From Homestar Runner to Salad fingers to badgers, stick figure battles, and the End of Ze World, this — dare I call it an artform? — was a cultural touchstone for a generation.
Flash made vector animation available to the masses, and internet distribution of the relatively small video files was a piece of cake. With the filetype now essentially deprecated, the creators gone on to bigger and better things, the distribution sites shut down, it is a dead form. Most of it will be lost forever, although there may be someone archiving some of it for posterity.
Nah, they’re still out there in other forms. Some other people, have archived the SWF files (like StickDeath’s) on Internet Archive.
I just miss going to the actual sites to view them in. I was going to say that Joe Cartoon was the last beacon of that but if you go there, it’s just YT videos all decorated around the site’s design. It’s not the same.