Some favorites and a few duds from Monday's commenting. I am in a horribly bad mood. It has almost become funny.
Favorites, in no particular order:
Unstarred commenter Noir Juggling caused my lips to curl into a cruel, mirthless simper with this foul crack at Richard Simmons in the Wake Up Deadspin post. For his effort, his comment was promoted, but he'll still probably die alone someday.
Also in the Wake Up Deadspin post, Gamboa Constrictor called Sean Avery an asshole in a way that is funny. Does he return my calls? NO. He probably doesn't even know I exist.
Person-who-seems-happy-despite-being-alive All Over But The Sharting used a clever choice of words to take a shot at Ja Rule, also in the Wake Up Deadspin post. Congratulations.
Infrequent commenter MattinglysSideburns had a nice laugh at the expense of everything decent with this timely reference to Princess Diana, also from the Wake Up Deadspin post.
Same Sad Echo's refreshingly silly middle-school joke in the Jon Barry/Derrick Rose post was good for a refreshingly less-devastating sob, followed by an afternoon's worth of the regular soul-darkening kind.
And finally, Hatey [my] McLife's outrageously unpleasant one-liner in the Fishing post was one of the best jokes of the day.
Total Fucking Duds
Continuing to live belongs on this list, permanently.
One dud today, from some guy named juanvaldez13. There's no lesson in today's selection; this comment is totally fucking terrible. The worst thing to ever happen to Deadspin commenting is The Simpsons. Without The Simpsons, half-brained, witless, fat-fingered, tone-deaf dill-holes like juanvaldez13 would foresake humor and go back to playing with cat turds and walking into glass doors. (I reserve the right to edit that last sentence to something along the lines of "smart, funny, successful, good-looking go-getters like juanvaldez13 will continue to astonish us with complex, eclectic, sharply-constructed, brilliantly-timed zingers ad infinitum" the very moment I feel bad about being a jerk.)
Okay, one more: EsotericPopCulturePun (whose snarky name makes me want to twist my own head off and punt it into a river of boiling sulfuric acid) got stomped out by the comment_ninja and Tulos_Mullet (among others) for a piece-of-shit contribution to the second MLB Reenactment post. Look, I'm for the public flogging; I'm even more for a public banning. Clearly, this guy has absolutely no business whatsoever commenting on Deadspin. Worthless comment, bad grammar, bad spelling, bad punctuation, not funny, not clever. And the use of the word "really" as a question that implies incredulity is a trend that makes me wish a giant fucking asteroid would hurry up and hit the fucking planet already. Seriously, what better opportunity to whip out the goddamn sad trombone? This guy's commenting history is the sad trombone, played in slow-motion over the sound of a train-wreck.
Serenity now. Happy DUANing.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
Thursday Roundup
Some favorites and very few duds from Thursday, the day shuttledik went into orbit.
Favorites, in no particular order:
Infrequent commenter Gottlieb's Cards made a clever Richard Marx reference in the Barry Bonds thread. The great thing about this joke is that, in +1ing it, a commenter can't hide having liked that particular Richard Marx song enough to recognize a not-especially-obvious reference to it 20 years later. That's good work.
Apparently one cannot link directly to a comment from a slideshow piece in the new site format. Awesome. dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese-mac had a great joke in the Al Davis thread. Go there and look it up, or go directly to his user page and look it up. It's funny. People liked it.
Steve U made a Dwight Gooden joke in the Wally Backman thread that managed to be both pitch-black and strangely sweet. He's really good at this commenting thing.
And finally, in a great example of turning a turd into delicious turd juice, SimuLord rescued Phintastic's lazy, chat-roomy waste of text with a very clever response that managed to make an actual joke out of a lame, lazy observation. I don't mean to crap on Phin, who's a Deadspin institution in part because of the number of times he's had his star yanked away, but he's had too many lazy contributions lately.
Total Fucking Duds:
Many, many people thrust themselves at the gates of the Al Davis post. Most of them were rebuffed. Good for them I can't like to individual comments on that post.
