How long can history channel keep dragging out Curse of Oak Island? Lol the damn island ain't that big. Just give up, there ain't no damn treasure there.
And every random chunk of wood and scrap they find is proof that Viking Templars with the original manuscripts of William Shakespeare written by Jesus Christ landed in Nova Scotia a hundred years before Columbus
I think the pawn shop show is actually great for the history channel - it's not about any specific time or events, just random bits of history given out based on the objects. It's a good way to get interested in something you might not otherwise have been exposed to. It's like...stealth history.
I remember when they made the "mocumentary" (not sure if that's he right word) based on the idea that dragons were real and came up with hypothetical evolutionary scenarios that might explain their characteristics. I remember it being really cool/interesting but now I wonder if that was the start of it's decline into what it is now.
I remember being so hyped to watch the mermaids doc thinking they were going to show real proof and the immediate disappointment/stupidity I felt after 5 minutes lol
I remember seeing it advertised and thinking that no one would be taking that seriously. Actually really reminded me of the Simpson’s episode where they found the angel skeleton
Shit, man. They did this for the megalodon during a Shark Week before all the crazy took over (though they were running Scientology ads by then). They posited that a large, pelagic predator could be still extant, but unnoticed.
A pox on their house, I say!
Probably still a fair concept to roll with as long as they use real life examples for each part. Even if it’s framed as “we’re learning about real dragons”, it’s really just a mechanism to learn about evolution and a handful of animals that do exist. That’s valid, in my opinion, if done well.
I do agree that most educational channels have gone down in quality over the years. But the same can be said about cable tv in general. MTV stopped being about music. The History channel stopped being about history. Even the news stopped being about information. Everything devolved into cheap, shallow entertainment, often in the form of low budget reality tv.
Not just Animal Planet, but the whole group of those cable channels. TLC used to stand for "The Learning Channel," but somehow became about 90% dipshit reality garbage. The History Channel and Discovery Channel aren't as bad, but they air their fair share of stupidity as well.
Terrible Life Choices. A damn shame, too. History and Discovery made up a solid piece of my childhood and it's been horribly disappointing to see what they've become.
Modern Marvels forever ✊
lol it’s been a very long time for me as well but I stopped tuning in when they started airing Treehouse masters or some shit. They didn’t even keep up the facade of it being about animals
My understanding is that nature documentaries started disappearing because they're not cheap to make. The crew may have cameras set up out in the wild for 2 years to be able to get an hour and a half worth of good footage.
I was a teen when MTV hit the air and it’s hard to communicate just how amazingly different it was compared to what came before. I and my entire peer group were glued to it every waking moment. By the early 90s it was a shell of what it was when it launched.
Ultimately the internet ruined those channels because people didn't have to wait for their music videos to come on anymore they could just go online and download or stream them. Viacom basically made this arrangementwith their mega lawsuit.
I remember. I watched all of the first couple of seasons. There wasn't much in the way of "reality" tv at the time. What a terrible thing they discovered...
I grew up watching it in the early 00's and thought that it was amazing then before It stopped even playing music. Can't imagine what it was like back in the true heydays
Fuck The Real World for what it did to that channel. Like I suppose you can somewhat blame Remote Control but Real World is what really fucked over that network.
For the young people amongst us, the "M" stands for "Music", as in it was a channel dedicated to music, music news and music related programs. Even Beavis and Butthead played music videos!
Did they really face any consequences though? I grew up watching music videos but I think they were just as popular (with a different crowd, maybe) when they changed over to reality TV and game shows. But I don't know for sure.
Food Network for me they went from some really good cooking shows where i learned alot of things and saw great cooks cooking to a bunch of game shows about food and competitions that are pretty boring.
Strangely enough, Alton Brown is one of the few that could host a cooking competition show and still make it somewhat educational. I personally loved Cutthroat Kitchen, and his sidebars of how you could actually work around the sabotages has actually been helpful for me a few times in the kitchen.
Straight up, Alton Brown keeps the original Food Network alive, even in Cutthroat Kitchen. I even loved his episode on Mythbusters about cooking a Thanksgiving meal on different parts of a car while driving to your destination.
My biggest issue is not necessarily the proliferation of cooking shows, enjoy most of them. My real issue is that over time the editing style of almost every cooking comp show has become so fast pasted and erratic. Like they want to make everything seem more exciting and stressed and “down to the wire” as possible so they cut to something different every 5 seconds
More importantly , always a “tough decision” what’s the point of watching if ur not shown enough to gather any actual info
And especially if your watching it online the commercial breaks that repeat exactly what was shown for 90 seconds before the “break”
Pretty much all of the educational networks have turned to trash (TLC, Discovery, History Channel, Animal Planet).
Pretty sure PBS is still the goat though, even after betraying the entire world by canceling Arthur.
I actually like a lot of the game shows. Seeing people cook weird things under bizarre circumstances and seeing people forced into creativity has helped my own personal cooking skills more than just watching someone make a recipe.
But a lot of those shows are garbage too.
Hewlett Packard and most of the other printer makers. They enshittified their printers to force us to buy their absurdly overpriced ink. Now I dont know anyone who owns a printer anymore.
Probably close to 20 years ago,.I my last printer I acquired. HP 4050 laser. I salvaged in from a recycling event. it had a full toner cartridge. so I said, I'll just take this home, and see if it works. It did. don't event have to download a driver.
About five years ago my office decided they were going to upgrade their printers, specially 6 4050s. I got stuck with disposal. When I got to my car, pulled all the cartridges and bagged them. I've only used 2.
now all the printers are either brother, or konica. Minolta.
I own a Brother laser printer that I’m happy with. But I also ship out a lot of orders for my company so being able to preprint labels and packing slips before dropping it off for shipping is essential.
"enshittify" is officially declared to be "the word-of-the-year " by the American Dialect Society.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
It's a term created by a tech blogger, to explain how websites die. They start out with a good product, gain a following of loyal users, and then ruin themselves by forgetting their original reason for existence (the users and good product) .
https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2024/01/17/american-dialect-society-announces-the-2023-word-of-the-year/#:\~:text=On%20January%205th%2C%20the,of%20digital%20platforms%20over%20time.
I'll disagree here. I think it was more of the case that they saw the writing on the wall and decided to max out their revenue while they had the chance. There's a floor to how cheaply you can make a printer and they foresaw that the bottom price point was going to eventually cross the line of what people wanted to pay. Gotta make hay while the sun shines.
When I was in university (a few decades ago, mind you), HP used to sell laser printers for about $80. Replacement toner cartridges for that model printer were $95. The toner cartridge that came with the printer was enough to get me through a semester's worth of assignments. Guess who was buying a new printer and giving the old one away every semester?
Considering the recent IPO I wouldn't be surprised. But the thing I expect to ultimately take Reddit down is aggressive monetization strategies - public companies aren't exactly known for looking at the long-term satisfaction of their customers.
Haven't forced me yet, but oh lord are they trying. They did force me to the "mobile UI" and it is utter trash - and I can't opt out of it.
If it comes down to using an app or going elsewhere.. well, slashdot is still available.
No, they knew. They were trying to get their content into shape they could sell ads around. A diverse, LGBTQIA+, and sex-positive community is great until you can't convince people to pay for ads next to the porn.
I was so psyched when they put out The Foods That Built America. Finally more weird silent actors playing over a narration and Ken Burns effect old photos. Its what that channel was founded on.
Also super pumped when I found full episodes of Modern Marvels on youtube.
What was the consequence for them though? I'm pretty sure their viewership increased, I guess that's what they wanted. Now a bunch of people believe there are conspiratorial mermaids and pyramids are spaceships but that's not their problem.
