collapsedsquid:

Did you just work a particularly shitty shift at Walmart? Visit walmart-blows.com to vent about your boss. Had an especially crappy experience flying United? Go to Untied.com to blow off some steam.

This was the promise of the “gripe site,” a fixture of an earlier era of the web. Often using the format CompanyName-sucks.com, gripe sites allowed people to anonymously complain about companies. Nowadays, gripe sites are digital refuse. Their old URLs lead to 404s or ancient HTML pages. Indeed, the very idea of having a website dedicated to griping about a single company feels antiquated in an age where we have websites like Yelp, Glassdoor, Twitter, and Facebook to meet our griping needs.

But the rise and fall of gripe sites are an important chapter in the history of the internet. Gripe sites were far more than a place to complain. Rather, they offered a lively, anonymous outlet for consumers and workers to criticize corporate power, and even to organize against it.

As a result, they faced an onslaught of attacks from companies. Gripe sites were the flashpoint for intense legal and regulatory battles—battles that boiled down to a confrontation between two conflicting visions of the internet’s purpose. Who owns the internet, and what is it for? This was the core question in the war over gripe sites, and one that remains no less urgent today.