Well, your friend and ours shuttledik finally got himself jettisoned on Thursday. It's a little bit surprising how many people celebrated it when it happened, but then again maybe it's not, given that there were actual DUAN threads about how much he sucked. Don't feel sorry for the guy: he quite richly deserved the banning he got, as well as the roughing up he took the past few days from guys like Tulos_Mullet, JohnnyDrinky, and of course the comment_ninja. At some point, his cluelessness curdled into out-and-out trolling. He knew what he was doing.
Anyway, ding dong the witch is dead. Do not ask who the bell tolls for, Paolo.Lex: it tolls for thee.
Happy Friday.
Favorites, in no particular order:
Infrequent commenter Gottlieb's Cards made a clever Richard Marx reference in the Barry Bonds thread. The great thing about this joke is that, in +1ing it, a commenter can't hide having liked that particular Richard Marx song enough to recognize a not-especially-obvious reference to it 20 years later. That's good work.
Apparently one cannot link directly to a comment from a slideshow piece in the new site format. Awesome. dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese-mac had a great joke in the Al Davis thread. Go there and look it up, or go directly to his user page and look it up. It's funny. People liked it.
Steve U made a Dwight Gooden joke in the Wally Backman thread that managed to be both pitch-black and strangely sweet. He's really good at this commenting thing.
And finally, in a great example of turning a turd into delicious turd juice, SimuLord rescued Phintastic's lazy, chat-roomy waste of text with a very clever response that managed to make an actual joke out of a lame, lazy observation. I don't mean to crap on Phin, who's a Deadspin institution in part because of the number of times he's had his star yanked away, but he's had too many lazy contributions lately.
Total Fucking Duds:
Many, many people thrust themselves at the gates of the Al Davis post. Most of them were rebuffed. Good for them I can't like to individual comments on that post.
Well, your friend and ours shuttledik finally got himself jettisoned on Thursday. It's a little bit surprising how many people celebrated it when it happened, but then again maybe it's not, given that there were actual DUAN threads about how much he sucked. Don't feel sorry for the guy: he quite richly deserved the banning he got, as well as the roughing up he took the past few days from guys like Tulos_Mullet, JohnnyDrinky, and of course the comment_ninja. At some point, his cluelessness curdled into out-and-out trolling. He knew what he was doing.
Anyway, ding dong the witch is dead. Do not ask who the bell tolls for, Paolo.Lex: it tolls for thee.
Happy Friday.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wednesday Roundup
Some favorites and very few duds from Wednesday, the day shuttledik went critical.
Favorites, in no particular order:
MBA hero Steve U torched and pissed on that last little remaining bit of Brett Favre's dignity with this devastating pun in the Sterger post. He clocked in again with the one truly funny comment in the entire dreary BYU thread.
In that same thread, Photoshop wiz See you suckers later delivered an excellent edit to a screencap from the Sterger interview. There was a time when his Photoshop jobs were among the best things to regularly appear on the site.
dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese mac touched off another fun round-robin in the Brian Giles thread. I just love these, both as showcases for the cleverness and wit of the commentariat, and as signs of its overall health. He later brought the house down with this wonderful reference in the Lil' Wayne thread. Sweet Jesus, that one made me dizzy it was so good.
Our guy Gamboa Constrictor came through yet again, with a great bit of wordplay that, in some cosmic way, has to have made Edward James Olmos feel like absolute crap, but sure as hell made me laugh.
Total Fucking Duds:
There were plenty today (the BYU post generated a wasteland of violations of the "be funny, do not not be funny" rule), and our buddy shuttledik has done enough just in the past week to damn near justify an entire spin-off blog of his own, but I'm going to single out friend-of-the-program norbizness here, for this... thing in the Police Blotter post. Does that block of text seem familiar to you? Are you a fan of the works of Mike Judge? Then maybe you'll notice that it is a word-for-word quote from Office Space, unburdened by any contribution from norbizness himself. Not only that, but it is only tangentially relevant to the story to which it is clumsily glued. He could have achieved exactly the same comic effect if, instead of posting this crap, he'd just written, "I've seen a movie in which people commit a crime." Or if he'd just posted a link to fucking IMDB. I hate this shit.
Hey, you have yourself a great day.
Favorites, in no particular order:
MBA hero Steve U torched and pissed on that last little remaining bit of Brett Favre's dignity with this devastating pun in the Sterger post. He clocked in again with the one truly funny comment in the entire dreary BYU thread.