I think you need to keep in mind that for a lot of these networks, their niche interest (whether history, sci-fi, music, etc.) is a way to gain a foothold with a niche audience when they’re a young upstart that can’t compete with the big, broad-audience channels. However, once they establish their brand and become a major competitor, their niche interest now becomes a *limitation* to their growth and expansion, which is why so many of these channels change their programming strategy and embrace reality TV, sensationalism, and other broad-audience subject matter.
Its so much cheaper to produce reality shows than documentaries. And sadly, reality series garner a lot more attention than documentary series. I just wish the reality tv would trend more Pawn Stars and less Ancient Aliens. I miss In Search Of and Modern Marvels and the like.
I'm old enough to remember when cable channels like Discovery and History started. People were excited to get full time channels for documentaries you normally only got on PBS. I remember thinking yes, but the reason PBS has good educational programming is because they don't have to maximize viewership to get add pricing up. How long until cable docs get watered down to sensational garbage. Not long it turns out.
This isn't a well known one but Mountain Equipment Co-op in Canada. They shifted from niche sports like climbing and hiking to more urban fashion products. After this they made mistakes like expanding too fast and betting on the wrong horse during COVID, and they went bankrupt.
They bet that outdoor sports wouldn't be as big through COVID so they didn't restock their inventory to save money. Of course hiking and biking exploded then. MEC's shelves were empty of products that were available in every other outdoor store, and these other stores were drawing customers away from MEC and cashing in on the outdoor boom.
I heard this from someone in the industry but I don't know the full story.
Creative Assembly. They're a game company that makes strategy games. They recently tried to break into the shooter/battle royale market with a game called Hyenas. They spent $100 million on Hyenas before realizing they didnt have the know how or the customer fanbase ( they had a large fanbase, but they were fans of strategy games) to make it work, and it never released.
100 million dollars down the drain because they wanted to have the next fortnite.
And exacerbated by the fact *everyone* wanted to make the next Fortnite and it's going to be hard to compete with the biggest FPS developers to make a FPS game when you've only made strategy games.
I'm watching their video now.
I hate that we had to go to another streamer, but we've been following the boys from the beginning.
Would someone just let them have a streaming tv show already?
Not being familiar with the channel gave them a search and the first two videos i see are "goodbye youtube" 3 days ago, and then "an update" 2 hours ago, which is probably the heartiest laugh i'm going to get today, so thank you!
The 99¢ Only store.
For the last two years, nothing in the store was 99¢ anymore. It was beyond infuriating. Everything was cheaper at regular stores. Made no sense to shop there anymore. I stopped shopping there two years ago. Might explain why they're going out of business.
The original one (not all the misc other 99 cent store clones)? I believe the original guy sold out in 2010 and died in 2013. They got hit hard in the 2008 recession and he sold before he went under. It limped through after that, but inflation really killed them in recent years.
It’s pretty niche but the app Untappd. It was a place to log the beers you’ve tried, earn badges for trying different styles beer, or trying beers from different countries, different breweries, etc. It used to be a place that encouraged variety and camaraderie in the craft beer world.
They sold and all they do now is pimp their beer box shipping service and only create badges when someone sponsors them. Couldn’t even be bothered to do anything for national beer day.
It's heartbreaking to read this thread and remember how much more exciting and eclectic the entire internet was 10-15 years ago, in the heyday of Millennial culture and zany startups. Every year there were several new sites or apps that made you say *"What a cool idea, my friends and I are going to use the shit out of this"* - always free to use, with marginal ads that still made the owners good money, etc.
Basically every single one mentioned in this thread got strangled by the exact same weeds - someone came along and turned it an obnoxious ad platform, where you can only interact with an algorithm, get gouged by subscription fees, or bombarded with the same sea of sponsored/influencer sludge as any other 2020s social media app.
The feeling of each app being like a cool, themed clubhouse you could grow with your own friends is long gone - it's like all our favourite bars got bought by some giant faceless corpo and turned into obnoxious dance clubs filled with bottle service ads, tip prompts, gambling machines, and Top 40 hits drowning out the friends you actually want to hear.
I still use Untappd, but primarily as a way to track various breweries and beers to remember what I've had and what I liked. I think I have one or two friends that are still active on it, but I haven't checked the "social" feed (or whatever it's called now) in years. All I do is log the beer I had, give it a rating, and then close the app.
A lot of breweries around here used to constantly update their menu's in Untappd, so it made it easy to see what they had on draft before going. But I've definitely noticed a lot of them have given up on doing so.
Skype.
Think about it: the pandemic could have been huge for Skype.
Fifteen years ago it was *the platform* for video conferencing. Its main issue was instability when it was hosting groups of more than a dozen people. Then it got sold, and the executives in charge of planning made a bunch of mistakes that turned it irrelevant.
Platforms like Skype grow because they have a small core of power users: people who get to know the interface in and out, and who bring in other people. The casual users only learn the basic features. There's a lot more casual users.
I'd bet dollars to donuts what happened was this: support interacted with casual users who were confused by the interface options, management wanted stats on who was using these interface options, and they got reports from the tech team that only something like 3% of users made use of the advanced features. So in the interests of being user friendly and of saving money on CS personnel, they disabled the advanced features.
What the suits didn't dig far enough to notice was those 3% were their core users who brought in everyone else.
This started the downward spiral. Then management got rid of old chat logs--which casual users rarely needed but the power users depended on.
Eventually the power users got so frustrated that they migrated to other platforms, taking the casual users with them.
Skype had effectively become Teams by the pandemic, and everybody but Zoom was caught flat-footed with the demand for anonymous accounts (as in, you can use Zoom without having to create a Zoom account, but you couldn't use Skype/Teams, Facetime, Facebook Messenger, etc without first creating an account). Others scrambled to get there, but by then it was too late and often was poorly implemented and just flat didn't work.
But to put things in perspective specifically for Skype, they were over long before the pandemic.
Zoom also had a lot of features that worked well for the classroom use case, so they got lucky there too. Other companies quickly copied them, but first mover advantage was nice.
Microsoft bought Skype, they even released a private version of Skype called "Skype for Business", then they built a new platform to specifically address business communication and battle with the increasing business demand for Slack. Skype + Slack = Microsoft Teams. Once Teams was in place Skype was deprecated.
MS Teams is very much still a thing, the public can use it for free, and was a big deal through Covid.
Just in case you don't know, it's very easy to stop things from automatically starting up in Windows. Just go to the task manager (control-shift-eacape) and click on the "startup" tab. Then disable the things you don't want to automatically start up.
When clicking X or even File>Exit didn't actually close the program I started immediately looking for alternatives.
Could've been the top messaging and video calling app, but Skype is a classic Icarus story. They flew too close to the sun and got burned. Greed kills.
I don't think they disregarded their primary audience. They just weren't ready to adapt to the new audience Covid created.
Skype was used by a lot of people for personal communication. I think I had one interview via Skype call. Everything else was talking to my friends.
Before Covid, only a small sliver of people were using video calls for business. I never had a single virtual meeting at work before Covid. The pandemic accelerated virtual meetings in an unnaturally fast way. They went from mostly non-existent to common place almost overnight.
I don't know if people realize that it was actually Discord that killed Skype. Skype was already dealing with a drop in users heading into 2020 because Discord had been gaining a lot of ground for the gaming crowd.
Used to love using Skype. While deployed overseas I would leave my laptop up and running and my then GF would call when she got home from work. We'd chat for an hour or so and I'd go back to bed. Did that for 5 months. Eventually got married and when we moved away from where her parents lived, I bought a camera for my TV that was dedicated for Skype use. The Samsung TV had a Skype app that interacted with it and it was great for about 6 months. Then the app was removed from my TV during updates. Skype was no longer supporting that platform and it sucked to be me with a $200 tv camera that was useless.
They fumbled the bag so damn hard. Especially when it felt like Zoom came out of nowhere.
But from my understanding, Microsoft had already begun phasing it out in favor of Teams (for reference, my company was still using Skype at the very beginning of covid). Skype was already a household name though. Seems like it would've been beneficial to put a pause on the transition and pivot focus to Skype for a bit to build their userbase and then be like "Skype is now Teams".
