Up-flandering

Up-flandering, also known as up-flanderizing, up-flanderization or bad updating is a trend on certain websites where they start to undergo updates and keep them going until it goes downhill. Often times, these are often times covered up via lies or excuses, often times to sympathize the userbase or backlash them. Often times in the aftermath, these can either stay good or either fall out of business.

Similar to network decay, these can also include changes where websites/social networks change course over time.

Most of the time, they can range from redesigns that often times suit more for smartphones than desktops, or basically trying too hard to compete with other websites. Often times, this is done to try to make cheap money for their businesses or try way too hard to be cash cowing. Other times, it can also show that they turn from a consumer-based business to a more business/professional friendly zone, with mostly removing things well-favored by their userbase.

The name has been derived from flanderization, a trope that refers to the act of taking a single trait from a character and exaggerating and amplifying it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character.

Made-up example is this:
 * 1) ExampleWeb in 2010: Good website with good services and helpful customer support alongside pro-consumer practices.
 * 2) ExampleWeb in 2016: Trash and greedy website with horrible customer support alongside anti-consumer practices.
 * 3) ExampleWeb in 2020: Closed website due to lack of users and/or financial losses.

Examples

 * 1) ImageShack was famous for this, turning themselves premium only and then removing images and then replacing them with ads.
 * 2) Vyond is currently the largest contender to this trope, having removed many things and made a lot of updates that the userbase tried to revolt against, such as when Comedy World was discontinued.
 * 3) YouTube started to go through this in 2016 with drama like Adpocalypse and other stuff. Unlike ImageShack, it's still a viable website, until partially since late 2021, right when they removed the dislikes button . Some bad updates that they did were removing annotations (mostly because of mobile devices doesn't support them even through they can be implemented, yet just removing the features entirely, which also breaks some older videos which used annotations) and Video Editor, as well as requiring users to have a Google+ account (2013 to late 2015).
 * 4) Photobucket became another contender for up-flandering in 2017 with the P500 error, where users have to pay additional fees for public images without the use of extensions or mods. It was only a matter of time for the website's downfall.
 * 5) DeviantArt worked on a redesign called DeviantArt Eclipse, which removed things like categories and journal skins and also came with poor optimization. Also, in terms of design it looks as if they tried to piggy-back on ArtStation. This new redesign, when it's was started being used everywhere, some certain pages are lefted unchanged, such as any groups page (as of 2022, and it's still not changed ).
 * 6) Fandom have gone through many bad updates such as removing the Monaco skin and UCP (even through for most users, it's just decent, but not as good as old one).