In that same thread, Photoshop wiz See you suckers later delivered an excellent edit to a screencap from the Sterger interview. There was a time when his Photoshop jobs were among the best things to regularly appear on the site.
dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese mac touched off another fun round-robin in the Brian Giles thread. I just love these, both as showcases for the cleverness and wit of the commentariat, and as signs of its overall health. He later brought the house down with this wonderful reference in the Lil' Wayne thread. Sweet Jesus, that one made me dizzy it was so good.
Our guy Gamboa Constrictor came through yet again, with a great bit of wordplay that, in some cosmic way, has to have made Edward James Olmos feel like absolute crap, but sure as hell made me laugh.
Total Fucking Duds:
There were plenty today (the BYU post generated a wasteland of violations of the "be funny, do not not be funny" rule), and our buddy shuttledik has done enough just in the past week to damn near justify an entire spin-off blog of his own, but I'm going to single out friend-of-the-program norbizness here, for this... thing in the Police Blotter post. Does that block of text seem familiar to you? Are you a fan of the works of Mike Judge? Then maybe you'll notice that it is a word-for-word quote from Office Space, unburdened by any contribution from norbizness himself. Not only that, but it is only tangentially relevant to the story to which it is clumsily glued. He could have achieved exactly the same comic effect if, instead of posting this crap, he'd just written, "I've seen a movie in which people commit a crime." Or if he'd just posted a link to fucking IMDB. I hate this shit.
Hey, you have yourself a great day.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
"It's as if you don't even know what we do around here."
In Tuesday morning's Wake Up Deadspin post, the esteemed Ninja made the statement quoted above to, surprise surprise, unstarred commenter shuttledik in reply to a characteristically shitty, clueless, useless comment. And it got me thinking.
Here's the thing: a comment like the one that drew that rebuke from the Ninja would not stand out in your typical barroom or workplace or weekend barbecue conversation about Jenn Sterger and the whole Favredong affair. Nor would it be out of place (acronymical profanity aside) on your typical sports-reporters-shout-at-each-other show on ESPN. In either of those contexts, calling it "shitty, clueless, [and] useless" would be off-base and mean and asshole-y, even if you disagreed with the comment's assertions. So why is it OK to call it those things in the context of Deadspin?
It's OK to call it those things in the context of Deadspin because the Deadspin comment sections are not intended to simulate an earnest conversation - even a conversation between intelligent, thoughtful, funny people - about sports. Barroom, or workplace, or weekend barbecue bull sessions about the latest sports scandal have their proper homes: barrooms, or workplaces, or weekend barbecues. ESPN shows where sports media types bark at each other are perfectly sufficient at providing the world with well more than a tolerable amount of sports media types barking at each other. The Deadspin comment sections are not chat rooms. They are not places for sports fans to make their voices heard. They most certainly are not places for readers to let the Deadspin staff know what they think of a certain piece.
The confusion, I think, arises from the expectation that the comment sections on one website will serve the same function as the comment sections on all others. On ESPN.com, for example, when you get to the end of an article, you can click a little link that takes you to the comments, and there you can see what, at its best, is a free-flowing, informal conversation between sports fans about the article, or about issues related to the article. At its worst (which is where it is roughly 102% of the time), it is a depressing flame-war between minimally-literate insane people and 13-year-old losers about which rival team's star player is the gayest. In any event, the function of the comment section is to give readers a place to spout off, to take part in the discussion represented by the site content. The intent is that this will lead to readers who visit the site more frequently, as they play out their regional rivalries or flame-wars or dick-wagging contests with and against each other. The commenters' intelligence, their literacy, their sanity, or their lack of those things are utterly irrelevant, because the comments are tucked away behind a link where only people who actually want to read them will do so.
I have no proof for this statement, but I'd bet that ESPN.com's editors fully expect that the average reader who clicks one of those links will do so once, gasp in horror, and never do so again - and that's fine, because the comments aren't for the average ESPN.com reader: they're for the insane, minimally-literate, obsessive, cloistered-in-sports-loserdom psychotic people and virgins and 13-year-old psychotic virgins who will refresh ESPN.com 15,000 times a day until they are certain their foe's gayness has been adequately established for all the other 13-year-old psychotic virgins out there.
