Because sometimes you just have to call shenanigans.
8. AINTITCOOLNEWS.COM
It started out as a cool website where you could find unbiased reviews and information on upcoming movies and television. Now it's owner and operator, Harry Knowles, (who looks like what would happen if an Orange Julius and a pile of tires had a baby) is so bought and sold by the studios that when he reviewed the movie Daredevil, he said this:
"Not since Christopher Reeve nailed SUPERMAN has an actor so beautifully capture the image, soul and charisma of a character drawn from the pages of comic books."
Really? I've taken shits that have more charisma than Ben Affleck in that movie. Every other critic HATED it, yet Harry gushed on for 3000 words. If you don't believe he's sold out, check out this screen shot from his review section of the site we took yesterday. Every review is positive. Don't be fooled by "The Mist" headline--it's actually Harry verbally fellating it.
7. PEREZHILTON.COM
I know, I know, how does a site that scribbles little droplets of semen coming from Britney Spears' mouth, jump the shark? By doing stuff other than that--that's how. Suddenly, Perez Hilton thinks people give a flying fuck about things he has to say other than celeb gossip, and he's started commenting on politics and music. Right. The only thing we want him to comment on is why he won't shut the hell up. Here's a rule: If your site shows a close up picture of Lindsay Lohan's vagina, you're not allowed to comment on Hillary Clinton's stance on health care reform.
6. JUMPTHESHARK.COM
JTS used to be a nice, straightforward website. Users would vote on when a classic TV show turned the corner and started to suck. It was a harsh, brutal, and clear-cut commentary on the TV world. Then it got bought by some big corporation and became my 12 year old sister's diary.
Dear TV shows,
I like you. I wish everything in the world was TV shows. I like TV shows more than I like sunsets and pretty ponies. Do you like me? I hope you do. Please don't ever die. You are my favoritest!
Love,
JumpTheShark.com.
And that's why the site sucks now. If you don't think they're biased, then why is half of their homepage taken up by some guy talking about "exciting show spoilers!." Take a look on the right of this screen shot.
5. ALL PAY PORN SITES
Can you remember the last time you paid money on the internet to masturbate? I can't, and let me tell you--I masturbate a lot. With youporn, porntube, redtube.com, and the like, there's enough free porn out there to satisfy all of China, if it was only inhabited by thirteen-year-old boys with portable lotion dispensers. Why should I pay $9.99 to get on a pay site when I can find a free site, with a search engine, that allows me to type in "boobs, huge, two girls, volleyball, Jeopardy," and get 48 videos? Don't try to answer that because you can't.
Nothing kills a boner like trying to type the three digit privacy protection code on the back of your credit card.
4. CNN.COM
Remember when cnn.com used to be about news? Now half the headlines are either about some dude who found out he was banging his long lost sister, or a story about a cat in Des Moines, Iowa that made a 911 call that saved Christmas. Again, below is a screen shot of their top headlines on the homepage from yesterday.
3. EBAUMSWORLD.COM
This used to be THE site for funny videos and pictures. In fact, there was a rumor that Eric Bauman was offered 100 million dollars for it and said no. That prompts me to start a new rumor: Eric Bauman is mentally retarded. If you've made your entire fortune from stealing other people's videos, how do you not forsee that maybe other companies might take your business model and kick the absolute crap out of it? Answer: See rumor I started above. Too slow to realize they should update every day and change their interface, eBaum's finally got the hint last year, but it was too late and no one cared.
2. MYSPACE.COM
Yes, Holy Taco has a myspace page, and every day I get the following friend request from some chick in a bikini named something like "Nadia". "Hey, I noticed you were on the site, just wanted to say hi! Myspace won't let me show my naked pics here, so come to my website!" If If I wanted porn, I'd go to a website or look in between my dad's mattress. And who could forget how awesome it is to go to someone's site, wait 15 minutes for it load the customized background picture of a unicorn flying, only to find when it does load, John Mayer's "Waiting on the World" immediately begins blasting out of my lap top. Somehow Myspace has tricked people in to thinking that everyone GIVES A SHIT about what their page looks like. This picture below makes my head want to explode.
