420friendly video platform WeedTube will shutdown on April 2nd, 2023

Citing online data storage costs and an uptick in illegal activity on the platform, WeedTube is shutting down on April 2nd, 2023. WeedTubers will have until May 15th, 2023 to download all of their content from the platform. WeedTube was started in 2018 as a censorship free platform centered around the cannabis indsutry creators that were being booted off of YouTube. The move is surprising given that WeedTube announced a new CEO less than a month ago. As cannabis industry content creators seek a new platform to move to, many options abound but each with their own perceived problems. It remains to be seen where the community ends up and how censorship resistant, decentralized, and overall robust that platform is.

RIP WeedTube (2018-2023)

WeedTube announced the closure on their Instagram:

5 Years. A Huge Journey. A Beautiful Community. As of April 2nd 2023, our platform will be closing down. For more information about why, and the decisions that were made, please head over to our Co-Founder @arendrichard post about it For those of you who are creators- first of all, thank you all so much for the love, creativity, and dedication that you’ve put into this platform. When we first set out to be a home for your content, we couldn’t have imagined how many beautiful souls would join us on this journey and support the dream. We have done our best to continue fighting online censorship, but the truth is that other social platforms are becoming more lax and starting to allow our kind of content again, which has decreased the amount of regular users on our platform. In addition, there’s been a large spike in illegal activity on the platform that we are having a hard time combatting. The final reason for shutting down is truly the cost. Online data storage is not cheap, and our platform hasn’t made a profit for a very long time, and it’s no longer feasible for us to financially support it. For those of you who have long form video content on the platform, you will have until May 15th to get everything downloaded. Our tech team is working right now to figure out how to make that easiest for everyone, so please stay tuned here for more updates. We will post on social and send out a newsletter with instructions for downloading content soon. No one is more devastated than the team here by this news. It was not an easy decision. We promise to take the right steps to ensure creators can access their content. We are sorry it has come to this. But we know that this community will still have each other beyond this platform, and we look forward to the day that we can all join together again. Please leave some loving words of remembrance about this beautiful community in the comments, or just drop some flowers. With love, The WeedTube

WeedTube Co-Founder Arend Richard emphasized the gravity of the closing announcement:

Heart broken doesn’t even begin to describe. 💔 If you are a creator, please head over to @weedtube where we will be sharing the plan for getting everyone their content. I’m sorry everyone. We did our best. We did some great things. But all great things must come to an end.

Featured image from Weedtube Instagram.