Similarly, the Washington Post's online comment sections are a never-ending holy war between the very worst dregs of partisan lunacy on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and I'll bet washingtonpost.com's editors couldn't possibly care less, as long as those lunatics continue refreshing the page every twelve seconds until someone acknowledges the unassailable rightness of the assertion that President Obama is a Muslim Communist mole from Indonesia and/or a crypto-Republican hand-puppet of our Wall Street overlords. As with ESPN.com, the comments are hidden behind a link that the average intelligent person will click once in his or her entire life, and then never again, either because he or she realized the folly of doing so and resolved to learn from the mistake, or because he or she tore his or her own eyeballs out after thirty seconds of reading the washingtonpost.com comments sections and then crushed them in his or her hands, and can no longer visit the internet, both because of being blind and because there is no internet in the lunatic asylum which is his or her new residence.
In both of those cases - and in virtually all others - the function of the comment section of the website is to provide obsessive readers with a designated place, safe and cloistered away from the general public, where they can hit the refresh button as many times as they want and say whatever pops into their heads without upsetting, driving away, or even being visible to the average site visitor.
That is not the case with Deadspin.
So what are Deadspin's comment sections? In short, they are featured site content. It will have escaped no one's notice that, notwithstanding the myriad merits of Deadspin's writing staff and the wonderful work its members do, the average Deadspin post is very brief - sometimes nothing more than an embedded video with three or four sentences of humor-tinged text to provide context. I am not in any way privy to the inner workings of Gawker Media, but I feel confident in saying that the expectation is that, both in the case of these brief items, and also in the case of the longer-form stuff, readers will take in the actual content of an article or video, then keep scrolling down and see a bunch of funny, clever, original shit that makes them laugh and want to come back to the site. Putting the comments after the content of posts, and below an advertisement, is a nod to the reality that not everything that appears in the comments will be something the average Deadspin visitor will find acceptable - but the comments are not hidden behind a link, because the comments are meant to be read, and not just by the commenters.
The exclusive, hierarchical comment system is not some accident: it is specifically and pointedly antithetical to the notion of comment sections as places for inclusion and conversation and free-flowing bull sessions. Your comments can't even appear on the site to anyone but starred commenters and Deadspin staff until you've proven you're funny enough to be approved (or, as in the case of too many current unstarred commenters, you've said something dumb enough or inflammatory enough to bait a starred commenter into approving you just to respond).
And the site has fucking rules, if the basic system and structure of the comment section didn't make its purpose clear enough. There's an entire goddamn Manifesto, for fuck's sake! And what's the very first rule? Be funny. The second rule? Do not not be funny.
The appropriate way to think of Deadspin is as a publication, like a magazine. (In olden times, “magazine” was a word for a stack of napkins on which primitive humans etched crude symbols in an extinct form of language known as “the complete sentence.” Also, cigarette ads.) Think of the mind-shatteringly hilarious “Fashion Police” section of Us Weekly. That’s the one where such cutting-edge comedians as Johnny Lopez, that woman who wrote the Sex and the City book, and Dave Coulier make blisteringly funny and incisive comments on the fashion choices of A-List celebrities such as That Hag Who Was On That Reality Show That One Time. If Carrot Top made a hilarious observation like, “My locker used to look just like that dress back in middle-school!!!” and Mo Rocca’s comment was “Mine too! Where did you go to school! I loved Trapper Keepers,” sure, we all feel that way, but it also breaks up the uncontrollable laughter of all 18 million readers, and deprives us of Rocca’s own gut-busting japery in the meantime.
But the real pisser is that, for as much as "My locker used to look just like that dress back in middle-school!!!" might seem like the funniest, edgiest, snarkiest boomroast ever, that comment would not get approved or promoted on Deadspin. How? you ask. How can this be? It can be because that comment does not contain a dick joke. But also because, in all seriousness, a comment like that is the sort of thing a clever person might blurt out in a conversation, to the amusement of others, but it is ultimately a lazy observation that is beneath the standard of what a genuinely funny and intelligent person would think up if they had time to think, their entire accumulated body of knowledge to reference, and absolutely no pressure to actually come up with anything.