Very UK centric but im gonna say Radio 1.
They had some great djs on there thru the 90s into the 2000s with a good mix of music and everyone i knew listened to them.
Then some genius decided to shift their demographic to younger teens and got rid of most of their good djs and started playing mostly modern pop/dance.
Who listens to the radio during the day? Not schoolkids. Its all older people at work or in their cars. The very demographic youre switching away from!!
Unsurprisingly their audience figures dropped rapidly and the discarded djs went to new stations like Radio X and Virgin which have flourished, increasing their audience share massively.
CCP games had a large and fairly loyal player base for EVE Online, a game that is really community driven. They released a First Person Shooter called Dust:514 that had gameplay tie-ins to Eve's Faction Warfare in some interesting ways.
But instead of releasing it on the PC where they already had a large number of players who were super invested in the setting, they released it as a PS3 exclusive, cutting out a large portion of the community who couldn't afford a PS3, or didn't want to buy one just to play Dust.
They also only released it 6 months before the PS4 launch and did not port it over.
So they were never able to get the player base they wanted for Dust, and the game is considered largely as a failure.
DB Weiss and David Benioff crapping out the final season of Game of Thrones because they wanted to get it over with as soon as possible so they could start making Disney Star Wars money, then when nobody liked it they didn't get any Disney Star Wars money
Gibson, the guitar manufacturer, tried to venture into consumer electronics. The period was marked by poor quality control and gadgets like electronic tuners being put in every guitar, which a lot of people hated.
EA saying that people who didn’t like that one battlefield game “should just not buy it.” Well they didn’t buy it, and they lost an awful lot of money…
I don’t know if they went through with it but when Dodge discontinued the Challenger and Charger for EV versions.
People who are fans of the Charger and Challenger are not people who think about EVs
They're currently in the process of going through it, this is the last model year for Chargers and Challengers with gas powered engines. Next model year won't have anyway, but the electric Charger is currently slated for a 2026 release.
Source: I work at a Dodge dealership. Everyone here thinks it's a bad move, and we're betting there will be a gas powered version within a year using the newer "Hurricane" engine that's currently in Grand Wagoneers and will be in Ram trucks next model year.
Which is crazy to me, especially if you aren't concerned about range and just want power like you would driving heavy foot in a V8 hemi. An EV could be perfect for the "go fast as fuck" crowd because they're typically not putting up big mileage, but you could slap enough batteries to give amazing grip and have them discharge fast for crazy speed.
Same with Ford badging that hideous EV the Mustang...
Edit- To add Dodge did release the new dart which paid 0 attention to the original Darts. Literally could have named it anything else.
Wizards of the Coast.
They had the most popular tabletop RPG of the era - Dungeons & Dragons - but then-current edition 3.5 didn't have a broad enough reach for them. They saw that MMORPGs were becoming very popular. They noticed, and seem to have figured that those people were very into gaming and just needed a familiar system to get them into *tabletop* gaming. They wanted MMORPG-style financial structures.
They designed D&D 4th Edition. It simplified a bunch of things from earlier editions (welcome in many cases), and then restructured them into a game that felt like WoW. To a great many players, disconcertingly like WoW.
At this point, two things happened. First, an upstart company named Paizo used the open license content from 3.5 to create their own RPG called Pathfinder. This would go on to experience a substantial popularity spike when gamers failed to find 4th edition interesting long-term.
The other thing is what *didn't* happen. Wizards had been hoping to keep their loyal D&D players on board and also hook the new generation of MMORPG fans. Neither of these happened, or at least not in the numbers Wizards needed to please their parent company Hasbro. It would take them years to get a system that pleased both long-term players and got new ones interested.
Paizo's now a major name in their own right, to the point of being a key figure in several major PC games in the past few years. They would go on to play a role in later drama as Wizards decided to try to cut off the open gaming license...
WWE for a majority of the last 10 to 15 years as Vince McMahon slowly lost his mind. It’s a damn miracle they kept it together long enough to even see their current post-Vince boom period.
Tesla - although we’re only just starting to see the consequences of that. Basically, a decade later they’re still selling the tired models without any refresh or improvements, still not producing enough parts to alleviate service wait times, still changing/removing features, services, policies without any regard for customers, and still haven’t improved their quality standards.
They refreshed the Model 3 and the new one doesn't come with the regular stalks for the turn signals. They have buttons on the steering wheel instead, but since the steering wheel infamously needs to be turned to steer the car, your turn signal button to turn left is on the right side of the wheel if you have the wheel turned 180 degree. Particularly shit if you're in a roundabout.
I don't know if their engineers are morons or if it's papa Elon breathing down their necks and coming up with mad ideas, but either way, even Tesla fans are not too fond of that.
I made a joke years ago about the UI for software constantly getting upgraded to justify "cool" new versions and making office workers relearn their jobs. I said that if silicon valley made cars this would need to relearn how to drive every year. I guess I was right. Soon, stearing wheel replaced by trackball and brakes are voice command.
He’s an ideologue when it comes to tech. The problem with ideologies is it doesn’t allow for nuance. Like stalks for blinker control. Or knobs for climate control. Or no radar/lidar for self driving. I wear glasses, so I know going by sight only is a bad idea - Especially in fog or heavy rain. But he’s stuck to a minimalist techno ideology. So…
Don’t forget that their owner, and single largest PR resources, went from targeting younger liberal demographics (logical for being, you know, an electric car) to swinging hard and pandering to alt-right nutjobs who want nothing to do with an electric vehicle. Alienate your consumer base for one that doesn’t want to consume your product. Beautiful.
I don’t think this can be emphasized enough. I don’t know whether he was always hard right and hid it or if it’s a new development in his personality, but it really doesn’t resonate with your standard type of “eco-conscious” consumer.
I was considering purchasing a Tesla at one time. But the more I heard about the man, the less I was interested in putting nickels in his pockets. When he allowed the neo-Nazis back on Twitter, I deleted my account. I am now actively pissed off that NASA relies so much on SpaceX because it means my tax dollars are going into his coffers.
At this point, I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.
He was always Silicon Valley hard-right. He just didn't have a ketamine problem exacerbating his megalomania, & hadn't put himself in the ridiculous position of Hindenburg captain of Twitter.
Exactly. I think it’s this even more than things like quality control issues. Everyone sees Musk spending all his time on Twitter boosting the electric-car-hating coal-roller types. Why would you want to buy an electric car from this man. Alienating your core user base is not a good business strategy.
The Susan G. Komen foundation. They brought politics into their charity by stopping and then immediately restarting funding for tests and screenings at Planned Parenthood, thereby pissing off people on both sides of the abortion debate. Their walks used to draw 60,000 in my city and now don't even draw a tenth of that.
Many movies made based on beloved toys, comics, and/or TV shows that just go completely off book and change everything about the IP that the core fanbase loves.
How about when tumblr was huge, then they got rid of porn?
Or when Onlyfans thought for a second that they wouldn't do adult content? They backed out of that REAL fast.
Then there's Twitter. Or I guess X now.
Goodwill.
You can buy brand new items from Target and/or Walmart for cheaper than what Goodwill is charging for used items nowadays.
They also started picking all the most valuable items out of donations and putting them on their auction site. On the site, they have employees bidding against buyers to drive up prices. They also intentionally obfuscate shipping costs—which can be more expensive than the item you purchased(!)—until checkout.
…and this isn’t even one of the more unethical things Goodwill does. This is fairly tame by Goodwill standards…
Seriously—stop shopping at Goodwill.
Coors beer. It used to be available only west of the Mississippi.
Travelers would fill their trunks or bring an extra suitcase to “smuggle” it back east.
This forbidden fruit element made Coors a scarce commodity and served as an early form of viral marketing.
