Does anyone have a good alternative?
It’s infotainment.
I currently go there every week or two (or 3 …). Quickly go thru and read a bunch of listicles when I’m killing time.
I avoid podcasts everywhere. Any article about gaming is a definite must miss. (And way too many photo contest type things have gaming references.) The articles from people who actually went thru weird stuff are generally quite good.
Sometimes there’s some nice humor in there. Sometimes there isn’t.
I’d forgotten all about that but, by Jove, you’re right. They used to each have a very distinctive banner with their name prominently displayed. Christina H’s was “Let Me Tell You About My Cats” with a cartoon image of her thrusting a cat at you, for example.
So it’s even less weird that long-time readers would have associated the writers with their specific work.
It’s gone downhill, and Title Guy is awful, but there’s still good authors.
Chris Bucholz is still the god of random insanity, especially his “So you’re…” guides.
Zachary Frey and Adam Wears are two new-ish guys who write Old-Style Cracked™ type articles. They’re active in the comments section, too.
Luis Prada is often good- he’s written some stupid preachy SJW stuff, but I find him funny more often than not.
I think Kathy Benjamin’s done some good stuff, too.
And of course, Seanbaby still occasionally descends from the heavens to grace us with his presence.
So yeah, it’s not as good as it was, but it’s not dead yet.
I’ve thought about this. I haven’t come across another site like Cracked that I visit regularly, but recently I came to the realization that YouTube has become my replacement for the type of humor and listicles and whatnot that I used to enjoy there. I think a lot of that “action” has switched over to video.
That was my experience, too: I learned a heck of a lot about Photoshop and benefited from Photoplasty/Macro sub-forum. (I feel sort of guilty, now, that I haven’t been there in so long). I won a couple of times (back when it was $50, this is. Then I got a couple of ‘Position of Honor’ placings—last place, which is the first entry viewers see. (Seriously, last place used to be called the Place of Honor by regulars.) I started counting the wins and realized no one was winning more than twice in a 12-month period.
I realize that sounds pretty egotistical and in fact I was NOT all that masterful; I had a few good entries, is all. But I started to think about the number of hours in any given week I was devoting, not only to creating the pics, but to thinking up ideas—and decided it wasn’t smart to continue. My hat is off to all who persist (of course those many folks who are more skillful than I can probably do the work in a lot less time than I took.)
Very true–the old standards for Photoplasty just aren’t there, anymore. But maybe I wasn’t the only one looking at the number of hours it would take to submit several complexly-constructed entries each week. (I just did a search of my screenname there and of course those old contests, from roughly 2010 to 2012, are still up, along with my Hungadunga entries. Lots of work from lots of talented people, on those pages.)
Heh. It was a “Gaudere’s Law” kind of thing – the juxtaposition of “this is accurate” with the reversed initials (“FJ” instead of “JF”) struck me as funny. Sorry, my post probably came across a lot snarkier than I intended.
Cracked had a short video series about monsters (a vampire, a werewolf, a witch, and a ghost) seeking representation from a talent agency.
They were the funniest videos I’d seen on the site, and I wanted to post their links. But I can’t find them anywhere.
Naw, I just couldn’t figger it out! 
I forwarded a link to this thread to a very regular Cracked contributor, who, in distillation, said, “meh” and “I’m not going to join this debate because I’ll deliberately derail it and troll people”.
Cracked promptly posts an article “Five ways you’re trolling people, don’t realize it and are a horrible person for it.”
All this said, I like Swaim, both Katies, DOB, Soren…sometimes Cody Johnston. I liked the girl whose name escapes me who left to join SNL for one season. I like Jack sometimes, the blonde guy with glasses who is nerdy, the guy who does the video game videos with Swaim.
If any of these people are asses IRL…don’t care all that much.
But I definitely get that a change has happened
Noel Wells. I looked that up out of curiosity, mind you.
Not terribly surprised that a Cracked writer is “meh”. Cracked knows what gets clicks and they pay the writers that get them clicks so if less-than-funny articles about social justice or Five Depressing Things You Only Learn By Being a Dental Hygienist pay the bills then why would he care what some SDMB people think?
I started reading Cracked in 2007 and it was gut-burstingly fun.
It’s got too preachy, not funny enough, and repetitive.
They still get a couple of good articles a week and “After Hours” and PCOD are great, but it’s been a couple fo years since I got the really good laugh.
Is that Christina H.? I loved her articles and she hasn’t been on that site in ages, I always wondered what happened to her…
Back in the print days it seemed that MAD magazine was marketed for middle school aged readers but read by elementary school readers who wanted to be cool. Cracked was marketed towards high school and read by middle school. National Lampoon was marketed for college but read by high school.
I went there today and didn’t see a humorous article, though I did read some of them.
When Mad started to flourish, publisher Bill Gaines stuck pins in a voodoo doll representing each of the competing humor magazines that imitated Mad. As each one disappeared he removed its pin. According to writer Frank Jacobs in The MAD World of William M. Gaines, it was probably the only religious rite that Gaines, an avowed atheist, ever observed. When Gaines died, Cracked’s pin was the only one left.
Cracked had some risqué humor in its early years–sexy pictures of women like Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield (who, in one article, as “Jayne Womansfield,” drove interviewer Mike Wallace to distraction); and pictures such as a woman in a car in a parade tossing her underwear to the crowd; and an article about colleges…a triptik of pictures of cheerleaders went a little too far: in the middle shot the girls’ panties have fallen down around their knees, and in the third picture they have fallen off altogether (the girls are wearing those usual short pleated skirts); the girls have shocked expressions as they see the panties fall off and land on the ground! :eek:
That’s a bit unfair. There is a huge problem with trolling and assholes (look at the comments on any utube video!), and it’s can be very difficult to identify “a bit of ribbing” when it’s surrounded by thoughtless destructive sadistic jerks.
Ah the gamergate boogeyman. The ultimate SJW excuse.
And now Cracked is just running advertising in lieu of articles with that VPN thing masquerading as “Three Products Designed To Hide Your Internet Use”. You’d think maybe it’s three silly and barely effective gadgets but, nope, just ads for three VPN services without even a “sponsored content” warning.
It wasn’t even funny, either.