And that's just the thing, right there: if you read the Commentist Manifesto linked above, you'll notice that nowhere in its contents does it say, or imply, anything even remotely along the lines of "Thou shalt comment." No one has ever lost a star, or been banned from the site, or in any way been rebuked or chastised or penalized for not commenting (although, depending on how you interpret the words "not commenting," you might say that SirTruthington is an exception to this). If you can't think of something genuinely funny and original to add, don't fucking add anything.
Here is where I imagine the sacoplentys (sacsoplenty?) and shuttlediks of the world making the same kind of noise that plenty of other subsequently-banned commenters have made about elitism and unfairness and the subjectivity of humor and WHAT ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION and blah blah blah. And you know what? They're wrong about the unfairness, they're mostly wrong about the subjectivity of humor, and I don't really know what the Constitution has to do with any of it - but they're right about the elitism. Deadspin's commenting system is elitist. It does not pretend to be anything else. Most people, whether because they don't have time or don't have energy or aren't all that funny or aren't all that smart or don't write well or whatever the fuck, simply can't do what the site rewards, which is being funny and original and clever and smart, in writing, a lot.
The fact that Deadspin commenters are not paid for their contributions doesn't mean they are immune from standards, however high the powers-that-be may choose to set them. There's absolutely nothing unfair about this, just like there's nothing unfair about the Ninja banning people for sucking, and there's nothing unfair about the fact that the majority of people who try to be Deadspin commenters never even get approved, much less starred.
Ultimately, the Commentist Manifesto communicates this stuff far better and more concisely than I do. However, since a good portion of what we do here is rip shitty commenters for their shitty comments, I think it's important to be clear about our understanding of the function, rules, and purpose of the Deadspin comment sections. On washingtonpost.com, you could very well accuse Barack Obama of being a Nazi and you wouldn't draw a peep from a moderator - and maybe that's fine, maybe that kind of wide-open Wild West atmosphere has value, whatever. But that's not what's going on at Deadspin, and would-be commenters who fail to heed that fact do so at their own peril, and in spite of abundant guidance to the contrary.
Be funny. Do not not be funny.
Here's the thing: a comment like the one that drew that rebuke from the Ninja would not stand out in your typical barroom or workplace or weekend barbecue conversation about Jenn Sterger and the whole Favredong affair. Nor would it be out of place (acronymical profanity aside) on your typical sports-reporters-shout-at-each-other show on ESPN. In either of those contexts, calling it "shitty, clueless, [and] useless" would be off-base and mean and asshole-y, even if you disagreed with the comment's assertions. So why is it OK to call it those things in the context of Deadspin?
It's OK to call it those things in the context of Deadspin because the Deadspin comment sections are not intended to simulate an earnest conversation - even a conversation between intelligent, thoughtful, funny people - about sports. Barroom, or workplace, or weekend barbecue bull sessions about the latest sports scandal have their proper homes: barrooms, or workplaces, or weekend barbecues. ESPN shows where sports media types bark at each other are perfectly sufficient at providing the world with well more than a tolerable amount of sports media types barking at each other. The Deadspin comment sections are not chat rooms. They are not places for sports fans to make their voices heard. They most certainly are not places for readers to let the Deadspin staff know what they think of a certain piece.
The confusion, I think, arises from the expectation that the comment sections on one website will serve the same function as the comment sections on all others. On ESPN.com, for example, when you get to the end of an article, you can click a little link that takes you to the comments, and there you can see what, at its best, is a free-flowing, informal conversation between sports fans about the article, or about issues related to the article. At its worst (which is where it is roughly 102% of the time), it is a depressing flame-war between minimally-literate insane people and 13-year-old losers about which rival team's star player is the gayest. In any event, the function of the comment section is to give readers a place to spout off, to take part in the discussion represented by the site content. The intent is that this will lead to readers who visit the site more frequently, as they play out their regional rivalries or flame-wars or dick-wagging contests with and against each other. The commenters' intelligence, their literacy, their sanity, or their lack of those things are utterly irrelevant, because the comments are tucked away behind a link where only people who actually want to read them will do so.
