Note: This article lists examples which take place within fandoms; not TV Tropes' opinion as to whether a change is for the worse. TV Tropes doesn't have opinions. The focus is on over-reaction about minor changes.
- All Your History Are Belong To Us was a Machinima series that detailed the history of video game franchises and developers. Once the original creator (who also did the voice work) Rob Talbert left and some new guys were brought on, the Replacement Scrappy vibe was undeniable. The show never really recovered before it was cancelled.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd:
- Old-school fans have lamented the diminishing "Angry" aspect of James Rolfe's character, in which more of his Real Life personality becomes inserted into the videos. Some of this can be attributed to Rolfe not wanting people to project the Nerd onto him as much, as well as his workload (especially The Movie) making it harder to do regular episodes with the same enthusiasm. Much of this led to the creation of James and Mike Mondays, which allows James to continue to produce regular content while just being himself, with Nerd episodes being more sporadic.
- AVGN himself often brings this up in his reviews, such as with The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask where pretty much everything he complains about were the things the game did differently than its predecessor like the three-day cycle, resetting time to save, and losing items on reset, and the sequel to Godzilla: Monster of Monsters! for being a Turn-Based Strategy game that followed an Action Game. Often too he'll acknowledge that fans were put off by the change but not see it as such a bad thing, like with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link where he acknowledges that there was no "standard" for Zelda games at the time so it being drastically different than the first was to be expected.
- Blurry Photos, a humorous podcast about the unusual and unexplained, was originally hosted by comedians David Flora and Dave Stecco and the format was largely built around the interactions between the two of them while discussing the week's topic. In early 2018, Dave Stecco retired from the podcast due to other commitments and David Flora continued the podcast as a solo work. Responses from fans have ranged from acceptance to "Get another co-host or at least a stable of guest co-hosts" to "Flora should re-name the podcast because it's not 'Blurry Photos' anymore".
- The October 2019 re-design of Box Office Mojo was criticized not only for ditching the old school charm of the prior design and dropping features, but also for putting its most popular content behind a paywall (eg, data for genres, studios, brands, etc). In March 2020, some of the data was freed from the paywall, but studio data is still not accessible. Making matters worse, it appears that the redesign caused the site to lose data which it already had - the only way to see the now lost data would be to go to the Wayback Machine.
- Comixology was absorbed into Amazon Kindle in February 2022. Fans were outraged because it doesn't work well on desktop, cancelled subscriptions outside of the United States, removed features, and forced you to re-download all of your comics, which turn out to take up more space yet be lower resolution and in some cases unreadable. Cue many threats to switch to piracy.
- There have been many complaints given whenever DeviantArt updated their interface. The Eclipse version of the site became infamous for triggering this trope for many of the site's users. And as of Autumn 2022 one can't search the site for more than one word at a time or search by recency instead of popularity unless one is logged in, and the ability to search in favourites has been turned off for everyone. As of Autumn 2023, one can again search for multiple words and search within favourites, but now a new problem has risen: whenever you search for anything on the homepage you'll get thousands of results, even if the majority of them has nothing to do with your query.
- The story-writing (and chat) AI Dreamily got hit hard by this after a year of operation because of the commercialization aspect after being the only AI service of this kind to be not only free but also nearly unrestricted. For background: Much of Dreamily's fandom came from AI Dungeon 2 when the game's sudden change in direction in 2021 caused by OpenAI's restrictions led to many users leaving and searching/developing better alternatives. A majority of these users are either minors (which Dreamily's fanfiction-style writing easily appeals to), lacking credit card (which the most popular AI alternatives only accept), from less fortunate countries (so the payment system practically gatekeeps them), simply poor or too broke for subscriptions, not tech-savvy or lacking a device to run their ownnote , or a combination of any of these. When Dreamily revealed the commercialization plan, it was in the form of quota limits on both the chat and the story writing unless the user subscribed, for an AI that is not on the same level as KoboldAI. Combine all these factors and it is not surprising that Dreamily's subreddit is filled with hate remarks and even the developers' statements are downvoted into negatives since then.
- Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) has changed its Originals intros often over the years. It's lampshaded in a Jake and Amir video, when Amir says he hates the new intro "Because it's different!"
- When the snark floodgates opened after Fark.com redesigned its website, Drew's four-word response became a site meme: "You'll get over it."
- Arin of the Game Grumps somehow manages to evoke this and It's the Same, So It Sucks with the Mario series in separate videos. During Super Mario World he laments that it was the last "unique" Mario game and that he's not a fan of the newer ones as the series has fallen into a rut where it's afraid to create new unique enemies or characters, while during Super Mario Odyssey he takes offense to The Broodals for "being out-of-place and unlike normal Mario enemies."