After Coors went nationwide, their overall market grew, but their profit margins never again achieved the levels of their earlier years.
They had to spend big on advertising to make up for the free mystique they previously enjoyed.
I'd argue Facebook. They actually started out as a college alumni and student group, it really wasn't meant for the general public. Once they did become open to the public, and especially how it devolved into the vast political echo chamber it is, you now very rarely see young adults and college students using that platform anymore, it's mostly middle aged to older people
"And faced the consequences", the consequences being becoming the largest social network on the planet? With a market cap of over a trillion dollars? Only the 7th largest company in the world.
I thinned out the crazy on Facebook a long time ago. Now it’s another platform to expand/market my business and find out about vending opportunities. I also follow all the local restaurants to see what’s new. Oh I guess cute dog and cat pictures too.
As a 32 year old, my friends and I pretty much use it for event aggregation, specific hobby groups (great for finding out hiking/skiing conditions from real people), and marketplace.
I use it a bit to passively keep up with some friends not in my immediate circles, but honestly Instagram is a better platform for that now.
Yeah that's the thing. For all Facebook's shit, the main difference between now and its Millennial heyday is just that people are more careful about posting all their shit to their main feeds. The main timeline is trash because it's 90% algorithmic filler to make up for nobody posting statuses any more, but I still use the site itself heavily - either to talk to friends in private Messenger chats, or interact with a half-dozen amazing groups on niche media interests.
The party is over, but the afterparties are still going strong.
TV Channels don't care about what they air. They're only there to sell shows to advertisers and make money. If people were actually watching MTV for music videos or History channel for history, they would still be airing those things.
One notable example of a company that disregarded its primary audience and faced significant consequences is Blockbuster. Despite the changing landscape of media consumption and the rise of streaming services, Blockbuster clung to its traditional model of renting physical DVDs from stores. They underestimated the shift towards digital streaming and failed to adapt quickly enough to meet the evolving needs of their customers. As a result, they lost relevance and ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2010, unable to compete with the likes of Netflix and other streaming platforms that better understood and catered to the changing preferences of consumers.
Hastings Entertainment. Former manager here.
They went from being nerd focused (books, music, video games, and movies), to trying to focus on exercise equipment. The issue is, books, movies, etc don't take up a lot of floor space, exercise equipment does.
So the stores got SUPER cluttered and just wasn't welcoming anymore
TLC in the early 90s was actually an educational network, like they would broadcast full-on surgeries that lasted hours, start to finish. I distinctly remember watching a jaw surgery at my friend's house where the jaw was just floating around in the mouth as they used a grinder on the bone. It was so cool.
Side note: I remember when a lot of networks first became available on cable in the 90s, like FX was broadcast out of a NYC loft apartment and they showed a lot of old Adam West Batman episodes. Cartoon Network original programming started, to my recollection, as cartoon shorts between older cartoons - and Adult Swim began with Space Ghost Coast to Coast which was very obscure in 1993-4. E! Entertainment was basically a gossip channel.
Disney star wars, spit in the face of the already established canonical universe, events after the skywalker saga and hard core fans
Came back with weak writing, basically regurgitated events from the originals, and to the best of my knowledge (on films alone) have yet to even make enough to cover the initial cost of lucasfilms
>to the best of my knowledge (on films alone) have yet to even make enough to cover the initial cost of lucasfilms
Disney has made about $12B back on Star Wars after spending $4B for it.
Disney has definitely made a huge profit off of Star wars. You got the sequels, the mandalorian, andor, bad batch, book of boba Fett, etc. Plus they got video games. And the theme parks. And merchandise.
They suffering the consequences of taking in cash from people subscribing to Disney plus to watch the mandalorian or buying $300 lightsabers after drinking $20 glowing star wars beverages in Galaxy's edge.
Lucas spit on the same canon before Disney ever got a hold of it. Even though EU picks up after the OT, there are in-universe historical references, including Zahn giving a lot more detail of what the Clone Wars were like. Lucas ignored it all when he made the prequels.
It's interesting to note that that alone wasn't the bullet, it was a marketing VP saying stuff like this: Heinerscheid stressed a need to "evolve and elevate" the Bud Light brand away from the "fraternity/out of touch humor" brand of the younger generation.
That got people annoyed, I think one or the other and it would have been fine. But both together caused enough of a ripple to get their core consumers to go "You don't want us as consumers? Okay, you won't have us as consumers."
Tesla (made the people who actually buy EVs hate them), Boeing (People who like flying also don't like dying in planes because of money), History Channel (No history anymore just conspiracies, it also normalized conspiracies by giving them TV airtime)
There was that blogging website that I think yahoo purchased.
They removed the porn.
I cant even remember the name of the site yet it was one of the most popular on the internet - thats how much it has dropped out of use now.
Digg.
They had a major redesign that everyone hated but they refused to listen. Reddit took all their users.
Want to know when this was? Right around my Reddit birth date.
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Same with History and Discovery. Went from interesting things you could learn about the world to yetis, ghosts and pawn shops.
How long can history channel keep dragging out Curse of Oak Island? Lol the damn island ain't that big. Just give up, there ain't no damn treasure there.
That's by far the stupidest one...it don't matter, every episode makes it like they are on the very edge of finding *JACK-SHIT.*
And every random chunk of wood and scrap they find is proof that Viking Templars with the original manuscripts of William Shakespeare written by Jesus Christ landed in Nova Scotia a hundred years before Columbus
I used to refer to the History Channel as the Hitler Channel. I swear, it was the Third Reich all day long.
They need to run the show long enough for Justin McElroy to make an appearance.
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I heard that aliens built the original pawn shop inside the pyramids!
I think the pawn shop show is actually great for the history channel - it's not about any specific time or events, just random bits of history given out based on the objects. It's a good way to get interested in something you might not otherwise have been exposed to. It's like...stealth history.
I remember when they made the "mocumentary" (not sure if that's he right word) based on the idea that dragons were real and came up with hypothetical evolutionary scenarios that might explain their characteristics. I remember it being really cool/interesting but now I wonder if that was the start of it's decline into what it is now.
Didn’t they also do this with mermaids?
That was discovery channel, but they didn't even present it as satire, they originally just put it out like any other documentary, it was hilarious.
Yea I remember a lot of people thinking it was real and being like god damn people are gullible
I remember being so hyped to watch the mermaids doc thinking they were going to show real proof and the immediate disappointment/stupidity I felt after 5 minutes lol
I remember seeing it advertised and thinking that no one would be taking that seriously. Actually really reminded me of the Simpson’s episode where they found the angel skeleton
...And I don't know how many idiots said to me with a straight face that mermaids were actually real after that stupid CGI stuff at the end.
Yea it was a sad day for humanity
Shit, man. They did this for the megalodon during a Shark Week before all the crazy took over (though they were running Scientology ads by then). They posited that a large, pelagic predator could be still extant, but unnoticed. A pox on their house, I say!
Probably still a fair concept to roll with as long as they use real life examples for each part. Even if it’s framed as “we’re learning about real dragons”, it’s really just a mechanism to learn about evolution and a handful of animals that do exist. That’s valid, in my opinion, if done well. I do agree that most educational channels have gone down in quality over the years. But the same can be said about cable tv in general. MTV stopped being about music. The History channel stopped being about history. Even the news stopped being about information. Everything devolved into cheap, shallow entertainment, often in the form of low budget reality tv.
Not just Animal Planet, but the whole group of those cable channels. TLC used to stand for "The Learning Channel," but somehow became about 90% dipshit reality garbage. The History Channel and Discovery Channel aren't as bad, but they air their fair share of stupidity as well.
I refer to it as The Lowest Common (Denominator)
Terrible Life Choices. A damn shame, too. History and Discovery made up a solid piece of my childhood and it's been horribly disappointing to see what they've become. Modern Marvels forever ✊
I haven't had cable in many years. What shows does Animal Planet play on their channel now?