I have no proof for this statement, but I'd bet that ESPN.com's editors fully expect that the average reader who clicks one of those links will do so once, gasp in horror, and never do so again - and that's fine, because the comments aren't for the average ESPN.com reader: they're for the insane, minimally-literate, obsessive, cloistered-in-sports-loserdom psychotic people and virgins and 13-year-old psychotic virgins who will refresh ESPN.com 15,000 times a day until they are certain their foe's gayness has been adequately established for all the other 13-year-old psychotic virgins out there.
Similarly, the Washington Post's online comment sections are a never-ending holy war between the very worst dregs of partisan lunacy on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and I'll bet washingtonpost.com's editors couldn't possibly care less, as long as those lunatics continue refreshing the page every twelve seconds until someone acknowledges the unassailable rightness of the assertion that President Obama is a Muslim Communist mole from Indonesia and/or a crypto-Republican hand-puppet of our Wall Street overlords. As with ESPN.com, the comments are hidden behind a link that the average intelligent person will click once in his or her entire life, and then never again, either because he or she realized the folly of doing so and resolved to learn from the mistake, or because he or she tore his or her own eyeballs out after thirty seconds of reading the washingtonpost.com comments sections and then crushed them in his or her hands, and can no longer visit the internet, both because of being blind and because there is no internet in the lunatic asylum which is his or her new residence.
In both of those cases - and in virtually all others - the function of the comment section of the website is to provide obsessive readers with a designated place, safe and cloistered away from the general public, where they can hit the refresh button as many times as they want and say whatever pops into their heads without upsetting, driving away, or even being visible to the average site visitor.
That is not the case with Deadspin.
So what are Deadspin's comment sections? In short, they are featured site content. It will have escaped no one's notice that, notwithstanding the myriad merits of Deadspin's writing staff and the wonderful work its members do, the average Deadspin post is very brief - sometimes nothing more than an embedded video with three or four sentences of humor-tinged text to provide context. I am not in any way privy to the inner workings of Gawker Media, but I feel confident in saying that the expectation is that, both in the case of these brief items, and also in the case of the longer-form stuff, readers will take in the actual content of an article or video, then keep scrolling down and see a bunch of funny, clever, original shit that makes them laugh and want to come back to the site. Putting the comments after the content of posts, and below an advertisement, is a nod to the reality that not everything that appears in the comments will be something the average Deadspin visitor will find acceptable - but the comments are not hidden behind a link, because the comments are meant to be read, and not just by the commenters.
The exclusive, hierarchical comment system is not some accident: it is specifically and pointedly antithetical to the notion of comment sections as places for inclusion and conversation and free-flowing bull sessions. Your comments can't even appear on the site to anyone but starred commenters and Deadspin staff until you've proven you're funny enough to be approved (or, as in the case of too many current unstarred commenters, you've said something dumb enough or inflammatory enough to bait a starred commenter into approving you just to respond).
And the site has fucking rules, if the basic system and structure of the comment section didn't make its purpose clear enough. There's an entire goddamn Manifesto, for fuck's sake! And what's the very first rule? Be funny. The second rule? Do not not be funny.
The appropriate way to think of Deadspin is as a publication, like a magazine. (In olden times, “magazine” was a word for a stack of napkins on which primitive humans etched crude symbols in an extinct form of language known as “the complete sentence.” Also, cigarette ads.) Think of the mind-shatteringly hilarious “Fashion Police” section of Us Weekly. That’s the one where such cutting-edge comedians as Johnny Lopez, that woman who wrote the Sex and the City book, and Dave Coulier make blisteringly funny and incisive comments on the fashion choices of A-List celebrities such as That Hag Who Was On That Reality Show That One Time. If Carrot Top made a hilarious observation like, “My locker used to look just like that dress back in middle-school!!!” and Mo Rocca’s comment was “Mine too! Where did you go to school! I loved Trapper Keepers,” sure, we all feel that way, but it also breaks up the uncontrollable laughter of all 18 million readers, and deprives us of Rocca’s own gut-busting japery in the meantime.