1. AOL.COM
AOL used to own the internet. They were like the smoking hot chick in high school that everyone wanted to bang. Now you go back to your ten-year reunion and they're the overweight hag, who's carrying a child and asking you if she can "bum a smoke" as she attempts to lick some dried mayonnaise off her face. AOL's been so bought out by large corporations and networks that their news coverage and search engines are total shit. Look at this screen shot from today of their "hot searches." Really? Comanche Moon, a TV movie on CBS is your top hot search and you call yourself a reliable search engine?
AOL is actually a proxy server, and your not ON the web, your on the AOL Server which gets stuff FROM the web.. So, AOL actually means America OFF Line... Just like Rogers in Canada.
Fark.com totally belongs on this list. It was pretty cool when it first came out, but now it's turned into one big steaming pile. Haven't been back in over two years and will never go back again. RIP Fark.
Have you seen how bad JTS is now after it's corporate "re-design"? Sheesh, there are no user votes or anything, and you are basically looking at a gossip blog- no individual shows unless TV guide writes a fluff piece about them. It's the ultimate Shark Jump-!!! Luckily some fans made a new site www.bonethefish.com in March of 2009, they actually put a "Jumptheshark.com" category to vote on when that now sad sack website (formerly great) boned the fish!!
I have a friend who started a website from nothing and until the end it turned out to be great business and he became operator and how it makes a lot of money through the magazines that are posted there. It`s nice to be viewed but it`s not easy to reach that step nowadays. The company paying him for magazines sold like 500 Memory Foam Mattress only because of him.
Fark.com has definitely jumped. They've sold out many aspects of the site to their sponsors and censoring threads as said sponsors see fit (and not the usual porn or profanity, but points of view). The moderators practice a very targeted form of trolling through the headlines but will not tolerate polite or constructive criticism - deleting such posts for "trolling."
Totally agree with the cnn.com statement. When they redid their website a year ago, that was it. No more news...just celeb sightings and fluff. They even have "news" from the onion on the front page!
Now my site for national news, even US news, is http://news.bbc.co.uk/ They have more real news in one quarter of their front page than CNN could fit in their entire wannabe news site.
I've been a member since late 2000. In fact one of the first few hundred to register an account.
And there's a lot of instances when we could claim that Fark had jumped the shark, but no doubt the final nail in the coffin (indeed it was a seething mass of sharks in a pool, which included at least one of each species) is when they trademarked "NSFW". And it became what it once mocked.
Umm.. AOL always was jsut a giant virus... MySpace has always been crap.. CNN is run by idiots... and the same gose for everything else on the list.. OHH and the whole paying for porn thing... thats just wrong to ask someone to do...
What about (writing porntube, redtube, youporn on sticky note) TSG? They've sold out to Hollywood, if that's not an indication that they're about to JTS, I don't know what is.
I agree, I'm surprised anyone would mention Spymac, but they turned to total trash since about 2-3 years ago, with the Fricken "Spymac Leapfrog" crud, and revoking free email after a promise of "free 1GB email before Gmail offers it for life!"
The founder of the site bailed out and now I'm paying for a service that doesn't work and nobody will help.
Aint it Cool would be higher on my list: I used to love that website, but it is so shit now
Witness the headline: "Understated, noble & tres cool... JJ's STAR TREK fake teaser blasts through the tubes of the Internets!". It's FAKE, you bunch of idiots!
for anyone who is sick of myspace's bullturds, check out my article on "how i killed my myspace", it includes handy dandy directions for giving myspace the finger without ditching your friends who use it to message you. http://amirblogue.wordpress.com/2008/01/12/how-i-killed-my-myspace/
I don't agree with AOL as they were the original Internet newbs right out of the gate; anything they've done to date HAS to be an improvement.
CNN.com and USATODAY.com are both shark worthy as they more closely resemble a tabloid/paid political fodder site more than that of an unbiased news reporting agency (if either were ever that)...
Good list, but you somehow forgot "Television Without Pity", which since the Bravo takeover has devolved into colorful crappy rantings about reality shows.