- Geography Now: Starting in the Venezuela episode, Flag/Fan Day was reduced to Youtube Shorts due to declining views, and the episode corrections and package-opening were cut. Fans who came just for the flag section were dismayed to see that the "BLOOD OF THOSE WHO FIGHT FOR THE FREEDOM!" animations were cut as a result.
- The Happy Video Game Nerd: HVGN's chief argument as to why Zoda's Revenge was a worse game than its predecessor, StarTropics. He takes the time to point out that just as many people agreed with his criticisms of the game as disagreed with them.
- A variant happens in the Hardly Working sketch "Sarah's Birthday", where not a SINGLE person remembers the "Happy Birthday song" or how to say it. They resort to singing an alternative song that Sarah hates, but which everyone else loves.
- Hat Films were accused of having their Grand Theft Auto V series RUINED FOREVER because Turpster joined (Sips also joined, but this wasn't anywhere near as controversial). Ross, Smiffy and Trott were fairly quick to call the fans out on this, arguing that the fans were too insistent on the show being formulaic.
- The tendency of geeks (especially gamers) to complain about changes to works at the drop of a hat is parodied in the series of Hitler Rants taken from the movie Downfall.
- Multiple
articles have been written about why Horse_ebooks changed and started sucking (on September 14th, 2011.) This is possibly the weirdest example of the trope, considering that Horse_ebooks is a spambot on Twitter with a strange knack for Word-Salad Humor. It turns out that there was a reason for it: in September 2013 it was revealed that ever since that date in 2011, the account was actually taken over by a human as part of an art project that continued throughout the following two years. - I Can Haz Cheezburger's YouTube videos have gotten a lot of flak since they stopped adding lolcat pictures at the end.
- The Irate Gamer's Breakfast Rants complain about how certain parts of cereal images changed. For Lucky Charms, it's the marshmallow shapes, while Cinnamon Toast Crunch has him railing against the box only displaying one of the three original bakers. He even ends the rants with "Face it, breakfast is ruined!"
- The Jimquisition changed its title sequence and long-running theme song in May 2017, with the intro's first use lampooning the trope by having "They changed it now it sucks" written verbatim on a wall. Ironically, the new intro sequence was generally well-received by fans.
- JonTron invokes this during his review of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, where he complains about all the changes to the game. More specifically, he states that he hates that he has to complain about the change in formula, except that the changes come with bits of the old formula that don't fit the new and detract from the overall experience.
- Jump the Shark was a website where people commented on when their favorite television shows jumped the shark. In early 2009, the site changed to a generic TVGuide tabloid before being completely absorbed by TVGuide later that year. These changes led to former fans saying the TVGuide takeover was when Jump the Shark jumped the shark.
- A very sad/scary example with Kittisaurus. After Nana, Toto and Dodo were added in 2020, Claire received a lot of comments telling her to get rid of them, or even kill them. It got to the point where Claire had to ask people to stop posting those comments.
- The Know Your Meme YouTube videos have gotten a lot of cries of "Ruined Forever!" after Rocketboom sold the rights to I Can Haz Cheezburger.
- Marvel Super Heroes: What The—?! gained more haters after it changed from a series of comedic stop-motion shorts, to a series of stop-motion commercials for various products with jokes thrown in.
- On 11 August 2010, web review aggregation site Metacritic redesigned their site. Today, they have 8,000 comments of seething hatred.
- Niche Gamer's article "Japanese users speechless by Niche Gamer's western localization article" showcases this reaction from said country towards English localization of mainly anime, manga, and Japanese video games. For years, the average Japanese mostly had zero clue of the Broken Base formed from Subbing Versus Dubbing or Translation Style Choices and assumed the westerners are divided because of a dub's performance. Language barrier did not help matters. Awareness began to be raised as the Japanese began to be alarmed of the Translation with an Agenda nature of English localizations, particularly ones from The New '10s and beyond, and videos like this (which is featured on the article above) exposed it further to the Japanese, causing those that discovered it to be shocked and decry the unneeded changes on what they thought would be just a humble English translation of their work.
- The Nostalgia Chick got this twice. The first was when she stopped doing linear reviews of "girly stuff" with usually only her in front of the camera, and changed it into a Mid-Review Sketch Show with her friends where they looked at anything she wanted. The second was when she dropped the Mid-Review Sketch Show and changed to an informative anthology show discussing the different adaptations of characters.
- Over time, The Nostalgia Critic got big on Character Development, cameos/crossovers and Rewatch Bonus storylines, became calmer, his reviewing style included more analysis (mostly at the end) and bratty rages were scattered around instead of appearing every few episodes. The "Bat Credit Card" fans note have complained about this.