But the real pisser is that, for as much as "My locker used to look just like that dress back in middle-school!!!" might seem like the funniest, edgiest, snarkiest boomroast ever, that comment would not get approved or promoted on Deadspin. How? you ask. How can this be? It can be because that comment does not contain a dick joke. But also because, in all seriousness, a comment like that is the sort of thing a clever person might blurt out in a conversation, to the amusement of others, but it is ultimately a lazy observation that is beneath the standard of what a genuinely funny and intelligent person would think up if they had time to think, their entire accumulated body of knowledge to reference, and absolutely no pressure to actually come up with anything.
And that's just the thing, right there: if you read the Commentist Manifesto linked above, you'll notice that nowhere in its contents does it say, or imply, anything even remotely along the lines of "Thou shalt comment." No one has ever lost a star, or been banned from the site, or in any way been rebuked or chastised or penalized for not commenting (although, depending on how you interpret the words "not commenting," you might say that SirTruthington is an exception to this). If you can't think of something genuinely funny and original to add, don't fucking add anything.
Here is where I imagine the sacoplentys (sacsoplenty?) and shuttlediks of the world making the same kind of noise that plenty of other subsequently-banned commenters have made about elitism and unfairness and the subjectivity of humor and WHAT ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION and blah blah blah. And you know what? They're wrong about the unfairness, they're mostly wrong about the subjectivity of humor, and I don't really know what the Constitution has to do with any of it - but they're right about the elitism. Deadspin's commenting system is elitist. It does not pretend to be anything else. Most people, whether because they don't have time or don't have energy or aren't all that funny or aren't all that smart or don't write well or whatever the fuck, simply can't do what the site rewards, which is being funny and original and clever and smart, in writing, a lot.
The fact that Deadspin commenters are not paid for their contributions doesn't mean they are immune from standards, however high the powers-that-be may choose to set them. There's absolutely nothing unfair about this, just like there's nothing unfair about the Ninja banning people for sucking, and there's nothing unfair about the fact that the majority of people who try to be Deadspin commenters never even get approved, much less starred.
Ultimately, the Commentist Manifesto communicates this stuff far better and more concisely than I do. However, since a good portion of what we do here is rip shitty commenters for their shitty comments, I think it's important to be clear about our understanding of the function, rules, and purpose of the Deadspin comment sections. On washingtonpost.com, you could very well accuse Barack Obama of being a Nazi and you wouldn't draw a peep from a moderator - and maybe that's fine, maybe that kind of wide-open Wild West atmosphere has value, whatever. But that's not what's going on at Deadspin, and would-be commenters who fail to heed that fact do so at their own peril, and in spite of abundant guidance to the contrary.
Be funny. Do not not be funny.
Tuesday Roundup
Some favorites and very few duds from Tuesday's commenting.
Favorites, in no particular order:
This thread from the Wake Up Deadspin post was terrific. Just a bunch of quality commenters having fun with a headline. On their own, the individual comments wouldn't draw a laugh, but together in a thread, they're great.
All Over But The Sharting's latest bizarre Olive Garden menu joke brought the house down in the UVA Lacrosse Murder thread.
In the Gary Plummer thread, Bevraj of Choice had nice play on words that got some much-deserved praise. He's really great at these clever, concise little reversals.
For some reason my attempts at linking to it keep failing, but it wouldn't be a day without a tip of the hat to Eddie Murray Sparkles, and his Owen Wilson joke in the DUAN thread is brutal and brilliant. Scroll down to near the beginning of the thread to find it.
Total Fucking Duds:
A handful of guys have pretty well staked out this section as their territory by now: Paolo.Lex, sacoplenty, and most notably, shuttledik. Tuesday was the day the latter of those three finally got a hip-check from the Ninja, for this wreck in the Wake Up Deadspin thread. He also got called out by Tulos_Mullet for another waste of space in the Celtics B-Team post. Inexplicably, he continued commenting after that, with no notable improvement - in fact, he later contributed a motherfucking .gif, of all things, to a later post. Congratulations, idiot: you're the worst thing on the entire website.
As for the rest of you, have a great day.
Favorites, in no particular order:
This thread from the Wake Up Deadspin post was terrific. Just a bunch of quality commenters having fun with a headline. On their own, the individual comments wouldn't draw a laugh, but together in a thread, they're great.
All Over But The Sharting's latest bizarre Olive Garden menu joke brought the house down in the UVA Lacrosse Murder thread.