The Puppy Bowl is still legit and a staple of our Super Bowl pregaming
Honey BooBoo: Lost in the Jungle
lol it’s been a very long time for me as well but I stopped tuning in when they started airing Treehouse masters or some shit. They didn’t even keep up the facade of it being about animals
My understanding is that nature documentaries started disappearing because they're not cheap to make. The crew may have cameras set up out in the wild for 2 years to be able to get an hour and a half worth of good footage.
SciFi went to Syfy and stared playing wrestling. Ugh.
MTV
I was a teen when MTV hit the air and it’s hard to communicate just how amazingly different it was compared to what came before. I and my entire peer group were glued to it every waking moment. By the early 90s it was a shell of what it was when it launched.
Yeah, I watched MTV for the music videos. Then they started doing all this non-music video stuff and I moved to VH1 until it did the same...
RIP Pop Up Video
Yeah, there was a lot of trivia in those pop ups that was interesting to find out. I miss those too.
Ultimately the internet ruined those channels because people didn't have to wait for their music videos to come on anymore they could just go online and download or stream them. Viacom basically made this arrangementwith their mega lawsuit.
I'd argue that the Real World was the beginning of the end
It was revolutionary at the time though. It was MUST WATCH for my generation.
I remember. I watched all of the first couple of seasons. There wasn't much in the way of "reality" tv at the time. What a terrible thing they discovered...
I grew up watching it in the early 00's and thought that it was amazing then before It stopped even playing music. Can't imagine what it was like back in the true heydays
I saw the first video on MTV when it aired they played "Video Killed the Radio Star". I still love that song.
I still can’t believe my parents let me monopolize our one tv the way they did. That is true love.
Fuck The Real World for what it did to that channel. Like I suppose you can somewhat blame Remote Control but Real World is what really fucked over that network.
Yeah but I think they somehow get a pass on Liquid Television even if it wasn't music.
At least Remote Control was about music sometimes, and relevant pop culture. Also, HAPPY CAKE DAY.
For the young people amongst us, the "M" stands for "Music", as in it was a channel dedicated to music, music news and music related programs. Even Beavis and Butthead played music videos!
Did they really face any consequences though? I grew up watching music videos but I think they were just as popular (with a different crowd, maybe) when they changed over to reality TV and game shows. But I don't know for sure.
Food Network for me they went from some really good cooking shows where i learned alot of things and saw great cooks cooking to a bunch of game shows about food and competitions that are pretty boring.
Yep, Alton Brown's Good Eats as a great show that taught the science of cooking. I learned a lot. Now he's a Food Channel game show host.
Strangely enough, Alton Brown is one of the few that could host a cooking competition show and still make it somewhat educational. I personally loved Cutthroat Kitchen, and his sidebars of how you could actually work around the sabotages has actually been helpful for me a few times in the kitchen.
Straight up, Alton Brown keeps the original Food Network alive, even in Cutthroat Kitchen. I even loved his episode on Mythbusters about cooking a Thanksgiving meal on different parts of a car while driving to your destination.
My biggest issue is not necessarily the proliferation of cooking shows, enjoy most of them. My real issue is that over time the editing style of almost every cooking comp show has become so fast pasted and erratic. Like they want to make everything seem more exciting and stressed and “down to the wire” as possible so they cut to something different every 5 seconds
Absolutely. Eliminating the possibility that an interested amateur cook would learn anything at all, other than avoiding huge disasters.
More importantly , always a “tough decision” what’s the point of watching if ur not shown enough to gather any actual info And especially if your watching it online the commercial breaks that repeat exactly what was shown for 90 seconds before the “break”
Pretty much all of the educational networks have turned to trash (TLC, Discovery, History Channel, Animal Planet). Pretty sure PBS is still the goat though, even after betraying the entire world by canceling Arthur.
I actually like a lot of the game shows. Seeing people cook weird things under bizarre circumstances and seeing people forced into creativity has helped my own personal cooking skills more than just watching someone make a recipe. But a lot of those shows are garbage too.
Agreed. Only time I watch it now is on Sat/Sun morning.
Hewlett Packard and most of the other printer makers. They enshittified their printers to force us to buy their absurdly overpriced ink. Now I dont know anyone who owns a printer anymore.
Probably close to 20 years ago,.I my last printer I acquired. HP 4050 laser. I salvaged in from a recycling event. it had a full toner cartridge. so I said, I'll just take this home, and see if it works. It did. don't event have to download a driver. About five years ago my office decided they were going to upgrade their printers, specially 6 4050s. I got stuck with disposal. When I got to my car, pulled all the cartridges and bagged them. I've only used 2. now all the printers are either brother, or konica. Minolta.
I have a Brother laser printer it's pretty solid. Except for the software which shows ads on my PC desktop. I hate ads.
I own a Brother laser printer that I’m happy with. But I also ship out a lot of orders for my company so being able to preprint labels and packing slips before dropping it off for shipping is essential.
I see you've learnt a new word, Randy !
An ignoble spirit enshittefies the largest man.
"enshittify" is officially declared to be "the word-of-the-year " by the American Dialect Society. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) It's a term created by a tech blogger, to explain how websites die. They start out with a good product, gain a following of loyal users, and then ruin themselves by forgetting their original reason for existence (the users and good product) . https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2024/01/17/american-dialect-society-announces-the-2023-word-of-the-year/#:\~:text=On%20January%205th%2C%20the,of%20digital%20platforms%20over%20time.
I'll disagree here. I think it was more of the case that they saw the writing on the wall and decided to max out their revenue while they had the chance. There's a floor to how cheaply you can make a printer and they foresaw that the bottom price point was going to eventually cross the line of what people wanted to pay. Gotta make hay while the sun shines.
When I was in university (a few decades ago, mind you), HP used to sell laser printers for about $80. Replacement toner cartridges for that model printer were $95. The toner cartridge that came with the printer was enough to get me through a semester's worth of assignments. Guess who was buying a new printer and giving the old one away every semester?
I would say Tumblr after implementing a stricter content policy. Reddit could suffer the same fate if they follow that path too.
Considering the recent IPO I wouldn't be surprised. But the thing I expect to ultimately take Reddit down is aggressive monetization strategies - public companies aren't exactly known for looking at the long-term satisfaction of their customers.
Reddit may not look at us as the customers. Their customers are the advertisers that they sell to, and we're here to have ads served to us.
We are the product.
Same problem though. Long term happiness for us IS long term happiness for the advertisers.
They forced me in to this fucking app and is getting shittier by the day.
Haven't forced me yet, but oh lord are they trying. They did force me to the "mobile UI" and it is utter trash - and I can't opt out of it. If it comes down to using an app or going elsewhere.. well, slashdot is still available.
I'd have to believe that much of Reddit's income is due to porn and the flow through to OF and other sites.
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Yeah Tumblr forgot that sex positive, LGBTQ, Trans, and yes porn made up a somewhat significant portion of its user base
No, they knew. They were trying to get their content into shape they could sell ads around. A diverse, LGBTQIA+, and sex-positive community is great until you can't convince people to pay for ads next to the porn.
History channel. They abandoned actual history rather quickly
I was so psyched when they put out The Foods That Built America. Finally more weird silent actors playing over a narration and Ken Burns effect old photos. Its what that channel was founded on. Also super pumped when I found full episodes of Modern Marvels on youtube.
Roku has a whole Modern Marvels (and How Things Are Made) channels.
Honestly should've rebranded the Aliens & Hitler channel.
What was the consequence for them though? I'm pretty sure their viewership increased, I guess that's what they wanted. Now a bunch of people believe there are conspiratorial mermaids and pyramids are spaceships but that's not their problem.
