When Websites Change (For The Worst)

[ValyceNegative]

I was looking at my bookmarked links to suggest more sites on the Little Lone Websites thread ( https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=2353.msg23026#msg23026 ) and knew that "Canuck's House Of Kaoanis", a webpage collecting kaoani icon gifs since the mid 00s, would be perfect for the topic. I had found the site a few months ago while looking at several linkout collections and was amazed to find it still up.
When I went to visit it yesterday, I found the webmaster had just finished revamping the site with an "updated" layout, faster loadtimes and collection display. That's good... but now the site looks like this:
http://gocanucks.free.fr/
Other than being explicitly coded by AI (you can't miss that huge disclaimer at the bottom) that oily, mistake-ridden generated banner slaps you in the face as soon as you enter.
For context, Wayback Machine has snapshots on how the site looked up until very recently: https://web.archive.org/web/20250709160443/http://gocanucks.free.fr/

So that sucks, but what aggravates it all is that I had added the link to my website as part of my "useful links" collection, and indeed despite the cosmetic change, the site is still providing an enormous source of kaoani GIFs. However, I am extremely anti-AI and having the link on my site makes me feel like I'm indirectly affiliating or endorsing with vibe coding.

What would you do in this situation? Shall I close an eye to the webmaster's choices and keep the link for the sake of its resources? Should I remove it from my collection? Should I instead link to the archiviated version of the site so to not endorse its modern iteration?

Did you have similar experiences of beloved sites suddenly changing and turning so bad you felt inclined leaving them for good? (I mean, that's the experience a lot of people had with DA turning into Eclipse...)

[Noah_S]

First impression of old version: That pixel art banner is pretty

First impression of new version: What the hell is that, I didn't know you could make me dislike a design with cherry blossoms

In this case, I'd probably link to an archived version of the old page.

I have also experienced websites going through verschlimmbessern. I'm not sure if there's a good translation for that word. It's when someone tries to improve something, but makes it worse instead. One of them is the only place to get local news (or parts of local news, since they started requiring a twitter account for the full version, and that's where I draw the line), the rest of them I've stopped visiting.

[ShadaneArts]

I think my experience with a website turning bad that I can remember off the top of my head (other than DeviantArt) was YouTube. When I first joined, you could customize your channel colors, change the background image, add, remove, or remove widgets to wherever you wanted on your channel page. I only had access to that feature for about a year or so before they decided to make it a trend to change the entire site layout, channels included. Nowadays, all YouTube channel pages look exactly the same aside from the profile picture and banner.

[oro_junestar]

I'd either just remove it or link the archived version. I would also try to contact them and tell them about the harm of AI in case they just don't know, but I don't see a contact link/address on this site. I'll never support anyone that uses AI, they don't deserve anyone's time or money. Very unfortunate that this happened :(

I was one of the people who left DeviantArt after the slop update. It could've been genuinely a great art site, but it's been hit so hard by enshittification as well as having an awful community.

[rnottelovesowls]

after seeing the "new and improved" version, all i can do is quote dante:

"what the hell is this?"

a website i used to like, called cursors4u, did a similar thing. it used to look like this... now it looks like this. and the webmaster is considering adding a paid marketplace and AI cursor generator. gross.

it's stuff like that that makes me hate the modern internet. every website looks worse and functions worse, all in the name of "keeping up with the hottest trends", in fear of "getting left behind". it's one thing to "renovate" a site that has worked perfectly fine for over 2 decades, into something bland, samey, and running horribly on older devices. but to ask chatGPT to make the entire thing? i don't even have the words to express my distaste for that. and everyone outside our space is just... fine with LLMs ruining everything we love? i'm going to puke...

i'm not going to lie, if it weren't for melonland, the FAA, imood, bear blog, or any other indie web space of ours, i don't think i could tolerate the internet anymore. watching something i grew up with turning into... this... causes me physical pain. i can't take it anymore

[candycanearter07]

agreed, either use an archived version (internet archive is great for that) or just remove it outright

[ShadaneArts]

I'd either just remove it or link the archived version. I would also try to contact them and tell them about the harm of AI in case they just don't know, but I don't see a contact link/address on this site. I'll never support anyone that uses AI, they don't deserve anyone's time or money. Very unfortunate that this happened :(

I was one of the people who left DeviantArt after the slop update. It could've been genuinely a great art site, but it's been hit so hard by enshittification as well as having an awful community.

↑ THIS ↑
Not only did I have my art scraped recently after news got out that an entire art sharing site I was on got scraped, a group of spiteful copycats angry that the first guy was called out and removed the files decided to not only just do it again, they actually began to use my art for generative AI without my consent, using "don't like, don't upload" as an excuse to not listen. Well I'm sorry, but I wasn't expecting some random dumbasses to take my art and feed it into a machine while I was actively using an anti-AI site anyway. They even claimed the site had "no protective measures against AI" when it actually had almost all of them.

As for DeviantArt, I got banned after being mass-reported by a very large group of trolls and bullies after a successful harassment campaign against me (DeviantArt is notorious for allowing harassment campaigns to last until the victim's reputation is completely destroyed rather than taking action), when I was finally allowed to come back, I saw that DeviantArt became an AI hellhole and saw no point in staying there other than for an ARPG or two. Not only that, the option in your settings to suppress AI art doesn't work as well as they claim it does because people who appeared on my front page just uploaded AI stuff from another site and refuse to tag it as AI. Plus, the individual who started that harassment campaign against me years ago probably thinks I deserved to have my art scraped since they still talk badly about me to this day.

[ValyceNegative]

The council has spoken!
Really though, I'm glad to see the responses pretty much validated what I was just about to do, which is entirely removing the link from my button wall of resources. The Wayback Machine version doesn't have all the kaomojis stored, unfortunately, so it's not a reliable source to take the GIFs from, and the modern site... ugh, nope. I draw a hard line at linking to AI made stuff. Be gone.

So, to anyone that has a graphics repository site, à la Pixel Sea or Pixel Safari or similar... there's 11k authentic oldweb kaomoji GIFs just waiting to be salvaged from an AI ridden website, if you have the time to right click and enough room in your archives! xD I'd very much prefer to endorse a brand new indiewebsite that hosts those GIFs.

@ShadaneArts I do remember the time when YouTube allowed page personalization. It actually helped people build some sort of their own site. Exactly like old DA and their CSS customization, if you think about it. Now it's just big-corpo monotony...

@rnottelovesowls aaah! I remember using Cursors4u in the late 2000s! I even remember the way older layout that was used before your linked snapshots. I now realize that I have indeed stumbled upon the "new" iteration very recently, but I was convinced I was visiting another site entirely. Wow...