The coming Kinja-pocalypse

The internet stopped being cool when accessing it didn't make your computer sound like it was having an exorcism.

I suppose that's true, and YouTube comments did give us Reposted Avenged Sevenfold Fan, so I suppose that some good did come of it.

I thought Ernie came across fine, honestly. Sure, he tried to match AVC snarktone and that's not what a lot of people wanted from him - but it was an understandable idea.

In response to whoever said it: as a web programmer I can fuckin' guarantee that no one at Gawker wants to do away with comments. They're tremendous click-drivers. You poor fools who keep clicking back to keep track of a conversation, you're just pouring money into the overload coffers. (Except we're all using adblocker, so womp womp.)

Nesting conversations would probably be a platform-wide change, which means that everyone on every other Gawker site would be enraged because their world was changing. It's obviously better, but, y'know, what we're seeing with AVC is a long process of selling out to corporate overlords, with a corresponding dip in how convenient they are for their specific users and also in quality of content. I mean, what, are you guys actually going there for some reason these days? Their movie reviews are mostly terrible. Their TV recaps have honestly never been very good. Their book reviews are a joke. Is it just Sean O'Neal?

I got off track here. My general point is, AVC some years ago: great; AVC the past few years: bad; AVC in the future: worse. That's how that goes.

I remember watching the old DS9 episode “Past Tense”—where Sisko, Bashir and Dax get stranded in the 2020s—a few years ago and thinking it was funny who they treated “The Net” as basically an extension of cable. Given the future of net neutrality that can still happen (been meaning to rewatch it anyway given housing costs in CA…).

It's ironic that after 20 years the internet would go full circle like that.

Comments were originally a way to increase page views (as people would come back to check out new comments) and the amount of time spent on each page. Unfortunately, just slapping comment sections everywhere and taking a laissez faire approach to the issues of moderation (free speech! users can self-moderate! downvotes!) lead to...well, the reasons we think of comment sections as horrible nightmares. And now comment sections are viewed as toxic and harmful, as having them lowers readers' opinions of the material they just read and also started harming retention.  So in the places that keep them, they want them to be mostly a place for people to leave a comment for "engagement" purposes, not for people to interact with each other or read other comments. 

The AVC was never like that, but it's going to be. 

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is great. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky covers a lot of really cool high lit.
Honestly, as a food person I like some of the new food coverage, but now that I think about it, the only reason I visit AVC these days - even more than O'Neal, because clicking newswires hoping to find O'Neal is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets - the only thing I'm looking for these days is Ignatiy Vishnevetsky.

I agree. Or rather, I agree that Ignatiy is the best thing AVC has going for it and meekly admit that I find O'Neal smug and unfunny

I suggest we start a NEW website! With nested comments! Devoted entirely to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky! We'll call it "The I.V. Club."

O'Neal's snark peaked a few years ago, for me - or my appreciation of it peaked. You're not alone. Long article O'Neal is way better than news story O'Neal.

There are a few writers I love to read over there.  I think I said elsewhere that Will Harris is still doing great things with "Random Roles," and I hope he continues to for a long time to come.  Donna Bowman has great write-ups of Better Call Saul, and I want to say there's another feature I dig a lot still, but I'm drawing a blank right now, which means I'm drinking too much.  Or not enough.

Jesus.  Gotta protect that brand.

ETA:  Okay, to be fair, Ernie's an employee, and I get the impulse to protect him from being hoisted as a effigy for us to take our anti-Kinja angst out on.  But on the other... shit, get rid of those troll comments at least at the same time, ya know?  And also, he engaged with the community.  Kinda gotta grow a thick skin if you're gonna be in PR.

Isn’t kinja’s moderation philosophy “Traumatize the poor offshored Filipino IT workers by making them look through the horrendous gifs people post to Jezebel” or something like that?

Ooh, you were The Quirk? I coveted your avatar! The goat with the monocle, right? Or was it a pipe?

...Anyblah, I've been commenting at the AVClub for 8 years now. It's still the website I visit most often, but so much of the stuff I liked is gone. I miss TV Club Classic, that sense of watching the same show as everybody else.