Culture Cracked is dying? Finally? - It's been swirling around the toilet bowl for years but here comes the drain.

Entire album: https://imgur.com/a/gwciU

Edit: Some of the better Reddit responses

 

[Muncie Anderson]

The Washington Post can always use more "Perspectives" writers.

Cracked was a pale shadow of Mad Magazine. I have no idea how they ever poached Don Martin.

Martin left MAD over a dispute over royalties from his artwork being reproduced in paperback format, and he estimated that he didn't earn at least a million dollars from this. Bill Gaines even insisted that Martin was being paid the same royalties from the paperback books that he would have earned when his cartoons were published in the magazine.

And a lot of MAD talent did contribute to Cracked as freelancers at least once, including Jack Davis, Al Jaffee and Angelo Torres. But it was no secret in the industry that almost no one liked or respected Cracked...

As for the website, I thought it started to go downhill when they let Auntie Meme take over one of the weekly Photoplasty contests a while ago.

 

[Transvaalan]

Entire album: https://imgur.com/a/gwciU

Edit: Some of the better Reddit responses

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For several years, I thought Wong was another angry asian man. But no, self hating white dude.

My guess, for the start of the fall, would be the Seanbaby article they nuked from being published, catering to David Wong and his trashy cohorts, and the live action segments. The live action sketch bits were actually quite nice, and pretty good, as were most related material. The recent Disney parody was fucking hilarious....but the stance it often took, the way things sometimes got portrayed, and the occasional shying away from humor...

Oh and of course, being one of the traitor sites of Gamergate and The Article, and going 0-MAXIMUM POZ OVERLOAD in CIS WHITE MEN ARE ALL THE DEVIL Lane. This site went from tit jokes to "Imma HUEG Gay for Pay ARSE PEDDLER, heres a list of mah FAAVORITE Dicks to nuzzle on". No exaggeration.

The signs were there before Gamergate, but I legitimately dropped going their afterwards, and for the next six months, only looked at the app for vids. And for the last 18 months to two years? The place just hasn't crossed my mind, save for a while back someone on 8chan linking the Disney parody. Its damned sad, but because they chose the shitstain SJW cult and were either forced to defend it to cover up the DARPA connections, or were just plain retarded, one of my favorite bits of the internet is dead.

I barely even have things to do on the internet anymore now.

 

[_blank_]

For several years, I thought Wong was another angry asian man. But no, self hating white dude.

My guess, for the start of the fall, would be the Seanbaby article they nuked from being published, catering to David Wong and his trashy cohorts, and the live action segments. The live action sketch bits were actually quite nice, and pretty good, as were most related material. The recent Disney parody was fucking hilarious....but the stance it often took, the way things sometimes got portrayed, and the occasional shying away from humor...

Oh and of course, being one of the traitor sites of Gamergate and The Article, and going 0-MAXIMUM POZ OVERLOAD in CIS WHITE MEN ARE ALL THE DEVIL Lane. This site went from tit jokes to "Imma HUEG Gay for Pay ARSE PEDDLER, heres a list of mah FAAVORITE Dicks to nuzzle on". No exaggeration.

The signs were there before Gamergate, but I legitimately dropped going their afterwards, and for the next six months, only looked at the app for vids. And for the last 18 months to two years? The place just hasn't crossed my mind, save for a while back someone on 8chan linking the Disney parody. Its damned sad, but because they chose the shitstain SJW cult and were either forced to defend it to cover up the DARPA connections, or were just plain exceptional, one of my favorite bits of the internet is dead.

I barely even have things to do on the internet anymore now.

That's about the time I decided to cut ties from Cracked as well. I am always hesitant to bring up GG because at this point I really do think it's not much more than a bogeyman for social media softbellies, but back in late 2014 it really was the line drawn in the sand in nearly every single place I frequented. It was also around that time I noticed the site's content veer sharply to try and act more- another term I hate to use due to its overuse but- SJW. Not going to say it was a red pill moment, but more like the same feeling when you listen to a new single from band you like, and you find out they changed their lead vocal and musical genre.

Like most people here, I came to Cracked to be entertained and read goofy articles about US Presidents being badasses, weird religious cults based around cartoon characters, and the sporadic article from Seanbaby talking about shit vidya. I didn't go to it to be chastised by a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals for being a straight white guy, and I certainly didn't go there to be told "you're a bad person because you like these things I don't like."

I cut ties from from Cracked right around that time, checking subreddits on sporadic occasions when a new Cracked drama bubbled up for a day, but not much else. At this point to see them being hollowed out... I don't even care. They've been dead to me for years.