- When the series was revived in 2013, the show began relying on sketches throughout the review. Critic no longer limited himself to only movies with nostalgic ties, eventually breaking his rule of not reviewing films still in theaters. Some reviews were just straight up reenactments of the film (even films that have been out for years). And the background wall was no longer white.
- Parodied in The Onion news video 'Iron Man' Trailer To Be Made Into Feature Film.
- When the staff of the Japanese site Poupeegirl announced that they'd be replacing ribbon sales with the creation of a real-money "jewel" currency, the LiveJournal community and Japanese forums exploded with outrage, fearing the jewel-only items would be the only special items available and the ribbon items would all be hideous things. The jewels were finally launched, and aside from a "jewel floor", nothing was really all that changed, since they could be exchanged for ribbons at a much better rate than bought ribbons. That didn't stop users from complaining even after the change simply on account of Poupee charging users for currency they'd essentially been paying for before the switch.
- Ray William Johnson of =3 fame has been seemingly coming under fire for changing the show's general format as well as being to "corporate" (he had copyright issues with Maker Studios and went on to make co-create a new studio from the ground up). These complaints may be justified to a certain degree seeing as how the show's overall quality has declined somewhat in comparison to earlier years. Not to mention all the minor changes made to the show such as =3 not having a "question of the day" anymore and actually having decent video quality.
- While Red vs. Blue going on a different route in season 18 earned many complaints, one that might fit fandom overreaction is the change from to Unreal Engine animation, with many negative remarks on how it compares to the Limited Animation of Halo Machinima.
- SCP Foundation:
- In early 2019, SCP-106 got new pictures, due to wiki moderators more stringently enforcing image policy that disallows the use of copyrighted/unsourceable images. To say their reception was mixed was an understatement, and the images had to be updated several times due to feedback. Then it was discovered that one of the images was partially plagiarized and had to be replaced yet again.
- And then there was the reaction to SCP-682's photo needing to be replaced as well, resulting in the iconic skull for a head look being replaced with just a giant whale carcass lying prone on a beach somewhere. To say fans were displeased would be putting it mildly.
- To put it bluntly, the decision to remove the original picture of SCP-173 thanks to the wiki's complicated relationship with the Creative Commons license and wanting to avoid copyright issues has gone over like a lead balloon, with many complaining that other avenues could've been taken to preserve the now-iconic original image while still respecting international copyright law.
- Some people weren't happy with the rewrite of SCP-031, which turned it into what they feel is a basically In Name Only generic hostile monster.
- Television Without Pity. Bad Sign #1: Three original editors depart a year after Bravo buys the site. Then the site was redesigned to include a lot more widgets, style flourishes and assorted clutter. More editors left. And the site started covering a lot more reality programming, especially Bravo's Top Chef, Top Design, etc. and scaling back some of the previously in-depth recaps with more glib, bare-bones "weecaps." About the only things left from the site as it once was before it closed were the Supernatural fangirl bridgade and the recapper Jacob.
- TFWiki.net, the official Wiki of the Transformers franchise, makes fun of this to the extreme with "GEEWUN", a derogative term applied to people who believe that if it's not Transformers: Generation One, it sucks.
- Parodied with the Third Rate Gamer, who criticizes the smallest of details, regardless if they're trivial or not. In his Yoshi's Island review, he complains that the game is too different from other Mario games, as well as minor details like the fact that the player can jump on Shy Guys to kill them, but not pick them up, reversing their role from Super Mario Bros. 2.
- The latter part of his Cool Spot review has him ranting about the variety of flavors of 7up drinks diminishing over the years. In a similar vein to the Irate Gamer's breakfast rant, he ends it by stating, "Fuck that! Fountain drinks are ruined!"
- Twitch: A one-two-three punch on August 5 and 6, 2014.
- First, the company decided to shut down Justin.tv which, while it wasn't as popular as it used to be, still had its fans.
- Second, they have dropped the ability to save full broadcasts of over two hours. Instead, any "highlights" of under two hours can be kept. The two hour limit would later be repealed.
- Third, and the biggest one, they implemented an acoustic fingerprinting system (similar to YouTube's infamous Content ID) which scans half-hour chunks of videos and mutes those thirty-minute chunks if it catches any copyrighted music. This even affects past broadcasts of major tournaments and Twitch's own shows.
- In an attempt to clean up their image, Twitch has been cracking down on streamers who rely partially on sex-appeal to rack-in views. Arguably, the site is meant to focus more on gaming and less on the gamer's assets. So the ban on "sexy streamers" is understandable in that respect. However, there is a good-sized chunk of viewers and streamers alike not happy with this change, including Rooster Teeth's own Meg Turney.
- This was later extended to prohibiting AO-rated games from being streamed on the site. Some Internet users, including TotalBiscuit, believe this is to prevent Hatred from being streamed on the site. The timing of it all didn't help.
