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bzipitidoo writes:

Starting in 2006, every March The Consumerist has held a Worst Company in America contest modeled on the March Madness college basketball tournaments. The 2014 champion was Comcast. But this year, there was almost total silence. No contest. No news on why the contest was not being held. No discussion at all. It's like almost every post about a 2015 WCIA contest is being deleted. That includes all of the Internet outside The Consumerist website. Very few articles or blog posts exist trumpeting the contest for 2015.

Has interest in the contest declined that precipitously? The contest certainly had problems, with the worst being that it was an unpopularity contest focused on bad service rather than a merit based contest that considered more factors about why a company might be bad, with many companies worse than EA not even being seeded, and entire industries being ignored. For instance, not one member of the mining industry has ever been seeded, despite their horrible records on safety and environmental damage, such as the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that killed 29 miners, and the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that poisoned the water supply of 300,000 people. A difficulty is that mining companies are more ephemeral, routinely transferring most assets to the owners, then going bankrupt to evade having to pay for clean-ups. The same lack of seeding goes for the prison-industrial complex, the photo enforcement industry, and the still active military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

Or is it that The Consumerist website is slipping, being taken over by corporate interests or perhaps just incompetents, given that they killed off their user base when they wiped user accounts and disabled posting for months? Is this a demonstration of the growing power of the corporate propaganda machine, which would surely like to censor all negative publicity?

This is also a demonstration of the fragility of websites, when they become a single point of failure for the user community they build.