Websites that have been Overshadowed by Controversy.
- Out of all the social media sites, forums and image boards, 4chan is definitely one of the most infamous. While the impact this website has had on the internet, for good and for ill, is immeasurable, even in its early days, it was seen as a feedback loop of violently anti-social behaviour, manageable only so long as you didn't go out of your way to provoke them (especially not /b/). This changed around 2014, when users' resentment over the burgeoning social justice movement boiled over into unprovoked harassment and attacks, including doxxing several high-profile figures, inciting violence, and raiding tumblr with extremely NSFW pictures over two tumblr users scolding them for misogyny. They were also infamous for supporting several subs which were laden with homophobia, antisemitism, racism, and many other hateful and extremist views.
- 8chan splintered off from 4chan after the latter's owner hired moderators who would actually do their jobs; it was infamous for taking all of 4chan's various cultural issues and amplifying them tenfold, to the point that Cloudflare eventually cut their service for rampant hate speech, stochastic violence, and hosting of child sexual abuse material.
- Reddit is going to be known for a lot of things, both good and bad, but the bad has definitely left a stain on the site. Examples include:
- The disastrous fall of the subreddit r/antiwork, where one of the mods went on a news interview to defend the movement only to make themselves and the subreddit come off as a bunch of lazy people; this disaster resulted in the subreddit blocking users for a few days to fix things after they tried (and failed) to defend the mod who gave the interview.
- The botched attempt to find the culprits of the Boston Marathon bombing
, which falsely accused a missing dead man (who seemed to have died way before the bombing) of being one of the bombers, to the point of harassing his family. - Lastly, the incident in which r/conspiracy users, who were suspicious of a daycare building that looked strange, took pictures of the building and through the windows, broke into the building and even left bad reviews that caused damage to the daycare's reputation. It was soon realized the daycare was, in fact, safe.
- Cartoon Brew is a news website that was initially popular among animation fans for publishing articles, commentaries, and reviews about the animation industry. However, in subsequent years, the website became better known for the petty and caustic behavior of co-creator Amid Amidi. Such incidents involving Amidi include making biased and often slanderous criticisms towards various animators and networks in the industry, note organizing a petition to stop people from drawing Rule 34 of Zootopia, pushing for the cancellation of The Loud House following its creator's termination for sexual harassment despite the rest of the show's staff and cast being completely innocent, infamously giving a negative review to a plate, and having an apparent belief that animation as a whole is dead. All of these factors have made him, and the blog as a whole, a complete pariah among the animation community.
- GoAnimate/Vyond is probably best known for the infamous "Grounded" videos and founder Alvin Hung's apparent attempts to stop more of them from being made.
- G2A.com is a website where people can buy and sell unredeemed Steam game keys, usually at a much lower price than usual, which has been embroiled in controversy following accusations of fraud and incompetence:
- Despite billing itself as a reliable source for reselling game keys, the company's lack of oversight has turned it into a quasi-black market. The absence of any authentication means that many of the keys sold on G2A were originally pirated or purchased using stolen credit cards, forcing developers to shoulder the burden of refunding customers. The company's impact has become so detrimental that many indie developers would rather see their games be pirated rather than purchased through G2A. The site still manages to attract many customers thanks to its low prices, but in most gaming communities, mentioning that you bought a game on G2A is practically begging for people to call you out.
- G2A is also infamous for its many poorly-disclosed extra fees. Many people have reported buying a few games on the site, only to be charged some monthly fees later on without knowing how to cancel them, or being flat-out unable to cancel due to accidentally locking themselves out of their account. Specific examples include G2A Shield, a premium subscription providing faster customer support if you buy a non-functional key, which is easy to accidentally subscribe to and was notoriously tricky to cancel, and an inactivity fee deducted from your site funds if you spend too long without logging in (supposedly to cover the costs of keeping your account on their servers, even though the 1€ per month they charge is several orders of magnitude more than it would cost to just keep the inactive account in their database).