AOL was for people that couldn't get the REAL internet, which was available mainly on college campuses in the 80's.. AOL was one of the LAST online services to allow real internet access and e-mail to the outside world. So though it may have had all the features and a graphical interface, it was an island separated from the rest.
And boy did USENET start to suck when they let the AOL people loose on it.
Digg has jumped as well because of all the "fads", and the ronbots, but Facebook is now more social I don't see that as a problem, it can become a more "young corporate" site.
Personally I stopped going to slashdot, after all the political commentary and non "nerd" news, so for me that's jumped too.
AOL was Q-Link back in the day (80's). I was a SysOp for a BBS before the net became what it is - good times. But for a kid in my teens at the time, it was a bit too expensive to subscribe.
To add to the mix - another website that jumped: WIRED.com
AOL was never cool. Yes, it relied heavily on graphics that s-l-o-w-e-d e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g d-o-w-n, but it was an isolated communty of non-educated users, who did not realize that there were not even on the internet. Hmm, it still is.
AOL was the web before the web...in the 80s? That's not really correct - AOL didn't really get started until '94 or so. I think you are referring to CompuServe (which had GUI elements from '92 or so) and Prodigy - those were the real OGs. AOL's big breakout was more '95 or '96 or so.
Nice article - I regularly read only cnn, AICN and jumptheshark before they spiraled off into suckitude but I agree with your observations about those, so I'll hop on for the others as well.
The comment about Harry Knowles = Orange Julius + pile of tires is the Coke-Spitting Quote Of the Day.
Actually, those of you who are saying that AOL was never cool are completely wrong. You're probably just too young to have ever seen it, because its decline started early. AOL WAS THE WEB BEFORE THERE WAS A WEB (in the 80s)...it put a graphical face on online communication. Among other things, they had perfected the chat room. But, when they web came along, AOL started losing ground fast...they made a lot of mistakes by trying to hang on to their content instead of making it available on the web, and then they flooded the world with floppy discs and then CDs in trying to regain their prior level of dominance. But they had made fatal errors by then, and it was too late. They've been a shell for a very long time. But there was a time when it was them and NO ONE ELSE. Back when AOL started, Compuserve was still text based. Bulletin boards (BBS's) were the only online community. AOL was mostly point-and-click grphics. You were just born too late to have seen all the fun... ;-)
Oh gawd, you could go on forever about sites that have taken a turn for the worst: Break.com, Craigslist.org, amazon.com, ebay.com, pffsh.... how about we just do *.com and be done with it.
(75 Comments)
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July 29th, 2008 at 08:27 am
"where else can you find out about crazy religious songs and strippers and potato chips?! Didn't think so..."
actually, cracked.com is almost just like this site. with a lot of random lists and such. just thought i'd put that out there.
February 25th, 2009 at 02:37 pm
AOL is actually a proxy server, and your not ON the web, your on the AOL Server which gets stuff FROM the web.. So, AOL actually means America OFF Line... Just like Rogers in Canada.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Fark.com totally belongs on this list. It was pretty cool when it first came out, but now it's turned into one big steaming pile. Haven't been back in over two years and will never go back again. RIP Fark.
April 29th, 2009 at 05:38 am
Have you seen how bad JTS is now after it's corporate "re-design"? Sheesh, there are no user votes or anything, and you are basically looking at a gossip blog- no individual shows unless TV guide writes a fluff piece about them. It's the ultimate Shark Jump-!!! Luckily some fans made a new site www.bonethefish.com in March of 2009, they actually put a "Jumptheshark.com" category to vote on when that now sad sack website (formerly great) boned the fish!!
May 21st, 2009 at 06:17 am
I have a friend who started a website from nothing and until the end it turned out to be great business and he became operator and how it makes a lot of money through the magazines that are posted there. It`s nice to be viewed but it`s not easy to reach that step nowadays. The company paying him for magazines sold like 500 Memory Foam Mattress only because of him.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Fark.com has definitely jumped. They've sold out many aspects of the site to their sponsors and censoring threads as said sponsors see fit (and not the usual porn or profanity, but points of view). The moderators practice a very targeted form of trolling through the headlines but will not tolerate polite or constructive criticism - deleting such posts for "trolling."
