So, I noticed that several of my flashes have apparently been deleted. Old, oooold flashes that I made damn near ten years ago, when I was most active on Newgrounds. A little research indicates that they were deleted because they contained music I didn't have the license to.

Really, Newgrounds? Are you fucking kidding me? Half the goddamn uploads here - including the famous ones that made this site's bread and butter - don't own the license to half the shit in them. We gonna delete every single movie that uses video game sprites next?

...actually that might not be a terribly bad idea but that's beside the point

It's honestly embarassing to see Newgrounds kneel to the same bullshit copyright worship that makes other websites shit, and it's the attitude of "herp derp, better safe than sorry!" that's made this place go from being an internet powerhouse to mere internet history. This...this is why you're having trouble paying the bills, Tom. Newgrounds is supposed to be about creativity, and blandly accepting the (very much legally questionable) demands of asshats like the RIAA goes against everything this place used to be about. Newgrounds, I hate to say, is really not much more than a lamer version of Youtube - and THAT is saying something.

For the record, no, I don't actually give too much of a shit about this. I'd looooong since stopped being an enthusiastic member of Newgrounds for many reasons, not just this. I didn't make my flashes for artistic purposes. I didn't monetize them. Hell, I could have probably gone months longer without noticing this if someone hadn't pointed it out to me. But some of these deleted works involved old friends who I've long since lost contract with, and represented a lot of fun and (as shitty as they were) hard work. I would have appreciated a notice beforehand, at least, a chance to download my own work before Newgrounds purged them, or at least make them ACCESSIBLE to me despite not being publicly-viewable. It would have been a simple bit of courtesy that the staff was evidentally unwilling to provide in their rush to make Newgrounds just like every other place on the internet.

Long ago, I used to be a member of a group on Newgrounds that worked against malicious and stolen flash submissions, and we always talked about how we needed to have Portal mods to really get shit done. Well, now we have them, and if I'd have known this is how lame we'd be ten years down the road, I'd have left a lot sooner.

I'm still going to occasionally visit Newgrounds to enjoy the old classics...while I can (how long until Little Red Riding Ho gets deleted for using a ten-second clip of "my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard"?). But anytime someone asks why Newgrounds is having so much trouble these days, I'm just going to tell them to stop asking questions to which they already know the answers.

I would like to point out that Newgrounds let me keep the flash involving three monsters gangraping a corpse, but took away the five-friend collab that used a Bon Jovi song. Good to know where people stand.