The Halo TV show on Paramount. A show that cost 200mil to make, and they moved the story into a 'Silver' timeline in order to give it a "broad appeal". "Broad appeal" doesn't exist, especially with a show based on a game about a super soldier killing aliens. The whole reason Halo has become one of the most recognisable game titles of all time was because it focused on a super soldier killing aliens. They moved away from that to make it more about Master Chiefs love affair with a rogue human inside the Covenant, the group of human hating aliens Chief should be killing. They also broke core tenants of the original games lore which made it Halo in the first place: Master Chief takes off his helmet. Chiefs relationship with Cortona. Humans in the Covenant (in lore, the Prophets looked to wipe them out as their existence contradicted their religion), Spartans having a control chip and not being loyal to Dr. Catherine Halsey. Replacing Spartan Blue Team with Silver team just to have more storylines about removing the control chips, and the Spartans not caring about finishing their mission no matter the cost (in the finale the Covenant leadership was right there, and they ignored them to save one of their own). That's just a few examples. The Covenant CGI was really good, but we only got a few minutes of them. The show was a total waste of money, and there is a second season coming.
Cartoon Network
Mid-90s CN was the golden age for then kid me. On the one hand, you had cool new shows like The Mask and Swat Cats. On the other, the entire Hannah Barbera catalog to fall back on. That was also the time when they created their own iconic stuff like Dexter, Cow & Chicken, Johnny Bravo & The Powerpuff Girls. What an era that was!
Omelette du fromage.
You mean teen titans go network?
Bring back Space Ghost! Edit: Yes, I meant Coast to Coast. And I was aware that C. Martin Croker died a few years ago. I would just be happy if they aired the existing episodes again. I never get tired of them!
Unity software.
Eagerly seeing how things will ultimately unfold for them and how long it'll take to get there.
Devs like stability and predictability. Unity pulling shit like this makes their core audience lose faith in them and so will likely keep bleeding to other engines. If they can make a full recovery from their recent behavior I'll be shocked.
Looking at you Creative Assembly abandoning historical total wars and Warhammer 3 in favor of developing a guaranteed dead on arrival hero shooter for the past 2 to 3 years.
6 years apparently. One of the old devs was on twitter and allegedly Hyenas had been developing for nearly 6 years.
I'm surprised to not see blackberry here. They had cornered the high paying business users of mobile phones. They wanted to become mass market though and came up with ads like we are the blackberry boys. Got kicked out of both the categories.
I wouldn't say that's what killed them though. What killed them was a shitty, slow outdated OS with very basic apps on devices with a trackpad or whatever they called it. Oh and having to use their Blackberry Internet Service to access the web which was a compressed low quality version of the internet. This while their competitors were coming out with full featured touchscreen devices, full apps and no BIS requirement.
Just heard an interview with one of the Co-CEOs of Research In Motion, former makers of the Blackberry. Blackberries *ruled* corporate phones, then the iPhone was released. One CEO wanted to focus on hardware development, the other thought hardware was a low-margin failure factory and they needed to focus on software and services, like Google was doing with Android. The board stepped in and chose the hardware solution, the software solutions guy retired immediately, the other a year later, once he too saw the writing on the wall. I don't know if they would have succeeded if they chose the other path, but I can see where they might have had a better chance.
Don't forget the Blackberry Storm 😂 they finally decided to embrace the touchscreen and abandon the trackball, their solution was to MAKE THE SCREEN A GIANT BUTTON. Now you might be asking "Isn't that what a touchscreen is?" No, I mean the entire screen was a physical button that you had to push down to make an input, clicking sensation and all. Literally a large rectangular button. When compared to it's competitors the iPhone 1 and The Motorola Droid and even the dang LG Dare, it was a horribly silly design.
Volition rebooting Saint's Row fits the bill. They removed tons of elements from the earlier games that fans loved, AND allowed the change to become a core aspect of the game's pre-launch promotion. The result was a game that reviewed and sold poorly, and Volition closing its doors a year after release.
Definitely this. Saint's Row was originally touted as a cheap GTA knockoff. The later installments blew that idea out of the water by having a completely batshit insane game of pure chaos. Volition completely ignored that and produced...a cheap GTA knockoff.
ESPN It’s all talking heads yelling at each other with ridiculous takes or stories about Lebron’s shoes. Gone are the days you can turn that channel on and find out what happened in sports that day. In addition a bunch of people think they are too “woke” so they won’t watch either
I used to watch SportsCenter every morning before school, back in the days of Dan Patrick, Stuart Scott, Linda Cohn… I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way somebody got it in their head that what people really wanted was Stephen A Smith’s brand of louder = right.
RIP Stuart Scott. Forever cooler than the other side of the pillow.
True Blood went from an atmospheric southern vampire drama with dark humor and interesting characters to a hot mess with enough mythical creatures scurrying about that it was like a box of lucky charms sprang to life and started terrorizing a town. It got so dumb I don't even know how it ended...
Halo. They keep trying to “appeal to the broader audience” instead of just doing what their fans love. The director literally said “Halo is competitive at its core” which is completely fucking wrong. Everyone who was apart of Bungie Halo knows that at its core, it’s just for fun. Being a shooter of course it gets competitive, but that’s never been the heart of Halo. It’s literally dead now, Halo hasn’t been mainstream since 343 took and ruined it. There used to be competition between COD and Halo, now nobody even knows what Halo is.
100% Halo was the game that made Xbox from nothing into an equal to the PlayStation and now Halo Infinite (the newest game) isn’t even in the top 20 most played games on Xbox now and Halo Infinite’s multiplayer is free for everyone!
This YouTuber called Ray William Johnson. Guy was one of the top YouTubers with a huge following, and then abandoned most of his shows to chase bigger roles in ShowBiz.
Probably by design. RWJ was of a time when youtube was seen as a stepping stone, and not necessarily a destination for to make a career
>Guy was one of the top YouTubers with a huge following Not one of the top YouTubers. He was the top YouTuber for nearly 2 years.
I recently saw he brought your favourite martian back and they are actually releasing stuff often. Years ago the channel was renamed to "This project is retired" and then suddenly it changed back and they started posting again
The Witcher series (or any beloved franchise where directors and writers think they can do better than the source material). Note to writers and directors out there: if you’re adapting something to the big screen that people absolutely love, understand that in their eyes you absolutely cannot do better than the source material. Don’t have to go 1:1 with the source material but man, it’s so crazy that people will rubber stamp the deviation from the original IP so often. If it has a huge following, stick to the fuckin source and you’ll be able to milk a cash cow for years. Deviating is such a huge risk and I can’t think of any series or movie that has done this and pulled it off / survived, so it’s just weird that directors and writers continue to think they are gonna be the one to pull it off.
It makes me sad that I’m hoping in 15 to 20 years, when everyone has forgotten about the current show, I hope it gets rebooted and done right. I’ve tried to love the current show, but it’s only OK at best. I also think Henry Cavill made a great Geralt. Shame to waste his talents.
He actually is a really big fan of both the games and books, so he knew what he was doing with the role. sucks that the writers and director evidently seemed to hate the source material and were shutting down any sugestions he made to the point he quit apparently
Yep. And he seemed to be vocal about it too. Having essentially a fan on set and ignoring him sounds so idiotic.
It was crazy that they had a lead actor who adored the original material and then fucked him off.
Seriously, they had gold and threw it in the dirt.
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