The coming Kinja-pocalypse

I got notifications today for two four year old responses to a four year old comment I made on a four year old article.

I've heard the Avocado is a little mod happy.

Though admittedly I've never run afoul of the mods before, it's worth mentioning that the two people who started complaining about the Avocado in my valedictory PCW post had befouled themselves many atime thereon (I'm not sure whether naming names is cool here, but one kept asking me if I was Washington Post writer Maura Judkis in a mildly threatening fashion before accusing another Avocado regular--I can't remember whom--of Holocaust denial, and the other devoted themselves to mild stalking, especially of a specific mod or two, under several different Avocado/AVC handles). My understanding, at least, is that mod overreach in general seems to lie in the past.

Um... what "valedictory PCW post"?

We mod a little differently than the AVC, is all, primarily in that racism/sexism/etc aren't allowed at all and in that we ask people not to be flirty/sexual with people they don't know. But AFAIK we haven't issued any kind of warning at all in quite a while, and we've only banned obvious trolls and spambots in the last several months.

That frame is unexpectedly chilling, thanks.

And now I'm getting notifications for those same replies every morning.  

Holy hell it's dead over there. There are newswires that have been up for hours that have single-digit comments.

They seem to be slowly loading in articles from February of 2016. So I keep getting these old, old notifications.

I'm getting overloaded with notifications, which makes it impossible to see if I got an real ones in there unless they're one of the last 5, or I want to dig through the terrible dashboard panel.

On top of that, I'll get the notification before it may properly display, so if something leaps out to me and I want to see the context, I can't find it.

There's an article over there on Obama's statement on Trump ending DACA, I know we had trolls before, but woo boy, it's like a nest of vipers over there. Not sure if it's worse, or because of how Kinja ranks comments that get lots of replies at the top (at least that's how I understand it) if it just seems that way since all the worst comments come first. Either way, I backed away slowly and ran into the (reasonable) arms of the TI.

I will say this about Kinja: once you're out of the greys--no self-related pun intended, but I had to point out that it occurred to me, er...--once you're not stuck in pending purgatory, it is possible to comment on the topic in a meaningful way. It's needlessly over-formatted and labor-intensive to browse, but it is possible to say something on-topic.

But having conversations or any sense of community? N/A

Maybe the plugins improve some things, but the descent into weird-little-corner-of-voices territory is a sad, sad thing for the AVC.

For any given story, and some features, the writing is still going to be as good or better than most of the alternatives out there, but I find myself asking myself the same questions that others mentioned upthread...is it worth it to try and support anymore? Should I avoid to make a point? Again, very sad.

At least the writers at The (New) Old Country are having fun with the "Recommended Stories" under each article.

Today's Jeff Goldblum Newswire says, "Recommended Uh Uh Uh Uh Stories?"

I scanned a few articles at the Old Country, and saw something about a "Wheelman" movie. I thought "There ought to be fodder for some real lame Family Guy joke there. That could probably piss people off". But it just wasn't worth the pain and effort.