It’s a sad day: the photoshopping remix site Worth1000 is shutting its doors, victim of being “technologically orphaned” after refactoring its codebase and then losing its programmer. The site’s owner, Avi Muchnick, can’t make any changes or updates to the site. He’s looking for buyers, or suggestions for turning the site into “a static browsable museum.” I’ve blogged plenty of great stuff from Worth1000 over the years and it will be sorely missed. Our commiserations to Avi and the W1K community.
As a direct result of the lack of maintenance, traffic has rapidly declined. Obviously the site can’t continue to operate like this and thrive, which leaves me with three choices:
A) Let it continue as is and suffer a slow, drawn-out death. This doesn’t appeal to me (or, I’d imagine, to any of you).
B) Try to find a new owner who does have the intent and means to maintain and fix the site going forwards. Or who has a good plan for how to improve / integrate aspects of the site – I don’t want the amazing work here to ever go away. Unfortunately, over the last year, although I have found some interest and searched exhaustively, I haven’t found the right person who would make a good owner yet or that a transition would be worthwhile for both parties. At this point, I think Choice B highly unlikely enough to consider it a dead-end.
C) Retire Worth1000 and turn it’s content into a static museum that doesn’t require maintenance and will hopefully be available for everyone to browse forever, as a respectful enduring testament to the amazing creativity of Worth1000 participants. At the very least, I’d like it to forever be a beautiful, streamlined gallery archive of Worth1000’s most amazing content, a tribute to the artists who participated here, and a timeline of milestones and important events in Worth1000’s history. This is the option I have decided to move forwards with.
The future of Worth1000 – EVERYONE PLEASE READ
(Thanks, Galoot!)