I’ve been using trakt.tv to track everything I watch since the 7th October 2013, I’ve been on there for over a decade now and it is so engrained into my daily living that it’s borderline obsessive. You can ask me any date or time between now and my sign up date what I was watching, and I can tell you - assuming I was watching something on that date and time you guess.
v2 Profile - Click here for full webpage snippet
Rewinding to 2025 a bit, I’ve seen a steadily increasing pattern across nearly all platforms that I use - AI. I have my feelings on AI that I won’t discuss here, as that’s another conversation, but one of the things I really hate is the ongoing pattern of very clearly AI designed websites that have clearly not been user tested at all.
Back when I signed up to Trakt in 2013 it was using the good ol Bootstrap, something I still use to this day and then at some point they changed to what is now being called “v2”, it’s what I considered personally (and others do) the perfect design for what Trakt was. Everything was easy to view, access, you knew EXACTLY what your data was trying to tell you and it was that way for years. To make the perfect setup, Trakt released their iOS app in 2020. I actually beta tested it with a bunch of other Trakt users and it was perfect. I think you’re starting to get the point here though - trakt was perfect. was.
The downhill spiral of trakt appears to have started sometime in June of 2025, when they increased their annual VIP membership from $30 to $60. For a website I’ve used every day of my life since I was 16 years old I didn’t even blink at the price increase, to me it was worth it. They were adding new features, the existing features I paid for were still there and being improved and lets be honest, RAM and Storage is getting ridiculously expensive so it makes sense.
Then came January of this year, 2026. The iOS app got a redesign, “v3”. v3 is what I and seemingly quite a lot of other people would consider, a steaming pile of dog poo.
But you know what? It’s just an app. We can continue using the website in Safari, it was designed for mobile because there was never an app in the first place. So that wasn’t really a massive issue, but then February of this year came along, and they starting limiting what you could do on Trakt - even if you paid $60 a year, now granted, not many people are going to hit these new limits in the first place but that does beg the question of why have they been implemented in the first place? Starting to get a bit of a dodgy feeling now but, again… 13 years on this website, it can’t get much worse.
March 17 2026 - Free Users Redirect to v3 - that terrible iOS app we’d seen back in January? It’s now being forced onto non-VIP users with no v2 access what-so-ever. This is what I personally refer to as “kevin the bald headed idiot just bought the nail for the coffin” era. They’ve implemented a mobile-first, apple-tv? first design onto a website and it makes zero sense. You want to see what you’ve watched? Good luck working out the button colors, want to see what seasons of a show you’ve watched? Nah you don’t, you don’t need that. Starting to get worried now but at least I still have access to v2!
March - April was around the time I started debating exporting my data and jumping ship. I did some research into the TMDB API, and used my template One User System ASP Core project that I’ve used previously for things like my gaming tracker, but I wasn’t ready to jump ship yet, although I did cancel my VIP renewal that’s due in December of this year and now looking at it, I’m glad I did - my self hosted tracker has data importing, I just need to build the actual tracking portion.
July 2026. Why can’t I access the v2 dashboard anymore? Do I need to go to a subdomain like you do for Old Reddit? No. they got rid of it. The last part of trakt that was actually usable and made me and many other users (read the comments on that forum post) stay with Trakt is gone completely. What was once a great website for tracking TV Shows, Movies, your Physical Media collection is no more - Collections no longer exist in the sense that they did, it now links with Plex which is the most pointless feature I’ve ever heard of.
v3 Profile
To see a website I used so much for so long fall to shit truly is a heart breaking experience. The enshittification of trakt has finished, but I feel like it will only get worse.