I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time. People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist. For every lovely fla

I think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time. People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist. For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity. My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible. It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.