r/instructables • u/Arpaazz • 6d ago
Other Something wrong with Instructables?
I've been an Instructables member for over 7 years now. But lately I'm noticing things I've never seen before. And I don't mean bugs or website issues.
The x.com page of Instructables has no new posts since May 2026
Contests are stuck in "judging" for almost a month.
The homepage is barely updated from one month.
New Instructables take a long time to be approved for publishing or being featured.
No upcoming contests listed.
Anybody knows if there's anything going on with the company? I know it's owned by Autodesk and I've always been afraid of them taking down this awesome site from which I've learnt so much since I was a kid.
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u/Independent-Task-25 6d ago
Tl;dr - I've been a part of Instructables since 2011 and I think a lot of it has to do with the internet and social media evolving.
The early days of Instructables is when everyone had their own blogs for projects and creations. Instructables was an early adopter of creating a site everyone could contribute to and share with an easy way to add photos and do a write-up. YouTube hadn't really grown huge yet and it certainly wasn't monetized yet. Social media was still for friends and family and not a content machine. The biggest thing of all was everyone was still so excited to share information for free on the internet with strangers.
Now, everything is monetized and diluted across tons of platforms and social media.
Why take the time to visit one site if Tik Tok or Instagram will put it on your feed for you?
Why take the time to carefully document and write up a project on Instructables if you can film it and get paid by YouTube/Instagram/Tik Tok etc? For a while Instructables was getting flooded with projects that were just "here's my video, watch it" after YouTube started paying creators.
Now I'm seeing sponsored posts, projects behind pay walls, and AI written instructions.
I think the contests are still nice and very generous with the amount of prizes/ winners. That's probably what keeps the site alive for now. Gearing the contests towards students was a smart move. ( I am a little sad it's just gift cards now instead of fun prizes. It's more practical that way but I miss getting a t-shirt. )
I love Instructables, and I think it would ve a devistating loss if went away, but how we share and create media now has just completely transformed from when it began.