So, every once in a while I’ll go all over the place to see how comic Web hosting site that I am/was on are doing. I’m sure a great many of you already knew that NHN, the latest owner of smackjeeves.com, the site was taking down on Dec. 31 2020. (I was the only one late to this news TODAY!) Anyhow, I knew it was going to fail after I couldn’t get any of my stuff off their site when they made the “big change” to be more like Webtoons. From what I read, most went to Comicfury. (Mmm…Not one mention of DruckDuck). So, now two remains free will comic hosting that pretty much let you publish pages of what you want, for free. RIP Smackjeeves? Who knows if NHN will bring it back or sell it off. The thing is, smackjeeves still has a name….but with a bitter taste in everyone mouth. If it came back, would creators return? Would any advertisers return? To me, NHN completely destroyed smackjeeves like MySpace. (At least MySpace still exist.)

Any thoughts about the direction of Free comic hosting sites are heading?

It's becoming more corporate and profit driven. Back when I was starting out I wouldn't have approached a place like Webtoons or Tapas with a barge pole…
We tick along fine here.
But we could use some advertising… I'll get on that.

I forgot all about Smackjeeves. RIP.

“Any thoughts about the direction of Free comic hosting sites are heading?”

I think there's always going to be a free way to publish comics online, even if the platforms change. Social media (regrettably) is probably going to be a big part of it. I found a lot of creators through YouTube and Twitch oddly enough.

Oy, it mattered to me! There were so many treasured comics I haven't seen posted ANYWHERE that sort of died, but I still enjoyed looking at the art once in a while. Now it's all gone forever. I know some folks tried to preserve things via internet archive but who's to say they got it all? My favorite's list is gone, and I don't remember the titles of those comics that stopped updating in the mid-oughts. It's only a memory now.

Shame, shame be upon those NHN ghouls! We told them it would ruin Smackjeeves to do what they did, and they plunged ahead with it anyway and lost money, because they always think they know better about what creatives want and they are ALWAYS WRONG.

Utterly stupid.

It's like watching an explosion on the horizon and thinking “Glad that wasn't us…”

Amelius wrote:
Oy, it mattered to me! There were so many treasured comics I haven't seen posted ANYWHERE that sort of died, but I still enjoyed looking at the art once in a while. Now it's all gone forever.

That's the biggest tragedy :(

The biggest tragedy is definitely the loss of art. It's the same when any platform or site goes away. So many of the people involved did their work and released it into the wild, and it's gone now.

But as I've said many times before now, Smackjeeves was a hole that absolutely deserved to dry up and blow away. They started out nice, and they became censor-happy exploitative idiots out for their own profit more than anything else…and didn't even do that well.

I do wish we could preserve more of the art and creativity that have been put out there, though, and I hope that at least the creators who want to continue to work in the medium of comics will find the Duck. It's just about the only decent place left.

Makes me wonder, should we have some sort of archiving option for The Duck? Like, just click this link and download the entire archive in ZIP format… I know that might be a bit of a hassle, but a simpler solution could be a tag you could add to your comic saying, “Hey, it's cool if you download this for your archives”.

EDIT: For some reason it never occurred to me that we can do that ourselves X3 Assuming uploading a whole ZIP file of anything we want to archive won't bog down The Duck any…

We used to have that. Not anymore though.
We'll have to get it re-implemented.

Damn. I used to be on SmackJeeves. Their changes caused me to lose all my work, and subs, so I left.

Wow. They really shot themselves down.