EXPLOITATION, PERSONAL ESSAYS, BRANDS, INFLUENCERS, SCAMS, SNAPCHAT, SNAPCHAT IS WHERE BRANDS CAN EXPRESS THEMSELVES IN COOL WAYS, DUMB MONEY, NOBODY LEARNS, THEY’LL BE FINE EITHER WAY. Goodbye to The Awl, Awl Tags, to The Hairpin. The sites are shutting down at the end of this month, they announced Tuesday.

Thank you to my mom and dad, Choire and Alex, for giving me the best job on earth https://t.co/yfRnbQ1Yew

— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) January 16, 2018

LOL BYE https://t.co/3esJfKd424

— Choire (@Choire) January 16, 2018

the best way to remember the awl and the hairpin is by giving someone who hasn’t been published a chance and a check without asking that they humiliate and spend themselves in return

— John Herrman (@jwherrman) January 16, 2018

The Hairpin was so much fun. Thanks to @AlexBalk, @choire, @davidcho, @johnshankman, @SeeJaneMarie, @Nicole_Cliffe, @cassiemurdoch, @lizzyville, everyone who contributed, and everyone who ever read or commented, that was the most fun of all.

— Edith Zimmerman (@edithzimmerman) January 17, 2018

For a long time, The Awl and The Hairpin were so good. (The two other sites in the Awl network — The Billfold and Splitsider — are sticking around, at least for now.) David Carr wrote about them in 2010: “The Awl confronts the tyranny of small numbers in an age when Web behemoths, like Gawker Media and The Huffington Post, get most of the attention.” Wirecutter got its start at The Awl, in 2011. There was that big Verge profile in 2015, which made it seem not crazy that Vox might buy The Awl and just let its do its thing. Silvia Killingsworth, who’d been managing editor at The New Yorker, became editor-in-chief of both The Awl and The Hairpin in 2016. The Awl also moved over to Medium, for a year between 2016 and 2017, but seemed to lose momentum there, then came back to WordPress. “The move to Medium was a cool experiment, in my opinion, but the year is up and personally I missed the ads,” Killingsworth wrote at the time.

yes the real reason is you guys got too stupid when we told you not to https://t.co/bTlA6sbKDZ

— Silvia Killingsworth (@silviakillings) January 16, 2018

Without @Awl there would be no @wirecutter . Thank you for incubating the stuff that is too smart for most dumbclick publishers to understandhttps://t.co/n4MDmuyNtt

— Brian Lam (@blam) January 17, 2018

“We’ve always been somewhat intentionally small, and scale has become increasingly important for securing large ad deals,” Awl publisher Michael Macher told The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Mullin. “It’s a structural shift with the way media buyers and agencies relate to publishers — and for better or worse less of those dollars are falling to indie publishers.”

Also, surprise: Clay Shirky was A Married Dude?

One of my favorite writing jobs ever was writing some of The Hairpin's "Ask a Married Dude" columns for @edithzimmerman. Sad to see it go. https://t.co/epCR0f59qn

— Clay Shirky (@cshirky) January 17, 2018

The sites’ archives will stay up, Killingsworth said. “I had the best time editing the sites and discovering new talent,” she said in an email. “There’s a very specific pleasure in matching a writer to the subject on which she’ll flourish, and that was what The Awl did best — put the enthusiasm first, and gave new and inexperienced writers a chance.”