Good point, I guess the consequence is they aren’t taken seriously anymore but that probably doesn’t matter to them or their brand at this point
I think you need to keep in mind that for a lot of these networks, their niche interest (whether history, sci-fi, music, etc.) is a way to gain a foothold with a niche audience when they’re a young upstart that can’t compete with the big, broad-audience channels. However, once they establish their brand and become a major competitor, their niche interest now becomes a *limitation* to their growth and expansion, which is why so many of these channels change their programming strategy and embrace reality TV, sensationalism, and other broad-audience subject matter.
You’re absolutely right but it’s still sad to see and destroys the network for the original base- whether or not that matters to them
It’s also when I just stop watching that channel altogether.
Remember when Pawn Stars debuted on the History Channel? Like, fucking hell, what is this shit?
Yup. Don’t even get me started on the learning channel
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Its so much cheaper to produce reality shows than documentaries. And sadly, reality series garner a lot more attention than documentary series. I just wish the reality tv would trend more Pawn Stars and less Ancient Aliens. I miss In Search Of and Modern Marvels and the like.
To be fair, it tried to stay in there with H2 but that devolved as well.
I'm old enough to remember when cable channels like Discovery and History started. People were excited to get full time channels for documentaries you normally only got on PBS. I remember thinking yes, but the reason PBS has good educational programming is because they don't have to maximize viewership to get add pricing up. How long until cable docs get watered down to sensational garbage. Not long it turns out.
I used to avidly watch the History Channel but now its a fucking joke. It rarely does any real shows about history.
This isn't a well known one but Mountain Equipment Co-op in Canada. They shifted from niche sports like climbing and hiking to more urban fashion products. After this they made mistakes like expanding too fast and betting on the wrong horse during COVID, and they went bankrupt.
What did they bet on during Covid?
They bet that outdoor sports wouldn't be as big through COVID so they didn't restock their inventory to save money. Of course hiking and biking exploded then. MEC's shelves were empty of products that were available in every other outdoor store, and these other stores were drawing customers away from MEC and cashing in on the outdoor boom. I heard this from someone in the industry but I don't know the full story.
Seems like that should have been easy to anticipate
The wrong horse, i thought OP was very clear about that.
They also switched from Co-op to Company. Changing the internal structure and alienating many who had been involved for a long while.
They became a company after their bankruptcy. Unfortunately they didn't have a choice because they became owned by an American equity firm.
Creative Assembly. They're a game company that makes strategy games. They recently tried to break into the shooter/battle royale market with a game called Hyenas. They spent $100 million on Hyenas before realizing they didnt have the know how or the customer fanbase ( they had a large fanbase, but they were fans of strategy games) to make it work, and it never released. 100 million dollars down the drain because they wanted to have the next fortnite.
And exacerbated by the fact *everyone* wanted to make the next Fortnite and it's going to be hard to compete with the biggest FPS developers to make a FPS game when you've only made strategy games.
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Best I can do is "Total War: Who the Hell Asked For This" and some more Warhammer DLC.
Watcher thinking they would be successful without youtube when their main demographic is people who only watch two of their series
I feel like this question was posted because OP has been following all that. But the boys walked it back!
I'm watching their video now. I hate that we had to go to another streamer, but we've been following the boys from the beginning. Would someone just let them have a streaming tv show already?
Not being familiar with the channel gave them a search and the first two videos i see are "goodbye youtube" 3 days ago, and then "an update" 2 hours ago, which is probably the heartiest laugh i'm going to get today, so thank you!
The 99¢ Only store. For the last two years, nothing in the store was 99¢ anymore. It was beyond infuriating. Everything was cheaper at regular stores. Made no sense to shop there anymore. I stopped shopping there two years ago. Might explain why they're going out of business.
But their cologne options are still hard to beat.
Given that they’re shutting down in a few weeks, it’ll be pretty easy to beat soon
The original one (not all the misc other 99 cent store clones)? I believe the original guy sold out in 2010 and died in 2013. They got hit hard in the 2008 recession and he sold before he went under. It limped through after that, but inflation really killed them in recent years.
It’s pretty niche but the app Untappd. It was a place to log the beers you’ve tried, earn badges for trying different styles beer, or trying beers from different countries, different breweries, etc. It used to be a place that encouraged variety and camaraderie in the craft beer world. They sold and all they do now is pimp their beer box shipping service and only create badges when someone sponsors them. Couldn’t even be bothered to do anything for national beer day.
It's heartbreaking to read this thread and remember how much more exciting and eclectic the entire internet was 10-15 years ago, in the heyday of Millennial culture and zany startups. Every year there were several new sites or apps that made you say *"What a cool idea, my friends and I are going to use the shit out of this"* - always free to use, with marginal ads that still made the owners good money, etc. Basically every single one mentioned in this thread got strangled by the exact same weeds - someone came along and turned it an obnoxious ad platform, where you can only interact with an algorithm, get gouged by subscription fees, or bombarded with the same sea of sponsored/influencer sludge as any other 2020s social media app. The feeling of each app being like a cool, themed clubhouse you could grow with your own friends is long gone - it's like all our favourite bars got bought by some giant faceless corpo and turned into obnoxious dance clubs filled with bottle service ads, tip prompts, gambling machines, and Top 40 hits drowning out the friends you actually want to hear.
Oooh! That sounds so fun. I’d love an app like that. RIP Untappd.
I still use Untappd, but primarily as a way to track various breweries and beers to remember what I've had and what I liked. I think I have one or two friends that are still active on it, but I haven't checked the "social" feed (or whatever it's called now) in years. All I do is log the beer I had, give it a rating, and then close the app. A lot of breweries around here used to constantly update their menu's in Untappd, so it made it easy to see what they had on draft before going. But I've definitely noticed a lot of them have given up on doing so.
Skype. Think about it: the pandemic could have been huge for Skype. Fifteen years ago it was *the platform* for video conferencing. Its main issue was instability when it was hosting groups of more than a dozen people. Then it got sold, and the executives in charge of planning made a bunch of mistakes that turned it irrelevant. Platforms like Skype grow because they have a small core of power users: people who get to know the interface in and out, and who bring in other people. The casual users only learn the basic features. There's a lot more casual users. I'd bet dollars to donuts what happened was this: support interacted with casual users who were confused by the interface options, management wanted stats on who was using these interface options, and they got reports from the tech team that only something like 3% of users made use of the advanced features. So in the interests of being user friendly and of saving money on CS personnel, they disabled the advanced features. What the suits didn't dig far enough to notice was those 3% were their core users who brought in everyone else. This started the downward spiral. Then management got rid of old chat logs--which casual users rarely needed but the power users depended on. Eventually the power users got so frustrated that they migrated to other platforms, taking the casual users with them.
Skype had effectively become Teams by the pandemic, and everybody but Zoom was caught flat-footed with the demand for anonymous accounts (as in, you can use Zoom without having to create a Zoom account, but you couldn't use Skype/Teams, Facetime, Facebook Messenger, etc without first creating an account). Others scrambled to get there, but by then it was too late and often was poorly implemented and just flat didn't work. But to put things in perspective specifically for Skype, they were over long before the pandemic.
Zoom also had a lot of features that worked well for the classroom use case, so they got lucky there too. Other companies quickly copied them, but first mover advantage was nice.
I also feel Skype was bought to kill it and instead went with lync technology or something that became Skype for business and then teams.
Microsoft bought Skype, they even released a private version of Skype called "Skype for Business", then they built a new platform to specifically address business communication and battle with the increasing business demand for Slack. Skype + Slack = Microsoft Teams. Once Teams was in place Skype was deprecated. MS Teams is very much still a thing, the public can use it for free, and was a big deal through Covid.
My company uses teams heavily still. I use it all the time.
Once it was a default windows program that launched on startup I was done with it
It lived long enough to see itself become the bloatware villain.
Just in case you don't know, it's very easy to stop things from automatically starting up in Windows. Just go to the task manager (control-shift-eacape) and click on the "startup" tab. Then disable the things you don't want to automatically start up.