One final note- I did swing over just right now (just out of morbid curiousity) and got their pop-up "please contribute" ad with a lot of the former Cracked talent pictured in it. Wonder how many of those are even still getting paid by Cracked...

 

[toilet_rainbow]

What a pity. I regularly read Cracked in the early days too.

I still check out the site from time to time, mainly to read photoplasties and old articles I used to enjoy. I hate Trump myself but holy fuck has the site's absolutely deteriorated over the last few years. I'm supposed to crack a smile on a humor site for fuckssake.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

It was clear they were doomed to die when they stopped writing informative articles written to be funny and started publishing rants about sexism instead. That's the sort of shit you write on a forum or blog, not as an article on an edu-comedy site.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

They were getting pretty bad before Gamergate, I recall. The article that really woke me up was something bitching about how all popular movies are sexist and racist because there's too many white men, or something like that. Then of course Zoe Quinn writes an article for Cracked, and that was it. I think I've been there maybe once in the past 3 years.

Which is too bad, because it was a really good site at one point that you could spend hours on laughing at shit and learning a ton too. Their last gasp of fresh content was probably the articles interviewing people who did weird jobs/were in crazy situations, like some kid whose father was a drug lord, an undercover DEA agent who had infiltrated cartels, prostitutes, and a bunch of other really interesting stuff. Those articles were mostly great when the site was devolving into "5 Video Games You Didn't Know Were Secretly Racist".

 

[Zarkov]

Unilad next please. It's a cesspool of moralfaggotry thar needs putting down like a sick puppy.

 

[NotoriousD]

I don't think I've ever read Cracked more than a few articles. They were all those top ten list things and weren't terrible, but were very boring to read through. Anything bad about the site dying?

 

[Oh Shit I'm Sorry]

I'm just amazed it took this long, especially after the site's change to 24/7 politics and virtue-signalling. Not to mention just how much of a complete moron David Wong is.

Here's an example: Way back in the early 10s David created a Leddit account to do an AMA. Then for whatever reason after that he would use the account to go around and flame random people (like those in the food service industry), resulting in him becoming infamous and hated by much of the site. Eventually he deleted his account and left the site. Then a couple years ago he created a new account and decided to do an AMA, apparently believing people would have forgotten or forgiven his past behavior (which of course, they didn't). So people started flaming him right off the bat and he did what cows always do, which is cry about GlopperGroop and try to summon reinforcements (from Cracked). Only this is Leddit and summoning reinforcements isn't allowed so as a result David got shadowbanned from his own AMA. That's a level of fuckup most people could never reach.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMADisasters/comments/3o0z5b/david_wong_writer_and_executive_editor_for/

 

[Ineedahero]

My guess, for the start of the fall, would be the Seanbaby article they nuked from being published, catering to David Wong and his trashy cohorts

What's this now?

I don't think I've ever read Cracked more than a few articles. They were all those top ten list things and weren't terrible, but were very boring to read through. Anything bad about the site dying?

On the fifth page of the thread you say this? Come the fuck on man.

 

[vertexwindi]

I barely even have things to do on the internet anymore now.

This is the saddest thing of all, I think. GamerGate turned pretty much every website I frequented, or even occasionally lurked, into complete cancer. The writing was on the wall, sure, but GG turned all the liberals into maximum shut-it-down. I still find it completely baffling that a website where people come to laugh at autists and trannies is one of the few websites left where I can make offensive jokes or talk about my conservative viewpoints without being shunned.

 

[Muncie Anderson]

I will say that, for a few years, Cracked finally found its niche when it moved to the internet and started posting all of those lists about a plethora of topics. It certainly came a long way from the shitty humor magazine you would only get if MAD had sold out, or it was one of the months where MAD didn't publish an issue. I used to be a MAD reader as a teenager. Back then, I never once thought that I would be checking anything with the Cracked brand name on it on a daily basis while completely ignoring the usual gang of idiots and their antics.

But then so many clickbait sites sprung up copying the "Five/Ten/Fifty Things That So-and-So Did/Said/Wrote" formula that Cracked was doing first years ago. And some of the more diabolical websites make you click through so many pages loaded with ads if you want to browse through the whole thing.

 

[76LD910]

It was David Wong that wrote that, and he was being completely disingenuous. He was literally posting about Trump voters being Nazis before and after the election, before and after he wrote that article.

I'm not sure why he wrote it. I'd guess either one of his superiors made him or else he had the overwhelming temptation to be smug and that was the most topical outlet at the time.