- The Harry Potter Lexicon was one of the two largest fan websites for the Harry Potter series while the books were still running (MuggleNet being the other). Shortly after the book series concluded, the site became overshadowed by a copyright infringement scandal dubbed "Lexicongate". The webmaster was trying to get the site's content published as a Harry Potter reference book, but it was discovered that he was trying to do it without series creator J. K. Rowling's permission. When the site's creator complained about how hard it was to compile all the information into a book, Rowling quipped back "I know, I wrote most of it."
- Kiwi Farms is a forum that spun out from the CWCki Forums that promotes itself as a site for discussing eccentric and problematic individuals online. However, it's far better known for numerous reports of stalking, doxxing, cyberbullying, ableism, transphobia, and other bigoted views and extreme activities, as well as being linked to the suicide of at least three individuals. A high-profile campaign by Canadian Twitch streamer Keffals following her own doxxing and harassment led to Cloudflare blocking the site in 2022 and various news sites labeling it as a hate group.
- The Mary Sue was once a respected hub for geeky news with a feminist bent, reaching particular prominence during the Depression Quest controversy, where it became known as one of the few sites where the subject could be discussed safely due to its active moderation. Its reputation started to decline with the departures of its founding staff, including Jill Pantozzi and Rebecca Pahle; the new regime, headed by Teresa Jusino, made heavy cutbacks to the site's features, attempted to move the site to a subscription model (ostensibly to pay for new features that never materialized), and became notorious for putting out articles with controversial takes, apparently for no other reason than to generate controversy and attract clicks (most infamously, Jusino herself penned a piece defending the use of Bury Your Gays on The 100).
- Following Jusino's departure, the site came under the leadership of Jessica Mason and Rachel Leishman, whose personal peccadillos (Mason banned many of the site's longtime commenters for criticizing her, while Leishman constantly fawns over Tom Holland and calls him her "son") have overshadowed any discussion of the site's articles.
- Further controversy arose in 2020 when in response to a question about terrible working conditions in digital media, Pantozzi and Pahle came forward and revealed that TMS had severely underpaid them, that parent company Abrams Media forced Pantozzi to do a video discussion on sister site Mediaite about Game of Thrones (in which Pantozzi was the designated feminist critic) and then failed to protect her from the inevitable flood of trolls, and that after Pantozzi and Pahle left, the editor who replaced them was paid even less than they were. Pantozzi summed up her feelings thusly: "On the outside, the appearance of The Mary Sue in the industry was one of wild success, a niche market being served to by talented writers and editors who knew what they were doing. Inside we were being taken advantage of and miserable. I wish I had left sooner."
- It's often hard to discuss anything related to Nintendo's Miiverse without bringing up the site's strict policy and administration system. Most infamously, mentions of the high profile Game Mod Project M were declared "criminal activity" and met with a ban, and allegations quickly emerged claiming that people were getting automatically banned just for making posts that included the initialism "PM"— which more people were using to denote the time of day than reference the mod. Miiverse became even more controversial in July 2015, when the site was revamped from the ground up to make a daily post limit and a crackdown on topics that didn't relate to gaming, in an attempt to cut down on spam and other forms of abuse. This immediately caused the site to gain the ire of anyone on the site who wasn't a hardcore gamer (as the site was popular among image-board users, artists and roleplayers), and resulted in users having to tread carefully on Miiverse for the remainder of its lifetime. The controversy regarding Miiverse is likely why the site was not given Nintendo Switch support in favor of Twitter and Facebook integration, as well as being the most likely factor in its eventual shutdown in November 2017 (which itself was also met with scrutiny due to a good amount of Wii U titles making considerable use of Miiverse integration in gameplay).
- RockYou was a website initially known for widgets and apps for sites like MySpace and Facebook, but are now known for their data breach in 2009, when 32 million passwords were exposed in part because the site stored them in plaintext. Nowadays the RockYou name is associated more with the publicly available password list more than the site itself.
