Cartoon Network’s Website Was Deleted. That Should Scare You All.

The most remarkable feat that Warner Bros. Or even its wildly unpopular move to shutter Cartoon Network’s iconic 26-year-old website, scrubbing an almost historical archive of clips, show episodes, and digital games in order to direct young viewers to sign up for the clunky streaming platform known these days as “Max.” As of today, the Cartoon Network website has officially shut down and redirected to Max. pic.twitter.com/nUB1KaMRlW — CN News/Schedules August 8, 2024 Nuking a kids’ network’s digital presence is hardly a sin on par with, say, killing Cartoon Network altogether, as was rumored to have occurred last month. Because, much like Paramount’s decimation of the online MTV and Comedy Central archives, Zaslav’s own butchering of the Cartoon Network website is a cheap ploy engineered to force viewers into signing up for his own increasingly enshittified streamer—and at a time when the internet as we’ve broadly recognized it is rapidly crumbling. In recent years, we’ve seen once inescapable media disappear from the internet at a frightening rate, whether it’s general-interest blogs and websites closing down, popular old browser games losing their adaptability and functionality, pre-Spotify music streamers tanking their servers, social networks collapsing into the void along with all their memories, hyperlinks degrading in functionality, or copyright-flexible artworks from an older internet age getting hit with suits by rights-holders and then being pulled from distribution.