I've said this somewhere on the farms before, but as one of the few people who listened to the cracked podcast just as it was starting (got old pretty fast and i'm not sure its even a thing now) and heard him speak freely on a number of topics i got the impression he's the type of SJW that isn't a 'true believer" and just regurgitates the rhetoric for profit/recognition like hbomberguy and Zoe Quinn.

He can certainly talk the talk, but to me it's obvious he would have a very different public persona if he had worked in some other profession or just fell in with a different crowd. Some of the things he's said about his attitude towards woman for example lead me to believe he would have been at home in the MGTOW community in another life.

So maybe that was just frustration with the people he surrounds himself with coming through.

 

[Keystone]

Can't imagine why Cracked has, well, cracked into a thousand seemingly irreparable pieces...

Oh wait...yeah I can.

Not much to say other than what has already been said by others. I think I said it in another thread about Cracked, but the thing that made me stop going was the fucking bitter, angry self loathing these people had about themselves and their lives; it started to leak into the articles they wrote and I just thought "Fuck it, I'm not gonna read your secret cry piece for help you whiny, simpering babies."

Last thing I saw them write about before I fully left was about Zoe Quinn and how amazing she was -- how shoving a micro chip into her fat, cum encrusted hand made her a cyborg or some such bullshit they said with a straight face. At that point I just went "Yeah okay, that's enough of this shit" and never looked back. At this point the best Cracked can hope for is to become NeoGAF -- alive, but tarnished beyond all hope and permanently cemented as the butt of every joke and legit criticism about political bias ruining an internet site.

 

[Trilby]

You know you done goofed when you make Cracked the Website less successful than Cracked the Magazine.

Sylvester P. Smythe has been avenged!

 

[DumbDosh]

Good riddance, NuCracked didn't deserve to last as long as it did.

 

[Positron]

I don't think I've ever read Cracked more than a few articles. They were all those top ten list things and weren't terrible, but were very boring to read through. Anything bad about the site dying?

Cracked has died long ago. Now they're just unplugging the life support to a bloated, bed-sore covered, malodorous vegetable.

 

[LetterlandMafia]

They were getting pretty bad before Gamergate, I recall. The article that really woke me up was something bitching about how all popular movies are sexist and racist because there's too many white men, or something like that. Then of course Zoe Quinn writes an article for Cracked, and that was it. I think I've been there maybe once in the past 3 years.

Which is too bad, because it was a really good site at one point that you could spend hours on laughing at shit and learning a ton too. Their last gasp of fresh content was probably the articles interviewing people who did weird jobs/were in crazy situations, like some kid whose father was a drug lord, an undercover DEA agent who had infiltrated cartels, prostitutes, and a bunch of other really interesting stuff. Those articles were mostly great when the site was devolving into "5 Video Games You Didn't Know Were Secretly Racist".

Agreed. Earlier in the thread I mentioned Luke McKinney - he was writing 'everything men like is sexist and you can't be sexist towards men because male power fantasy' shit long before gamergate happened. GG just turned it up to 11 and got everyone else involved. Sargent and Wong very much stole his thunder in that regard, but I assume he left before Cracked's downfall happened so I guess he had the last laugh.

 

[AnOminous]

I remember an article bitching about unpaid internships in journalism, both print and video, and how the interns needed to band together and insist on being paid. Except there were so many people trying to get into the field that if anyone bitched they were fired immediately and the next sucker was hired. The person writing was complaining about how this was unfair and thereottabealaw, etc. etc. etc.

It was one of the best unintentional humor articles I’ve ever read.

I'm generally in favor of doing away with that bullshit, too, but I'm not sure how you would. Not for the benefit of the interns, though, because nobody who can afford to take a year off after school and work for free is anything but a fucking trust fund baby who is getting a free ticket into some industry that people who need to pay back loans can't afford to do.

This means less paying jobs for people who actually need those jobs. Maybe they could tax the businesses for the free labor they're getting, but most of these interns are fucking useless idiots anyway who got this as a perk because their daddy and their grand-daddy were alumni.

Also it's hard to really give a fuck about journalists. They're vermin.

 

[Koby_Fish]

The biggest shame of it all is that they were doing it for asspats and good-boy points (and virtue signalling) all while they were failing hard to keep the bulk of their audience. It's like they all hired a bunch of people with Dobson-like mentality--you know, the one where "If you're a Republican you're a bad person stop following my content and GTFO!" Too many of them must have gotten too deep into tumblr or took a social justice-laden course or major in school, drank the koolaid, and then decided that they had a platform to preach to the world the gospel of postmodern intersectional feminism. Instead of, you know, being funny.