The Death of Consumating and Conspiracy at Help.com
C|NET has officially closed the doors on Consumating. In doing so, they made the mistake of redirecting the URL to another of their sites, help.com.
This was a huge mistake on their part. Many consumators went there and expressed their feelings in the way that they’re used to doing so on our mostly-unmoderated site. Since help.com is more heavily moderated, many of these comments resulted in banning. This just served to fan the flames which brought more consumators to help.com and a clash between consumating users and help.com users.
Consumating creator and former owner, Ben Brown posted on his new site Go, Team Internet a plea to simply ignore help.com. C|NET handled this poorly. Ben suggested that they simply should have created a 404 page with a picture of Consumating’s Feedback Zombie mascot and left it at that. That would have been an elegant and respectful solution. Instead they attempted to redirect us hoping to ramp their userbase there.
In related news (I always wanted to say that) a group of Bay Area consumators held a candlelight vigil for the death of Consumating at C|NET which included a bagpipe group playing Amazing Grace. It was a fitting sendoff for the website that we loved so much.
Tags: consumating, controversy_at_cnet, endofanera, friends
By flyingfishstick, March 15, 2008 @ 4:27 am
Who played the pipes?
And I agree – the shunting of users to another site was weak sauce indeed.
By Jay Def, March 15, 2008 @ 4:44 am
I’m not certain who played the bagpipes.
Video of this can be seen here.
By FiZ, March 15, 2008 @ 5:15 am
I think it’d actually be nice if the 404 could have an embedded video of the vigil.
I really can’t argue with the anger a lot of consumating refugees considering that, not only did we get a redirect, c|net had the gall to actually insist that we join help.com as some kind of tolerable facsimile. I think that shows more desperation on the part of c|net more than anything else.
By the slackmistress, March 15, 2008 @ 12:08 pm
I knew it redirected to help.com but I had no idea of the ensuing carnage. Hee.
By minx (imagine some tildes), March 16, 2008 @ 9:59 pm
the ensuing carnage garnered a wiki entry that i just *happened* to stumble upon.
By Jay Def, March 16, 2008 @ 11:10 pm
@minx – Do you have a link? I’d be interested.