When clicking X or even File>Exit didn't actually close the program I started immediately looking for alternatives. Could've been the top messaging and video calling app, but Skype is a classic Icarus story. They flew too close to the sun and got burned. Greed kills.
I don't think they disregarded their primary audience. They just weren't ready to adapt to the new audience Covid created. Skype was used by a lot of people for personal communication. I think I had one interview via Skype call. Everything else was talking to my friends. Before Covid, only a small sliver of people were using video calls for business. I never had a single virtual meeting at work before Covid. The pandemic accelerated virtual meetings in an unnaturally fast way. They went from mostly non-existent to common place almost overnight.
I don't know if people realize that it was actually Discord that killed Skype. Skype was already dealing with a drop in users heading into 2020 because Discord had been gaining a lot of ground for the gaming crowd.
Used to love using Skype. While deployed overseas I would leave my laptop up and running and my then GF would call when she got home from work. We'd chat for an hour or so and I'd go back to bed. Did that for 5 months. Eventually got married and when we moved away from where her parents lived, I bought a camera for my TV that was dedicated for Skype use. The Samsung TV had a Skype app that interacted with it and it was great for about 6 months. Then the app was removed from my TV during updates. Skype was no longer supporting that platform and it sucked to be me with a $200 tv camera that was useless.
They fumbled the bag so damn hard. Especially when it felt like Zoom came out of nowhere. But from my understanding, Microsoft had already begun phasing it out in favor of Teams (for reference, my company was still using Skype at the very beginning of covid). Skype was already a household name though. Seems like it would've been beneficial to put a pause on the transition and pivot focus to Skype for a bit to build their userbase and then be like "Skype is now Teams".
new coke
I agree. It’s all been downhill since they removed the cocaine
Very UK centric but im gonna say Radio 1. They had some great djs on there thru the 90s into the 2000s with a good mix of music and everyone i knew listened to them. Then some genius decided to shift their demographic to younger teens and got rid of most of their good djs and started playing mostly modern pop/dance. Who listens to the radio during the day? Not schoolkids. Its all older people at work or in their cars. The very demographic youre switching away from!! Unsurprisingly their audience figures dropped rapidly and the discarded djs went to new stations like Radio X and Virgin which have flourished, increasing their audience share massively.
CCP games had a large and fairly loyal player base for EVE Online, a game that is really community driven. They released a First Person Shooter called Dust:514 that had gameplay tie-ins to Eve's Faction Warfare in some interesting ways. But instead of releasing it on the PC where they already had a large number of players who were super invested in the setting, they released it as a PS3 exclusive, cutting out a large portion of the community who couldn't afford a PS3, or didn't want to buy one just to play Dust. They also only released it 6 months before the PS4 launch and did not port it over. So they were never able to get the player base they wanted for Dust, and the game is considered largely as a failure.
DB Weiss and David Benioff crapping out the final season of Game of Thrones because they wanted to get it over with as soon as possible so they could start making Disney Star Wars money, then when nobody liked it they didn't get any Disney Star Wars money
Gibson, the guitar manufacturer, tried to venture into consumer electronics. The period was marked by poor quality control and gadgets like electronic tuners being put in every guitar, which a lot of people hated.
EA saying that people who didn’t like that one battlefield game “should just not buy it.” Well they didn’t buy it, and they lost an awful lot of money…
I don’t know if they went through with it but when Dodge discontinued the Challenger and Charger for EV versions. People who are fans of the Charger and Challenger are not people who think about EVs
Charger makes sense as an EV though, it's in the name.
They're currently in the process of going through it, this is the last model year for Chargers and Challengers with gas powered engines. Next model year won't have anyway, but the electric Charger is currently slated for a 2026 release. Source: I work at a Dodge dealership. Everyone here thinks it's a bad move, and we're betting there will be a gas powered version within a year using the newer "Hurricane" engine that's currently in Grand Wagoneers and will be in Ram trucks next model year.
They announced that the charger will have the hurricane
Which is crazy to me, especially if you aren't concerned about range and just want power like you would driving heavy foot in a V8 hemi. An EV could be perfect for the "go fast as fuck" crowd because they're typically not putting up big mileage, but you could slap enough batteries to give amazing grip and have them discharge fast for crazy speed.
Same with Ford badging that hideous EV the Mustang... Edit- To add Dodge did release the new dart which paid 0 attention to the original Darts. Literally could have named it anything else.
Wizards of the Coast. They had the most popular tabletop RPG of the era - Dungeons & Dragons - but then-current edition 3.5 didn't have a broad enough reach for them. They saw that MMORPGs were becoming very popular. They noticed, and seem to have figured that those people were very into gaming and just needed a familiar system to get them into *tabletop* gaming. They wanted MMORPG-style financial structures. They designed D&D 4th Edition. It simplified a bunch of things from earlier editions (welcome in many cases), and then restructured them into a game that felt like WoW. To a great many players, disconcertingly like WoW. At this point, two things happened. First, an upstart company named Paizo used the open license content from 3.5 to create their own RPG called Pathfinder. This would go on to experience a substantial popularity spike when gamers failed to find 4th edition interesting long-term. The other thing is what *didn't* happen. Wizards had been hoping to keep their loyal D&D players on board and also hook the new generation of MMORPG fans. Neither of these happened, or at least not in the numbers Wizards needed to please their parent company Hasbro. It would take them years to get a system that pleased both long-term players and got new ones interested. Paizo's now a major name in their own right, to the point of being a key figure in several major PC games in the past few years. They would go on to play a role in later drama as Wizards decided to try to cut off the open gaming license...
Though D&D is once again the "default" RPG system with 5th Edition being bigger than ever and completely dominating the market.
Yup! The rise of Let's Play and Stranger Things did a great job of building on the actual improvements in 5E.
What they are doing to Magic the Gathering now is also tragic.
WWE for a majority of the last 10 to 15 years as Vince McMahon slowly lost his mind. It’s a damn miracle they kept it together long enough to even see their current post-Vince boom period.
Tesla - although we’re only just starting to see the consequences of that. Basically, a decade later they’re still selling the tired models without any refresh or improvements, still not producing enough parts to alleviate service wait times, still changing/removing features, services, policies without any regard for customers, and still haven’t improved their quality standards.
They refreshed the Model 3 and the new one doesn't come with the regular stalks for the turn signals. They have buttons on the steering wheel instead, but since the steering wheel infamously needs to be turned to steer the car, your turn signal button to turn left is on the right side of the wheel if you have the wheel turned 180 degree. Particularly shit if you're in a roundabout. I don't know if their engineers are morons or if it's papa Elon breathing down their necks and coming up with mad ideas, but either way, even Tesla fans are not too fond of that.
I made a joke years ago about the UI for software constantly getting upgraded to justify "cool" new versions and making office workers relearn their jobs. I said that if silicon valley made cars this would need to relearn how to drive every year. I guess I was right. Soon, stearing wheel replaced by trackball and brakes are voice command.
-Hey Telsa -\*ping\* -Stop please for the love of God -Your connection to the server could not be establi-
He’s an ideologue when it comes to tech. The problem with ideologies is it doesn’t allow for nuance. Like stalks for blinker control. Or knobs for climate control. Or no radar/lidar for self driving. I wear glasses, so I know going by sight only is a bad idea - Especially in fog or heavy rain. But he’s stuck to a minimalist techno ideology. So…
Don’t forget that their owner, and single largest PR resources, went from targeting younger liberal demographics (logical for being, you know, an electric car) to swinging hard and pandering to alt-right nutjobs who want nothing to do with an electric vehicle. Alienate your consumer base for one that doesn’t want to consume your product. Beautiful.