April 15th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Please visit jesus-is-lord website.
Thank you.
January 25th, 2008 at 05:04 am
RE: AOL web page.
Must......resist......checking......hot search.......who......is.....tony......romo
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:51 am
What about Facebook?
January 18th, 2008 at 03:04 pm
Totally agree with the cnn.com statement. When they redid their website a year ago, that was it. No more news...just celeb sightings and fluff. They even have "news" from the onion on the front page!
Now my site for national news, even US news, is http://news.bbc.co.uk/ They have more real news in one quarter of their front page than CNN could fit in their entire wannabe news site.
January 17th, 2008 at 09:11 pm
www.fark.com should have been on this list.
I've been a member since late 2000. In fact one of the first few hundred to register an account.
And there's a lot of instances when we could claim that Fark had jumped the shark, but no doubt the final nail in the coffin (indeed it was a seething mass of sharks in a pool, which included at least one of each species) is when they trademarked "NSFW". And it became what it once mocked.
January 17th, 2008 at 07:21 am
Umm.. AOL always was jsut a giant virus... MySpace has always been crap.. CNN is run by idiots... and the same gose for everything else on the list.. OHH and the whole paying for porn thing... thats just wrong to ask someone to do...
January 16th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Some funny shit...
January 16th, 2008 at 09:22 pm
What about (writing porntube, redtube, youporn on sticky note) TSG? They've sold out to Hollywood, if that's not an indication that they're about to JTS, I don't know what is.
PS->notes weren't sticky before I sat down.
January 16th, 2008 at 07:42 pm
@chauncey
I agree, I'm surprised anyone would mention Spymac, but they turned to total trash since about 2-3 years ago, with the Fricken "Spymac Leapfrog" crud, and revoking free email after a promise of "free 1GB email before Gmail offers it for life!"
The founder of the site bailed out and now I'm paying for a service that doesn't work and nobody will help.
January 16th, 2008 at 07:20 pm
"...overweight hag, who’s carrying a child and asking you if she can “bum a smoke” as she attempts to lick some dried mayonnaise off her face."
That's AWESOME! Too funny!
January 16th, 2008 at 05:47 pm
The internet is for porn.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645
January 16th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
HOLY MOLY! A celeb gossip site with no celeb gossip, it's now frequented by unfunny students and dole scum.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Where the hell is break.com ? thats atleast top 5 ...
January 16th, 2008 at 08:33 am
Aint it Cool would be higher on my list: I used to love that website, but it is so shit now
Witness the headline: "Understated, noble & tres cool... JJ's STAR TREK fake teaser blasts through the tubes of the Internets!". It's FAKE, you bunch of idiots!
January 16th, 2008 at 03:18 am
for anyone who is sick of myspace's bullturds, check out my article on "how i killed my myspace", it includes handy dandy directions for giving myspace the finger without ditching your friends who use it to message you. http://amirblogue.wordpress.com/2008/01/12/how-i-killed-my-myspace/
January 16th, 2008 at 01:11 am
The porn sites one is kinda accurate...
January 15th, 2008 at 08:39 pm
I laughed, I cried then I masterbated to the article. All in all pretty fucking good.
January 15th, 2008 at 07:31 pm
Your analogous description of AOL is soooo funny. Good list and great writing!
January 15th, 2008 at 07:30 pm
I agree that the list is pretty good. What about this site http://www.arbonne.cosmetics-4me.info they never really got going...
January 15th, 2008 at 06:35 pm
And facebook
January 15th, 2008 at 05:59 pm
I don't agree with AOL as they were the original Internet newbs right out of the gate; anything they've done to date HAS to be an improvement.
CNN.com and USATODAY.com are both shark worthy as they more closely resemble a tabloid/paid political fodder site more than that of an unbiased news reporting agency (if either were ever that)...
January 15th, 2008 at 04:37 pm
Good list, but you somehow forgot "Television Without Pity", which since the Bravo takeover has devolved into colorful crappy rantings about reality shows.
