From the early days Vox and sites like Polygon and TheVerge were pretty open and proud about their custom CMS and publishing platform. It is pretty surprising to see them abandon Chorus. Also interesting that they think Coral, a tolerable-at-best comments platform, is appealing for other customers.

A glimpse at the recent history of Chorus as a stand-alone product: https://product.voxmedia.com/chorus

There was a period (roughly the second term of Obama) where tech/media/politics was very intertwined. People moved from media to the Obama admin, which had a close relationship with big tech, and then onto leadership positions in big tech.

Vox was the pinnacle of this, a very technocratic liberal publication which raised a lot of money telling investors it was a tech company (hence the focus on the CMS).

This broke down after the 2016 election as the media blamed the tech industry for the election result (leading the NYT to set a editorial policy that tech must be covered in a negative light), and also had to focus on ideology over technocracy (which is why the wonkier people at Vox got slowly pushed out). The gap between politics and tech also grew as there was no path from the Trump admin to tech leadership (or vice versa).

Meanwhile youtube & twitter grew, making big media less and less relevant.

So this is an interesting if expected outcome as Vox has slowly dwindled in value.