See 'em Before They're Gone! AVC's Greatest Comment Threads!

Good Lord, I miss the dissolve in many ways, but I'd forgotten how much the comments section could turn into a middle school cafeteria.

The Dissolve FB group reminds me of it every day. 

To the extent that we can, we might want to try to link to the disqus pages for these - it might preserve the comments even after the switchover.

I think that was me. I also really enjoy when I'm re-reading some old thread, go to upvote a funny comment, and see that I already did that years ago.

Funeral music is one of my favourite threads - esp Nudeviking's contribution.

Does anybody remember the Cakeless Wedding comment thread? In a completely unrelated newswire back in paginated comments days, Lux Lisbon had one of the first comments, complaining that she just found out the wedding she was going to would not have a cake. The next two pages of comments were people registering their disgust at the idea of a wedding without a cake in it. Nothing, not even the Trump presidency, has so united the commenting community.

Well then stay away from Lux Lisbon, because she is PISSED.

This is true, but not the reason why I did not have cake at my wedding.

I had a traditional Korean wedding. Cake is not a part of their wedding tradition but really cool hats, the bride and groom drinking hard liquor during the ceremony, chickens, feats of strength, and a lady dressed as a man singing a traditional love song with a lady dressed as a lady apparently all are.

Our cake, I remember, was $180 and served about 100. Honestly $1.80 per person ain't bad. It's small potatoes in the wedding expense list. That said, you do know someone who's about to start working at a place known for cake decorating...

Chicken Feets of Strength?

We had a cake at our wedding, but by the time it was served, I was so drunk that I slapped my wife on the back in excitement about how awesome it was and almost pushed her into it.

First, a request we shift this to the main page as the end draws near. Now:



There’s a fair amount of romanticism about the old AVC, pre-Dissolve split. And it was a great place. But it was also a different place, a more acerbic place—a bit more like a writer’s room where everyone had a bit more armor (the confessionals really started picking up only near the end of the Olde Disqus era), and was paradoxically felt a bit more comfortable saying stuff. Stuff that could go over the line, even if it was wickedly funny.

That’s right. I’m talking about how celebrities smell.

To be fair I never actually saw anyone talk about this. But there was a lot of ire aimed at Lena Dunham, then at the beginning of her multimedia empire-building. A lot of the criticisms of Dunham were fair, a lot of them were more of Dunham’s weight and appearance, and many were a mix of the two. But it was enough for Keith Phipps to post A reminder of our commenting policy (and what you can do to help enforce it).



(“Reasonable Discussions” used to be the quasi-official motto of the comments, and the bottom of the page headlined a featured comment every week—pretty sure Cookie_Monster was the record-holder—until the advent of Olde Disqus.)

It’s mostly reasonable stuff—a reminder of the FAQ’s—but the inclusion of this sentence made the commentariat [ETA: there’s some great Elegant Victorian Lady in these comments] roar with collective laughter:


Smell is an inherently funny sense, and the fact that no one talked about how Lena Dunham smelled made it all the funnier, and it was a joke for a solid few weeks, though really one that only peaked in those comments.

Basically everyone had at least one comment removed in the post-smell crackdown, when the guidelines were very liberally interpreted. There was a definite bias towards comments about Dunham, including relatively innocuous ones. An exception, of course, came in the “exactly what you’d like to do to them in the sack”—well, that might have been literally followed, but solo fantasizing about Alison Brie (or Gillian Jacobs) continued apace.

Anyway this old thread came to mind because it’s very funny, reflects a transition of a different sort, and also reflects that there was never some golden age of commentariat-writer/staff comity—a topic newly relevant given Kinja Eddie. You’ll notice a lot of comments missing—many of these were from a gimmick commenter whose comments were roughly (can’t remember his exact name) as follows:

This comment was flagged
This comment has been flagged for review.

plus the occasional

Comment Deleted
This comment has been removed.

Both of these found themselves deleted more often than not.

Gimmick moderation’s long been an commenter-staff point of contention too. The Taco Bell Bell was repeatedly threatened with deletion and saved by O’Neal. I remember K. Thrace and I writing in to the AVC on behest of Reposted A7X fan, who was repeatedly getting banned as well [ETA: there’s also speculation in the above thread that Phipps was responding to the preponderance of gimmick commenters, including Reposted A7X]. There was a lot of affinity when everything was aligned and on topic—multiple people had Phipps as an avatar, IIRC, and I remember Tasha Robinson chiding me for missing out on a day when she was giving a talk on Ghibli in Chicago. That’s almost unimaginable now, but that was from focused, on-topic discussions about films and such. Not newswire. And there was always a willingness to strike back. And a vicious strike they landed when they posted

Tom Scharpling reads A.V. Club comments accompanied by a slide whistle

And the comments to that are funny, too (and, as I noted at the time, Scharpling fails on his own terms because “You could clearly hear him chuckling as he scrolled past the ‘I'm finding this news difficult to masturbate to’ comment”). And it birthed the Slide Whistle, a gimmick sadly cut short by the switch to nuDisqus.

So there’s always been a healthy exchange of semi-hostile jokey bs between the staff and commenters, much of it’s to be taken in the spirit of mockery and not taken too seriously.

Powerthirteen I think in most cases where gimmicks have run into trouble it’s because they’re considered a form of spam—Taco Bell Bell always posts the same thing, and I remember a “Victorian Spambot” gimmick getting flagged down and deleted very quickly.

One of my favorites would have to be the jovial IdiAmin—he had an exquisite sense of timing even though most of his comments were morbid non-sequiturs. Also pretty clearly the sort of gimmick that only could have worked in the pre-nuDisqus community.