The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

Meth Lab Shenanigans You know who actually lectured the commenters? Keith Phipps back in 2012, which we all look back on as the good old days. There hasn’t been any such reminder recently at the AVC, and one would be kind of pointless since there isn’t really as much of shared community at the AVC to lecture.

Look in the comments and you see a lot of mockery of Phipps’s point—and people made joking comments about celebrity smells for weeks afterwards (because, although Phipps included that as a precaution, that was one bit of BS not thrown at Lena Dunham, and smell is an inherently funny sense). But that was possible. And it’s striking how much wasn’t deleted, since the few weeks after that announcement were probably the most heavily-moderated in AVC history—a few tentpole commenters had brushes with bans over stuff that wouldn’t bat an eye today, almost everyone had a comment deleted, there was a crackdown on gimmicks, &c. That’s because the commenters fundamentally knew who each other were as far as the AVC was concerned and what they could say.

I don’t think there’s that much lecturing from the articles (though I agree that they can be a bit lazy—the AVC seems to unconsciously veer towards Clickhole territory earnestly from time to time—seriously, that Dr. Hibbert article), but people are more on-guard (with good reason) in the comments which makes that sort of relaxed, jokey atmosphere harder to sustain.

I unironically love Mohd and ad I don't understand why some people hate his guts. 

He gets there first and rakes in all the upvotes, making everyone envious.

There's nothing noteworthy about him other than that. 

Meth Lab Shenanigans Oddly most of my angriest replies come not from people who actually disagree with me but people who skim or misread my posts and write a long angry response to what they thought I wrote, which tells me there are a lot of people who come to the comments looking for an argument or fight and they’ll try their hardest to get one. I haven’t read as much in the past few months (and generally try to stick to stuff I think I’ll actually like), but the writers and commenters do seem to be on kind of different wavelengths. I can’t blame them, though—the Ghostbusters comments turned to hot garbage fast (like, immediately fast), with people either saying Hassenegger liked Feig too much to be “objective” or saying he didn’t do enough to critique the film’s problematic elements. I mean, posting first, reading later is an old AVC tradition but so is not taking yourself too seriously.[/i]

I mean, certainly they can veer off topic, but there's usually some tie-in to the article.

Like I said, I don't hate the guy, but I can absolutely understand why he irritates people.

"Walter Goggins"

Yeah, so they've cut so many features that there are now only 2 spots above the fold instead of 6, they just misspelled the name of one of the most revered character actors on TV in one of those 2 spots, and I can no longer see Disqus notifications on my faux-Disqus AVC account. This is grim.

I grew up on broadsheets dammit!

And yeah, it looks like the notifications still work on my phone but not on the computer. Weird.

I find once I've refreshed a few times and waited several minutes the notifications fuckup seems to go away. So even that's inefficiently done if they're (Disqus, not the AVC) trying to screw us out of our AVC-only accounts.

After several months of paying better attention, I can see why Mohd annoys people, but the vehemence of the dislike seems a little weird when there are longtime regulars who are just as obnoxious (if not more) and don't attract a tenth of the anger.

Still goggling (heh) at the "Walter Goggins" thing, too, but it was almost worth it to see someone post the lyrics to the Kinks' "Do You Remember Walter?" in the comments. I pretty much upvoted every joke of that sort on general principles.

Yeah, refreshing doesn't do squat to make my notifications come back, it's just the iPad that works.

I pinged Teti on Twitter; he had no idea what happened, so he posted a thread himself. Good work, and proof that social media works!

Credit where due: the back half of this week, content has been really strong. Every day should be like this.