The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

Agreed (and io9 did the same fucking thing). The show is on late enough that I watch it the next night, like a huge number of people probably do, especially since it's been running long every week.

That's been happening to me on Chrome on my phone on occasion when I click an article on the site.

It happened to me here once as well -- and really freaked me out since I've avoided any kind of virus infection for well over a decade now. But it appears not to be an infection; it's compromised code in the ads served up by the websites themselves, as I've been led to understand. But I know AVC was the only browser tab I had open when it happened most recently.

I always thought 2012-2014 was the Golden Era. I figure that's what people are usually referring to when they say the comments used to be great.

Were there comments there to begin with? They often don't allow them in the first place on sponsored articles.    

It's the A.V. Club's Langoliers.

I blame the millennials for the decline of the site.

I'm only sort of kidding.

So Univision bought Gawker...

There are more trolls and shitposters over there, and their comment system is atrocious. That said, I like some of the sub-blogs (mainly io9 and Deadspin). I think the main fear is that the AV Club will get folded into that umbrella, or that Kinja (which is much worse than Disqus) will get forced on the AVC.

In regards to replying via the notification panel... yeah, that happened a few weeks ago, and it's really annoying.

In regards to Disqus being stupid... give it a few hours, then the comments will appear normally. It's doing the thing where it doesn't load all the comments while being overworked. I usually participate in the first hour, then revisit 4 hours later, then the next day.

In regards to what you're reading... what are you reading? 

I think it went from an unusual Gen X site to an average millennial one, and it's the average part that's the problem. The Onion got a brilliant millennial successor with Clickhole, but the AV Club is sort of stuck halfway - it wants a younger audience but now lacks a lot of the quirkiness that drew the older users in in the first place, so it fails to get that younger audience because they weren't there for when the site was great and unique. Young pop culture nerds will just seek out a subreddit for whatever they're into instead, because the modern AVC doesn't really offer anything better. It used to. But now it doesn't.

(It probably doesn't help that the commentariat is regularly and loudly disdainful of most music that young people like, but I digress.)

This is exactly it. When I go back now, all the comments load (or at least way more than were loading before. Since the switch to NuDisqus, I always assumed it was the number of comments that were problem, and had stopped going back later once the article started having problems. Guess I misdiagnosed the issue. Some doctor I am.

I've seriously felt bad lately because I'll get a notification of a response, read it in the notification window, but can't respond or even upvote it because I'm still running an AV account and I'll give it up when they pry it from my dead cold hands. But my only recourse is to go back to the original thread, sift through possibly hundreds of comments to get to it, and then reply or upvote, and fuck that.