Why did Cracked.com fire most of the staff?

This makes me sad - I used to love Cracked but for a long time now it’s been on the decline.

The site has been steadily dropping in popularity for years now. There are a number of reasons for this including a departure of talented writers and an increase in promoting low quality user created content, but undoubtedly to my mind the biggest issue has been the massive swing towards preachy, politically charged content.

Cracked.com built its fan base in the mid 2000’s with a focus on list based articles which used often low-brow humour (dick jokes!) to deliver interesting facts and stories. The content was always high quality and almost always hilarious. Some of my favourites included:

http://www.cracked.com/article_1...

5 Insanely Huge Things You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped

http://www.cracked.com/article_1...

4 Romantic Books to Disgust and Annoy Your Lover

Cracked always had a liberal slant, which is fine, but starting around the time of the ‘Gamergate’ fiasco, politics suddenly took centre stage. Suddenly two out of three articles for literally weeks were all about Gamergate, the articles were repetitive, preachy and worst of all unfunny.

Since then politics has crept in to almost everything on the site:

Again - nothing wrong with posting political content, but when 90% of your audience are straight white males and half of your content is about how straight white males are literally the devil, you’re gonna lose audience.

Today, since Cracked has had to lose its entire writing staff to cut costs they are forced to rely wholely on user content, which is hit and miss to say the least. Cracked has gone from a site I visit multiple times a day to one I scan once a week on the off chance that they posted something worth reading. To anyone who hasn’t read cracked, please check out thier back catalogue - there’s a lot of genuinely great writing there which may be lost forever if (when?) Cracked shuts down for good.