- Now the site has come under fire again for its censorship policies after it banned Rinse & Repeat from being streamed on its site, especially with the game's developer pointing out the hypocrisy of what the site does and does not allow. A similar issue happened in January 2016 when they banned the game Yandere Simulator, with the developer and many fans making the same argument on what already exists on Twitch and what was in the game.
- Twitter:
- The new retweeting system has been unpopular with the userbase, mostly since the retweets can no longer be edited to add personal comments. Of course, the old RT system still works just fine.
- Old users weren't happy in changing the Fave stars to Like hearts on November 3rd, 2015.
- There has been a rather large backlash towards the change in how timelines are organized, going from chronological to using a popularity-based algorithm. Many have pointed out how this would cause countless users to be overshadowed by big-name brands & celebrities, with small businesses/creators/accounts being left in the dust.
- The redesign in 2019 was met with heavy criticism due to how the layout looks more suited for mobile rather than desktops; the menu was moved to the left as a sidebar and popular trends were moved over to the right, causing tweets to be squashed in the middle of the screen. In fact, there's outright no difference between desktop and mobile now, as changing the URL to the mobile version from desktop (or vice-versa) doesn't change the layout even a bit. Outside of using scripts or web browser extensions, there's no way to revert to the old layout.
- Writing.Com:
- The site making the creation of new interactive stories a paying members-only feature.
- The addition of a rather obnoxious anti-adblocking system to said interactives which is only disabled if you have a paid membership. If you have a free account (or none at all) and have a known adblocker on (including Adblock Plus and NoScript), then whenever you load an interactive chapter, the content will be hidden. You will only get to view the content after you see a message pop-up in its place telling you to disable your adblocker and clicking OK, then viewing another message like that for five seconds, then manually clicking another message that pops up that will allow you to finally view the page. If you have a basic paid membership, you will get less ads and the site will let you use your adblocker, while all the more expensive tiers remove the ads entirely. In a way, all this basically amounts to Writing.com saying, "Buy our memberships or GTFO."
- If you don't have an account or have a free one, then every so often you'll be redirected to a screen reading "Due to resource limitations, Interactive Stories are temporarily unavailable to visitors and free members. Please try again in a few minutes..." while browsing through interactives. These occur every minute or so without warning despite the site running perfectly fine otherwise. 2018 made it so that this screen also extols the benefits of a paid membership, reinforcing the aforementioned "buy our memberships" vibe.
- The Yogscast in general have been hit by this from "fans" that start insisting that they, as "original fans", are right and that any new fan or new member of the main group is an asshole. See below:
- The main channel in particular has come under flack from more reactionary parts of the fandom, who would prefer it go back to the days of it just being Lewis Brindley, Simon Lane and Hannah Rutherford. Nowadays, anybody else in the Yogscast, bar maybe Duncan Jones, Sips and Sjin (all of whom were around during the early years, albeit in a smaller capacity), tends to automatically get hatred thrown their way.
- Their Garry's Mod series is a prime example of this. When Gmod started becoming a more regular thing, Sips appeared for one recording and went down a storm. When he didn't return for one session and InTheLittleWood appeared, the fans started raging for Martyn to "stop replacing Sips", even though there was absolutely zero evidence that this was the case.
- And of course, some people do see their falling out with another famous British YouTuber to be a major unwelcome change due to some of the collaborations the two had being some of the more watched ones, and it doesn't seem like the two parties are in any mood to reconcile at ALL!
- YouTube:
- Happens quite often in mashup videos when copyright is claimed on any part of the audio. (If copyright is claimed on the video, it is removed entirely.) YouTube offers replacement, royalty-free soundtracks that often don't fit the theme, and don't contain any of the other sounds that were part of the original video, which paradoxically, has also been copyright-claimed at times, rendering the effort ineffective.
- YouTube has undergone many controversial changes through the years, but arguably the most infamous one is the COPPA update, which forced users to mark their videos as either "made for kids" or not. The change was detested for the fact that the guidelines for what qualified for either weren't defined in any way. It was also controversial since videos marked as made for kids lost many features, and videos were automatically marked for kids by the site's bots without any knowledge or consent from the uploader. Furthermore, the bots had a tendency to mark videos as made for kids even when they clearly were not, even if the videos were age restricted. Even worse is that sometimes if you uploaded the video and set the video as not made for kids, the bot will think otherwise and set the video as made for kids.
- Zero Punctuation: Lampshaded by "Yahtzee" Croshaw when the introduction of an original theme tune and new intro sequence for Zero Punctuation created predictable backlash; the weekly update to his website was titled "You Changed It Now It Sucks". Every week, the video thread is evenly divided between "best one evar!" and this complaint.
