Gawker

Sometimes you come to a conclusion that you can grow out of websites as well. During my many years on the internet, I have a list of sites I once visited on a daily basis only to eventually grow bored with the schtick on that site and then move onto a different one. Obviously I will not bore you with all of them.

But today I shall speak about Gawker Media's sites. I used to absolutely love Kotaku for their video game news and other silliness. Then I branched into Gizmodo for their gadget news and Lifehacker for all their useful information. And finally I started to go to Gawker's main site for the great videos, some useful information, and some pretty funny snark on the entertainment industry. i09 was alright for comic book gossip every now and then but Deadspin (a sports page that snarks on team sports) and Jalaponik (a site for cars) were clearly not for me.

Then in January they changed their layout entirely in favor of making something more iPad friendly. That would be fine if the re-design would have been useful on anything that is not an iPad but I guess I am asking for too much. Gizmodo and Lifehacker became entirely about smart phones and Apple products. Kotaku became worthless for video game news, and Gawker's main site now hosts ton of stories about sex in order to stay hip with the kids, no more news - just editorializing. Just like everywhere else. Links to videos to go a short writeup about the video and then you have to click a link to actually see the video. Stories shortened up to resemble a Twitter feed all over the place. I can obviously go on. I was going to give them a chance to fix their suddenly humongous list of problems, not that the prior site design was without fault, but it is just too much to take. They introduced some fixes but that did not bring back stories of note and not people being hyperbolic.

So in the end, I just have to walk away from it. They had three months and that is a lifetime in internet years and they just somehow got worse. I will find new sites and this is by no means a huge milestone in my life. But I do have to complain about stupid decisions people make in order to stay hip with the kids.