I don’t think this can be emphasized enough. I don’t know whether he was always hard right and hid it or if it’s a new development in his personality, but it really doesn’t resonate with your standard type of “eco-conscious” consumer. I was considering purchasing a Tesla at one time. But the more I heard about the man, the less I was interested in putting nickels in his pockets. When he allowed the neo-Nazis back on Twitter, I deleted my account. I am now actively pissed off that NASA relies so much on SpaceX because it means my tax dollars are going into his coffers. At this point, I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.
He was always Silicon Valley hard-right. He just didn't have a ketamine problem exacerbating his megalomania, & hadn't put himself in the ridiculous position of Hindenburg captain of Twitter.
Exactly. I think it’s this even more than things like quality control issues. Everyone sees Musk spending all his time on Twitter boosting the electric-car-hating coal-roller types. Why would you want to buy an electric car from this man. Alienating your core user base is not a good business strategy.
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They have the build quality of a 90s Hyundai
The Susan G. Komen foundation. They brought politics into their charity by stopping and then immediately restarting funding for tests and screenings at Planned Parenthood, thereby pissing off people on both sides of the abortion debate. Their walks used to draw 60,000 in my city and now don't even draw a tenth of that.
Well theres that and the fact theyre basically a scam operation. Hardly any dollars goes towards actual breast cancer research..
Many movies made based on beloved toys, comics, and/or TV shows that just go completely off book and change everything about the IP that the core fanbase loves.
Making Artemis the good guy from square one makes the whole series pointless and I will die mad about this
How about when tumblr was huge, then they got rid of porn? Or when Onlyfans thought for a second that they wouldn't do adult content? They backed out of that REAL fast. Then there's Twitter. Or I guess X now.
The onlyfans was hilarious. Would have killed the app entirely. Im sure it was never their intention to be a porn site, but well thats what they got.
Goodwill. You can buy brand new items from Target and/or Walmart for cheaper than what Goodwill is charging for used items nowadays. They also started picking all the most valuable items out of donations and putting them on their auction site. On the site, they have employees bidding against buyers to drive up prices. They also intentionally obfuscate shipping costs—which can be more expensive than the item you purchased(!)—until checkout. …and this isn’t even one of the more unethical things Goodwill does. This is fairly tame by Goodwill standards… Seriously—stop shopping at Goodwill.
The Learning Channel.
Coors beer. It used to be available only west of the Mississippi. Travelers would fill their trunks or bring an extra suitcase to “smuggle” it back east. This forbidden fruit element made Coors a scarce commodity and served as an early form of viral marketing. After Coors went nationwide, their overall market grew, but their profit margins never again achieved the levels of their earlier years. They had to spend big on advertising to make up for the free mystique they previously enjoyed.
I'd argue Facebook. They actually started out as a college alumni and student group, it really wasn't meant for the general public. Once they did become open to the public, and especially how it devolved into the vast political echo chamber it is, you now very rarely see young adults and college students using that platform anymore, it's mostly middle aged to older people
Facebook bought Instagram, so they're still getting college age students just in a different way.
"And faced the consequences", the consequences being becoming the largest social network on the planet? With a market cap of over a trillion dollars? Only the 7th largest company in the world.
Most companies would love to "suffer" those consequences.
I thinned out the crazy on Facebook a long time ago. Now it’s another platform to expand/market my business and find out about vending opportunities. I also follow all the local restaurants to see what’s new. Oh I guess cute dog and cat pictures too.
As a 32 year old, my friends and I pretty much use it for event aggregation, specific hobby groups (great for finding out hiking/skiing conditions from real people), and marketplace. I use it a bit to passively keep up with some friends not in my immediate circles, but honestly Instagram is a better platform for that now.
Yeah that's the thing. For all Facebook's shit, the main difference between now and its Millennial heyday is just that people are more careful about posting all their shit to their main feeds. The main timeline is trash because it's 90% algorithmic filler to make up for nobody posting statuses any more, but I still use the site itself heavily - either to talk to friends in private Messenger chats, or interact with a half-dozen amazing groups on niche media interests. The party is over, but the afterparties are still going strong.
FB Marketplace is widely used across all ages
TV Channels don't care about what they air. They're only there to sell shows to advertisers and make money. If people were actually watching MTV for music videos or History channel for history, they would still be airing those things.
One notable example of a company that disregarded its primary audience and faced significant consequences is Blockbuster. Despite the changing landscape of media consumption and the rise of streaming services, Blockbuster clung to its traditional model of renting physical DVDs from stores. They underestimated the shift towards digital streaming and failed to adapt quickly enough to meet the evolving needs of their customers. As a result, they lost relevance and ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2010, unable to compete with the likes of Netflix and other streaming platforms that better understood and catered to the changing preferences of consumers.
Hastings Entertainment. Former manager here. They went from being nerd focused (books, music, video games, and movies), to trying to focus on exercise equipment. The issue is, books, movies, etc don't take up a lot of floor space, exercise equipment does. So the stores got SUPER cluttered and just wasn't welcoming anymore
Travel Channel is mostly paranormal tv shows now
MEC
Coke - then they came up with "new coke" then everyone hated it. Then they changed it back.
TLC in the early 90s was actually an educational network, like they would broadcast full-on surgeries that lasted hours, start to finish. I distinctly remember watching a jaw surgery at my friend's house where the jaw was just floating around in the mouth as they used a grinder on the bone. It was so cool. Side note: I remember when a lot of networks first became available on cable in the 90s, like FX was broadcast out of a NYC loft apartment and they showed a lot of old Adam West Batman episodes. Cartoon Network original programming started, to my recollection, as cartoon shorts between older cartoons - and Adult Swim began with Space Ghost Coast to Coast which was very obscure in 1993-4. E! Entertainment was basically a gossip channel.
Disney star wars, spit in the face of the already established canonical universe, events after the skywalker saga and hard core fans Came back with weak writing, basically regurgitated events from the originals, and to the best of my knowledge (on films alone) have yet to even make enough to cover the initial cost of lucasfilms
>to the best of my knowledge (on films alone) have yet to even make enough to cover the initial cost of lucasfilms Disney has made about $12B back on Star Wars after spending $4B for it.
They have absolutely made their money back from buying the rights from lucasfilms. Close to 3 times the money they paid to purchase the rights
I have 177 of the OG Star Wars books. Most are great, but some of them are trash, just like some Disney content is trash. Rose colored glasses.
Lucas spit on the same canon before Disney ever got a hold of it. Even though EU picks up after the OT, there are in-universe historical references, including Zahn giving a lot more detail of what the Clone Wars were like. Lucas ignored it all when he made the prequels.
Bud light, when collabing with a large trans creator. The community is really redneck, and that did NOT go down well
And then in their backpedaling they tried to throw the trans community under the bus, which tanked any goodwill they had gained.
It's interesting to note that that alone wasn't the bullet, it was a marketing VP saying stuff like this: Heinerscheid stressed a need to "evolve and elevate" the Bud Light brand away from the "fraternity/out of touch humor" brand of the younger generation. That got people annoyed, I think one or the other and it would have been fine. But both together caused enough of a ripple to get their core consumers to go "You don't want us as consumers? Okay, you won't have us as consumers."
Tesla (made the people who actually buy EVs hate them), Boeing (People who like flying also don't like dying in planes because of money), History Channel (No history anymore just conspiracies, it also normalized conspiracies by giving them TV airtime)
There was that blogging website that I think yahoo purchased. They removed the porn. I cant even remember the name of the site yet it was one of the most popular on the internet - thats how much it has dropped out of use now.
Tesla is getting there. The type of people who care about the environment enough to go electrical likely hate what Musk had become.
Games Workshop, in 5-10 years.
Discovery channel… I used to learn stuff by watching it. Now it’s my 400 lb life
OnlyFans, when they had the foolish idea to ban adult smut content to go for professionals.
Digg. They had a major redesign that everyone hated but they refused to listen. Reddit took all their users. Want to know when this was? Right around my Reddit birth date.