Newgrounds

Newgrounds is an online entertainment website and company. It hosts user-generated content such as games, films, audio and artwork composition in four respective website categories. Newgrounds provides visitor-driven voting and ranking of user-generated submissions. The site's owner, Tom Fulp, produces in-house content over at the headquarters and offices, based in the Glenside neighborhood of Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania.
Fulp founded the site and company in 1995. Newgrounds played an important role in the Internet culture of the 2000s; "Time" ranked the website at number 39 on its "50 Best Websites" list in 2010.
Content.
User-generated content can be uploaded and categorized into either one of the site's four web portals: "Games", "Movies", "Audio", and "Art". A Movie or Games submission entered undergoes the process termed "Judgment", where it can be rated by all users (from 0 to 5 stars) and reviewed by other users. The average score calculated at various points during Judgment determines if whether the content will be "saved" (added onto the database) or "blammed" (deleted, with only its reviews saved in the "Obituaries" section).
Art and audio compositions are processed using a different method called "Scouting". All users can put art and audio onto their own page, but only those that are "scouted" will appear in the public area. Like the "Judgment" system, it stops stolen content, spam, or prohibited material reaching the public area, relying on users and site moderators (referred to as "Mods"). Once an individual is scouted, they are given the privilege to scout others.
Content and context are liable to be reported for review to the Mods and staff members by flagging it for violations to the site's guidelines; a weighted system recognizes experienced users and gives their flag more voice. The Homepage of Newgrounds includes featured submissions from each category, as well as awards and honors to users whose submission that fall under the site's requirements to earn them. Members of Newgrounds also organize animations called "collabs" through the discussion forum on the site. Some scholars noted that while hundreds of these "collabs" are produced every year, only 20% are completed, due to stress on those making the animations, while other scholars said that animators maintain a "strong sense" of authorship and ownership of what they produce, especially solo animators. 
Although the site hosted animations about Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Taliban, some scholars argued that the site has had a "relatively balanced" conversation on politics, even though those with right-wing views reflect a "sizable part" of the site's user base.
History.
In 1991, at the age 13, Tom Fulp launched a Neo Geo fanzine under the name "New Ground" sending issues to approximately 100 members of a club originating on the internet in Prodigy. Fulp launched a website in 1995 as "New Ground Remix" using a hosting service, increasing popularity in the summer of 1996 after BBS games "Club a Seal" and "Assassin" were created by Fulp while a student at Drexel University, Pennsylvania. Fulp created the sequels to his creations, as games Club a Seal II and Assassin II, along with the decision to develop a separate hosting site, titled "New Ground Atomix".
While Macromedia Flash was required for Newgrounds in order to play specific games, the site also brought together members who were interested in producing flash games, and gained "considerable online influence" as a result. As a result, Newgrounds became one of the most "active Flash creator communities in the English-speaking Internet" and served as a place that game developers could begin their careers. Flash was once described by Newgrounds as the "driving force" behind the site. Even so, those on the site had a "low tolerance for poor quality work," mainly judging humor and storytelling instead of animation, and by the early 2000s, some of the most talented animators on the site had moved to YouTube.
By November 2008, Newgrounds had over 1.5 million users and over 130,000 animations. This had increased August 2010, when it was reported that the site had over 2.2 million users and over 180,000 games and animated films, most of which were animations made by only one person, with others collaboratively made by various individuals. It was also said in 2013 that users had created "hundreds of thousands of animated movies and online games."
In 2018, Newgrounds began to encourage contributors to submit their games in a HTML5 format, rather than using Flash. In November and December 2018, Newgrounds experienced surges of new members originally from Tumblr, when that site began restricting adult content after illegal child pornography was found on that service, resulting in its iOS app being removed from Apple's App Store. 
In summer 2019, the administration of Newgrounds unveiled the Newgrounds Player, which some describe as a "solution for playing Flash games and movies" hosted on the site.
On April 18, 2021, a large update for "Friday Night Funkin"', a popular browser game, was exclusively released on Newgrounds, causing the site's server to become overloaded after a large amount of people visited the site to play it.