- The Sailor Moon fan website "Save our Sailors" torpedoed their already-shaky reputation with their "Prince Uranus" theory, which posited that the Sailor Uranus seen in-series was actually the (non-existent) Prince of Uranus, reincarnated as a woman after his sister transferred her powers to him; the site went so far as to wrongly claim that this was Naoko Takeuchi's intention for Sailor Uranus and that "many" Japanese fans didn't accept Uranus and Neptune as a queer female couple. Save Our Sailors was not criticized for this blatantly homophobic (even for 1998) theory so much as they were nuked from orbit; to this day, it's the only thing anyone remembers about the site.
- The Top Tens is a pretty average ranking list site. However, many people outside of the site tend to bring up its many infamous lists that have attracted attention for being intolerant (especially lists to do with countries), the administration and policy system which is regarded as being very lackluster eventually leading to a massive doxxing incident that ended with a majority of users deleting their accounts to prevent them from getting their location compromised, with one committing suicide, and the Broken Base between pop fans and rock fans.
- Tumblr as a whole was one of the most popular and commonly used social media websites on the Internet, thanks to its embrace of pop-culture, easy-to-manage dashboards, the ability to tag one's posts to allow easier access to specific content and wide appeal to specific content creators. However, in November 2018, the site's app was removed from the Apple store after the site was discovered to have contained child pornography. The staff responded by terminating various NSFW accounts that said pornography was linked to. Unfortunately, they went overboard and also terminated other NSFW blogs that were otherwise harmless. This fully came to a head one month later with an announcement that the site would no longer allow adult content. As Tumblr was one of the very few prominent blogging sites that allowed explicit content, this announcement inevitably upset many NSFW content creators. Some users were on board with this, since it would eliminate things like child porn and incest porn. However, the site's faulty filter bots began flagging everything but adult content, such as harmless LGBT posts and the site's own official announcement blogs. Ironically, one of the posts showing what sort of NSFW content would still be allowed was flagged by these bots as inappropriate. Those who were still active on Tumblr following the first crackdown saw this as the final straw, with many either leaving Tumblr altogether or taken to alternative websites note . To really pour salt on the wound, it turned out that the whole thing was being planned months in advance and that the reason was less about removing dangerous people or illegal content, but about the ease of advertising on the site. However, the timing of the announcement could not have been worse. This was presumably why Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic for an undisclosed amount that was reportedly only $3 million in 2019, a massive drop from its $1.1 billion price sticker when Verizon had bought it six years earlier.
- The Scots version of Wikipedia is overshadowed by the 2020 discovery that a huge chunk of its articles were written by an American teenager who didn't speak Scots, which led to a lot of discussion about subjects like whether Scots is a legitimate language or just a dialect of English, how this incident could happen, how harsh people should be on the teenager in question, and what the fate of the wiki should be.
- Most discussions about YouTube since The New '10s have revolved around their tricky relationships with content creators and advertisers:
- For creators, YouTube's infamously broken copyright systems and their general phasing out of home-grown creators in favor of celebrities and mainstream media have given YouTube the reputation of being one of the least creator-friendly platforms on the internet.
- For advertisers, YouTube's failings to properly moderate their content and their biggest creators getting wrapped up in controversies has given the platform a reputation of being a place for conspiracy theories, inappropriate content, and controversial figures, leaving it an unsafe place for advertisers to place their ads. This controversy directly led to two "Adpocalypse" incidents where advertisers withdrew support for YouTube, drawing the ire of smaller creators whose incomes were rendered practically frozen as a result of these actions and leading to the content moderation controversy spilling over into the site's broader userbase.
- YouTube is also heavily controversial among the LGBT community due to allegations of the site engaging in pinkwashing, note demonetizing any videos that mentioned any LGBT-centric language and imagery in the title, description, or thumbnail, and actively endorsing anti-LGBT YouTubers such as political commentators Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro.
- YouTube is also notorious for giving large creators who have violated their terms of service a slap on the wrists and doing nothing to deplatform them or anything of the sort, such as with James Charles (who groomed a 16 year-old fan) and Logan Paul (who infamously posted a dead body on his channel, and survived demonetization, only to scam his audience on multiple occasions with crypto projects).
