As I crawl back to this site after its initial closure, the general theme of failure is something forced upon me from every angle, looming perpetually, the ghost in the corner. Since I was thinking about failure so much, I naturally became curious and started deep-diving into other sites that failed, not with the mission of learning anything particularly constructive (contrary to what I told myself at the time) but as sort of a way of giving myself some mental closure from their physical closure. Surely my stuff was better than something, right?
My clicking frenzy led me to an area of the interweb I had never clicked to before: fashion blogging. Repeller, a particularly rambunctious fashion-blogging site, caught my eye, mostly because of the fact that it failed (again, my ego needed boosting, don’t judge), but also because it had this gutsiness. Like, how could a website not succeed when it ran I Found the Best Going Out Top for Staying In and Am I The Only Person Who Doesn’t Want To Look Like Glass as its headlines? Surely somebody in the world somewhere would drool over that stuff. I would have reckoned a site like that would have attracted a whole community of droolers, huddled together, loyally drooling until the very end.
But alas, no, they don’t, and the site didn’t. The only article I can find that addresses Repeller’s closure is a short one, which, to give her due credit, was written by the founder, as all closing letters should be. Despite that closing article being the fifth most popular post on the whole site according to the site’s own ranking system, it only has eight comments. Perhaps Leandra deleted some she didn’t like, or perhaps, in the words of one of those eight, that was really all they got.
In all seriousness though, it seems that the failure of Repeller was quite a saga. Without getting into it all, it suffices to say that before Leandra’s last post, she wrote what seemed to be an apology letter to the site’s readers for “the pain the site had caused,” and announced the hiring of a diversity and inclusion consultant. This was in 2020, right around the time of the big Black Lives Matter protests.
“Oh boy, I get it now,” I thought. Not that diversity and inclusion efforts are bad. It’s just that the site wasn’t about that: it was about women’s clothes. And that’s why Repeller failed.
It’s a, how best should I phrase this, interesting, time for the media industry right now. In a surprising double-whammy to readers of online news, Vice has declared bankruptcy at the same time that Buzzfeed axed its whole news division (RIP, I kind of liked Buzzfeed’s web design while also hating the articles themselves). Both Vice and Buzzfeed started out as scrappy, great sites which told people important stuff that more mainstream news sites wouldn’t say. But I think everybody can agree they aren’t great sites any more.
They started doing less of telling people important stuff and more of cherry-picking specific stuff that fit the narrative they wanted to forward, leaving out everything else. That might work great for my friends at Impact, but when people are relying on you for the news — or in Repeller’s case, women’s clothing advice — straying from that founding mission, or attracting an audience who expects you to stray from that mission, is nothing but a disaster. I find that it strangely all makes sense that some of the biggest viral news sites are crumbling while I’m resurrecting a viral media site about, of all things, LEGO collecting.
But that’s what I like about the LEGO community. Most of you aren’t here for a political agenda. You’re here to create, to learn, and to, in a real sense, find a respite from the highly politicized world around you. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Now don’t get me wrong. With the audience I have in this space and the attention I pay to it, I’ve taken the personal liberty to explore and support some D&I efforts behind the scenes. I think supporting female LEGO creators is important, and designing LEGO parts that make people everywhere feel included is something that can be really helpful. Barbie did the same thing with heart-touching results.
But do I think all media sites should use even their most innocent-seeming content to forward these agendas at the cost of the satisfaction of their readers? Heck no! I think the next generation of media sites (at least the ones that don’t fail) will need to cater to the curious, the learners, those who don’t need a site to tell them how they should think, but who instead read stories to find the next big thing to research for themselves and who genuinely find joy in reading about what other people think because it makes them feel something. What about those who feel repelled by it all and would prefer not? Well, they can, maybe, go into fashion blogging.