January 15th, 2008 at 04:15 pm
AOL was for people that couldn't get the REAL internet, which was available mainly on college campuses in the 80's.. AOL was one of the LAST online services to allow real internet access and e-mail to the outside world. So though it may have had all the features and a graphical interface, it was an island separated from the rest.
And boy did USENET start to suck when they let the AOL people loose on it.
January 15th, 2008 at 03:38 pm
Truth in every way.
Digg has jumped as well because of all the "fads", and the ronbots, but Facebook is now more social I don't see that as a problem, it can become a more "young corporate" site.
Personally I stopped going to slashdot, after all the political commentary and non "nerd" news, so for me that's jumped too.
January 15th, 2008 at 03:07 pm
very good commentary - make a video of it and put it on each site and see whats what lmao
January 15th, 2008 at 02:42 pm
How about Google? www.google.com
Used to be a search engine, now a horehouse.
January 15th, 2008 at 02:22 pm
This list wasn't thought out very well. You forgot McIGN, Digg being taken over by Ronbots, and Facebook opening up to everybody.
January 15th, 2008 at 01:35 pm
@calenti & chuck
AOL was Q-Link back in the day (80's). I was a SysOp for a BBS before the net became what it is - good times. But for a kid in my teens at the time, it was a bit too expensive to subscribe.
To add to the mix - another website that jumped: WIRED.com
January 15th, 2008 at 01:32 pm
10 years after i still hate AOL with a passion.
January 15th, 2008 at 01:29 pm
Television Without Pity should be on that list about eight times.
January 15th, 2008 at 01:27 pm
AOL was never cool. Yes, it relied heavily on graphics that s-l-o-w-e-d e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g d-o-w-n, but it was an isolated communty of non-educated users, who did not realize that there were not even on the internet. Hmm, it still is.
January 15th, 2008 at 01:08 pm
timmy!
January 15th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I used to be a homeless rodeo clown but now I am a world class magician !
January 15th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Haha! A good list :) !
January 15th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
AOL was the web before the web...in the 80s? That's not really correct - AOL didn't really get started until '94 or so. I think you are referring to CompuServe (which had GUI elements from '92 or so) and Prodigy - those were the real OGs. AOL's big breakout was more '95 or '96 or so.
Nice article - I regularly read only cnn, AICN and jumptheshark before they spiraled off into suckitude but I agree with your observations about those, so I'll hop on for the others as well.
The comment about Harry Knowles = Orange Julius + pile of tires is the Coke-Spitting Quote Of the Day.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
LOL! I agree. EBAUMSWORLD.COM used to be one of my faves but not now.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I fear for LOLcats. They are holding strong, but I know there will come a day when they are a viable entry to this list.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
s810, read much? Myspace is on the list.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:51 am
and yet no one dares to put facebook and myspace on the list?
January 15th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Actually, those of you who are saying that AOL was never cool are completely wrong. You're probably just too young to have ever seen it, because its decline started early. AOL WAS THE WEB BEFORE THERE WAS A WEB (in the 80s)...it put a graphical face on online communication. Among other things, they had perfected the chat room. But, when they web came along, AOL started losing ground fast...they made a lot of mistakes by trying to hang on to their content instead of making it available on the web, and then they flooded the world with floppy discs and then CDs in trying to regain their prior level of dominance. But they had made fatal errors by then, and it was too late. They've been a shell for a very long time. But there was a time when it was them and NO ONE ELSE. Back when AOL started, Compuserve was still text based. Bulletin boards (BBS's) were the only online community. AOL was mostly point-and-click grphics. You were just born too late to have seen all the fun... ;-)
January 15th, 2008 at 11:32 am
your forgot about digg, from what i can see, looks like they sold their soul to apple... haha
January 15th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Oh gawd, you could go on forever about sites that have taken a turn for the worst: Break.com, Craigslist.org, amazon.com, ebay.com, pffsh.... how about we just do *.com and be done with it.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:20 am
For those of us who were already online, the day AOL opened up to the net was the day the net jumped the shark.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Man, you are blessed with gift to be an evil and talented writer! HolyTaco goes directly into bookmarks.