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In this case, I'd probably link to an archived version of the old page.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