The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

According to Quantcast (which is not always a great indicator), they've had some of their best days ever since December 2016. It looks like a lot of them closely coincide with major political events, which explains the shift to covering Trump so extensively. And those days are certainly bigger than any while I was there. In general, the AVC's traffic has been going up over the past five years, not down.

I love comments sections, and I love reader engagement, but as I think about starting a web site of my own, the more I wonder if they aren't more hassle than they're worth in 2017. Thanks to the presence of the alt-right, in particular, but other, less well-known brigading groups, every single comment section is a ticking time bomb, especially if you don't want to invest in community moderators. (Thus, it makes a lot of sense that this change applies just to Newswire, the place where alt-right crazies are most likely to pop in.) 

The answer to that even five years ago was, "Geez. Invest in a community manager," or "Have your social media person keep an eye on comments," if you were, somehow, a site with a social media manager in 2012 (most sites wouldn't have had one at that time). But in 2017, people who read these articles on computers -- and are thus the most likely to comment -- are rapidly becoming a smaller percentage of your total readership, at least in comparison to people who randomly click on things on their phones. So your money is best invested in getting as many people to click on your article on their phone, not in fostering a comments section.

This is sort of why comments sections are probably on the way out at all but a few sites. 

I think you're right, but now I'm just depressed. 




(The A.V. Club)

I mentioned this over at the Old Country, but I just truly don't think they want us anymore. I'll probably be more active at the AVC After Dark in the future. All the stuff I joined the original AVC for is gone.

The comments are an absolute wasteland today.

The only advantage I can see to the AVC running articles on celebrity photo theft scandals is that I get to add a ton of people to my block list.

Some of the GJIs have had an insane number of comments, though.

But I think this may be the beginning of the end for the community over there.

And Castro is for real dead now! Oh how naive I was!

OK so now apparently they've turned off AVClub account access for Newswires. I'm not logged into Newswire comments at all. When I go to log in, it only gives options for Disqus and Facebook, no AVClub accounts. I'm logged in and can comment on non Newswire features, but not Newswire articles. And I still can't see icons on newswires.

Edit: I know people have been plugging this but I tried the "?permalink=true" trick of adding it at the end of the URL and it worked! I can see avs again! I'm logged in! Oh, sweet old comment section that still sucks but not as bad as it does now, I missed you!

They fixed the newswire comments.

It seems like a good compromise to me, as long as it works properly. I haven't had any issues so far.

Do we love Sean again now?

Back when I read Joblo.com regularly, I always liked how whenever they rolled out a new look for the site (which was at least every 2 years), they would do a post which had screenshots of every previous iteration of the site back to the beginning. It was always a fun little nostalgia trip of "oh man, remember when the site looked like that?!"

It'd be fun to see something like that for TOC. Of course, I could probably cobble something together myself using the Wayback Machine, but that sounds like work, and I'm not even about that.

Yeah, I'm fine with it. I have no real objections to the forever scroll of Newswires: I just want comments to work, and they do!