Warner Brothers has decided to shut down the Cartoon Network website. It now redirects to Cartoon Network India’s Youtube channel page where I don’t recognize more than half of the stuff. This seems like part of an ongoing cost cutting measure by the parent company and it is disappointing.

There was a Ben10 flash game on that site that I spent dozens of hours on and I don’t remember its name. The interesting part about this game is that users could create their own levels and submit. There were so many creative (and annoying) levels on the site and it was one of my earliest exposures to “gaming” as a community. I used to spend entire evening on sites like Cartoon Network and Zapak.

Internet as a whole is slowly starting to become a very unwelcome and unfriendly space for kids. This combined with the slow death of third places for kids to hangout, its going to be very difficult for a kid find and connect with someone like themselves. The only places left now are the hobby spaces like music and sports which are seen as day-care centers by parents in the kid’s early childhood and just another coaching center in their later years. Their enshittification has begun a while ago.