Where are they now? The rise and fall of cracked.com

Get your dentures ready, stir some metamucil into your monster and make sure you got some fresh depends on, you old fricks, it's time to reminisce.

If you were speds like me and @garlicdoors you probably spent time reading content online instead of touching grass and playing sports or whatever kids did before ritalin, e scooters and tiktok Youtube didn't exist yet, video hosting was incredibly expensive and IRC was still king. If you werent fortunate enough to have or borrow a credit card and get onto the somethingawful forums, you were relegated to free sites.

In no particular order, I remember spending a massive amount of time on

bleacheatingfreaks

brunchingshuttlepeepees

McSweeneys Internet Tendency

The Somethingawful front page

The Mirth Canal

Collegehumor

Pointless Waste of Time

Maddox's Best Page in the Universe

Between all of those SA and PWOT were the ones that ate up most time by a huge margin. Maddox was in the top 3 but as a one man show his updates were less frequent. SA had an incredible archive of B list movie reviews, bizarre indie games and actually funny content. Every english speaking nerdy weirdo would have had some contact with SA in these years. The forums were like an neurodivergent library of alexandria. Meanwhile, the front page had Fashion SWAT, WTF D&D, roamin' dad and various short stories alongside the weekend web, where they'd showcase bizarre web1.0 sites.

PWOT had a front page that in my opinion was as good and often better than SA. The content was better written, even though it was slightly more normie pilled. The forums were less active and worse, but the routinely good articles made up for it.

At some point likely around 2004/2005 Cracked, a print magazine that had historically played second fiddle to MAD magazine, decided to retool its content for the web. Who made this choice, I don't know, but they were absolutely prescient about the future of content and their decision would without exaggeration change internet content entirely.

Before cracked the entire idea of content was different. Longform articles were king. Most websites were text with few pictures, hand written in HTML and still mostly called web logs as the term blog didn't exist yet. Most of this was due to bandwidth constraints. Anyone who was online at the time was on dialup, and complex content alienated your viewerbase, not only were load times glacial but it wasn't uncommon for internet to be charged by the kilobyte.

Maddox's content was pretty emblematic of the time.

It was just words, maybe a jpg. The format began to change with the advent of DSL and digital cameras, and so content diversified. Something changed and hosting costs became trivial and websites took full advantage. No longer could you store an entire web ring on a single floppy diskette.

The blogosphere took off but content was still esoteric and cozy. I remember this one guy who lived by the mexican border and would post weird mexican grocery store products, or this one nerd who designed a 555 timer circuit to trigger the camera he attached to his cat's collar. Now you can probably find thousands of hours of cat POV content but he might have been the only one to do it back then.

What does this have to do with Wong? He had cultivated a large following on PWOT and had by this time written at least one novel. His work ethic was admirable and he posted regularly and as far as I know wasn't involved in drama. He wasn't irony poisoned or egomaniacal, like Lowtax or maddox.

Him and most, if not all, of the PWOT writers were hired on by cracked. At first the articles followed the standard format at the time:

But some point around 2006 Wong struck gold with the Listicle format. Normies were flooding the net now, everyone was on facebook, eternal september was irreversible. Youtube was taking off and most sites were pivoting to video. Most notably CH and the Onion, who's content then declined dramatically imo.

It's fun to shit on listicles now but 2006 era cracked was good. The authors wrote long, informed and entertaining articles about all kinds of weird trivia. Traffic to cracked skyrocketed, proto redditors flocked to the site. There were still some essay posts and older style content at this time, but it was getting rarer. The format got clicks, and other sites took note. Almost overnight it seemed that the entire internet was just listicles.

But cracked's golden age wouldn't last. The content soon turned entirely to listicles and the well ran dry. I'm not sure if they ran out of good writers (how many people can condense an entire 101 history course into 6 funny paragraphs?) or if Wong saw that normiepilled content drove more views. Soon the topics were exclusively vidya, comics and pop culture.

Apparently it still pays the bills and Wong is still executive director and has not done anything notable since, to my knowledge. The site exists but the content is the worst it has ever been: