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Dead Internet Theory: How a site made of looping images, sound clips, and zooming text carried a community through Flash's death and a 2020 relaunch, and why saving the files is not the same as saving the scene.
Dead Internet Theory: How StumbleUpon's thumbs-up button turned human judgment into a wandering engine, and what disappeared when the service folded into the feed-based world of Mix.
Dead Internet Theory: How Delicious' shared tags turned bookmarks into a community instrument, why repeated sales stripped the service down, and what a personal export could not carry away.
Dead Internet Theory: How Digg's 2010 redesign took away the tools that let its users shape the front page, why the community revolted, and what that rupture says about who really owns a community-run site.
Dead Internet Theory: How Slashdot's reader-run moderation system made it the internet's main technology meeting place in the late 1990s, why newer platforms and changing habits shrank that role, and why a quieter site is not the same as a dead one.
Dead Internet Theory: How LiveJournal's friends page and language communities grew, how a chain of ownership ended in Moscow, and why the network divided without shutting down.
Dead Internet Theory: How Xanga grew from a free hub for personal diaries into one of the biggest teen communities on the web, and how a 2013 fundraising relaunch turned it into a smaller, paid blogging club that still runs today.
Dead Internet Theory: Why Open Diary's public journals felt like relationships, how the 2014 shutdown cut those threads, and what an eight-year revival could and could not restore.
Dead Internet Theory: How Vox, the Six Apart blogging service that launched in 2006, built its experience around a privacy setting on every post, why audience boundaries made the site feel safe, and what its 2010 shutdown cost both posts and friendships.
Dead Internet Theory: How Posterous made blogging as simple as sending an email, why the Twitter acquisition turned out to be the end of the platform, and what its writers were able to carry out when it shut down in 2013.
Dead Internet Theory: How Gather built a discussion network around adult conversation, rewarded members for contributing, and found that the audience mattered to its buyers more than the writing.
Dead Internet Theory: How IMDb attached a message board to nearly every film and person in its database, what the February 2017 shutdown changed for the people who posted, and where film discussion scattered afterwards.
Dead Internet Theory: Television Without Pity turned the scene-by-scene recap into a communal weekly ritual before NBCUniversal closed it in 2014. This article traces what the shutdown cost the people around it, and where the community and its written record really survived.
Dead Internet Theory: The A.V. Club's commenters built one of the web's most distinctive communities, then survived two ownership changes, a hated platform migration, and a brief shutdown. This article traces how their identity formed and why much of it came back.
Dead Internet Theory: Topix built anonymous discussion boards for thousands of American towns, grew fast on gossip and grit, and shut them all down in 2018. This article traces how the forums organized local conversation, where moderation broke, and what their removal left behind.
Dead Internet Theory: Chowhound spent twenty-five years accumulating obsessive restaurant knowledge, then split apart as ownership, redesigns, and a shutdown scattered its contributors. This article explains how the trust worked, what strained it, and where the community and its local knowledge actually went.
Dead Internet Theory: How Epinions built consumer advice on webs of mutual trust and cash for reviews, and what happened when its owners wound the community down.
Dead Internet Theory: How Helium organized writing as a contest judged by rival authors, paid winners out of ad revenue and freelance commissions, and kept its content-supply arm alive after the community itself ended.
Dead Internet Theory: When HubPages absorbed Squidoo in 2014, thousands of 'lenses' moved but the community built on them did not. This article traces what the migration carried over and what it left behind.
Dead Internet Theory: Hubski has spent more than fifteen years pursuing thoughtful discussion without trying to become a mass social platform. Its small scale, person-centered feeds, privacy choices, and current invite-only signup make it a useful counterexample to the idea that an online community must grow huge or disappear.