In the Gary Plummer thread, Bevraj of Choice had nice play on words that got some much-deserved praise. He's really great at these clever, concise little reversals.
For some reason my attempts at linking to it keep failing, but it wouldn't be a day without a tip of the hat to Eddie Murray Sparkles, and his Owen Wilson joke in the DUAN thread is brutal and brilliant. Scroll down to near the beginning of the thread to find it.
Total Fucking Duds:
A handful of guys have pretty well staked out this section as their territory by now: Paolo.Lex, sacoplenty, and most notably, shuttledik. Tuesday was the day the latter of those three finally got a hip-check from the Ninja, for this wreck in the Wake Up Deadspin thread. He also got called out by Tulos_Mullet for another waste of space in the Celtics B-Team post. Inexplicably, he continued commenting after that, with no notable improvement - in fact, he later contributed a motherfucking .gif, of all things, to a later post. Congratulations, idiot: you're the worst thing on the entire website.
As for the rest of you, have a great day.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Monday Roundup
Some favorites and very few duds from Monday's commenting.
Favorites, in no particular order:
MBA favorite Eddie Murray Sparkles brought the funny with this gem in the Priorities post. He's just so damn clever.
I'm not sure I could explain why this comment by Hatey McLife in the Bug Bites thread cracked me up so much. It might be the exclamation point. In any event, it's damn funny.
SavetoFavorites didn't get any love for this Dexter-Manley-is-illiterate joke in the This Is So Stupid thread, and I don't know why. Sometimes the distribution of +1s doesn't make any sense to me. This was a hilarious comment. I'm still chuckling about it.
OnTheTwelfthNightOfLloydChristmas had my favorite comment of the day: this gem in the Go Away thread. Hysterical.
Total Fucking Duds:
There were plenty of duds today, but nothing comes close to this flat tire by unstarred commenter DonChandlerMissed. My favorite part about it is the "Edited by DonChandlerMissed at 04/11/11 12:12 PM." Really? You revised your comment to that?
Happy DUANing, people.
Favorites, in no particular order:
MBA favorite Eddie Murray Sparkles brought the funny with this gem in the Priorities post. He's just so damn clever.
I'm not sure I could explain why this comment by Hatey McLife in the Bug Bites thread cracked me up so much. It might be the exclamation point. In any event, it's damn funny.
SavetoFavorites didn't get any love for this Dexter-Manley-is-illiterate joke in the This Is So Stupid thread, and I don't know why. Sometimes the distribution of +1s doesn't make any sense to me. This was a hilarious comment. I'm still chuckling about it.
OnTheTwelfthNightOfLloydChristmas had my favorite comment of the day: this gem in the Go Away thread. Hysterical.
Total Fucking Duds:
There were plenty of duds today, but nothing comes close to this flat tire by unstarred commenter DonChandlerMissed. My favorite part about it is the "Edited by DonChandlerMissed at 04/11/11 12:12 PM." Really? You revised your comment to that?
Happy DUANing, people.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Friday Roundup
Some favorites and very few duds from Friday's commenting.
Favorites, in no particular order:
dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese mac, Hatey McLife, and SponsoredbyV8 played an awesome game of kick-the-can in the Kids And Their Dunks thread. I love to see commenters riffing on each other's stuff. cheese mac had another gem in the Manny Ramirez thread.
And those are the only favorites for what was a graveyard of a day in Deadspin commenting.
Total Fucking Duds:
Deadspin I-Team posts are often especially terrible, because many people seem to think that the appeal for information somehow lifts the requirement that comments be funny. Friday's I-Team post was no exception. Unstarred commenters ScarletSquire and BarbarobicsInstructor did their part to reinforce the common perception of Deadspin's comment threads as safe places for ignorant, obnoxious, borderline-offensive bullshit, with this and this, respectively. Boo on them both.
Also, unstarred commenter HelenaHandbasket earned a mention for an utter failure to simply read the rest of the Manny Ramirez thread before dropping this turd in it. This comment would not be funny even if it was remotely original, and it is not remotely original.
All in all, Friday was a pretty rotten day for commenting, which is consistent with my general sense that Fridays are a weak day for commenting.
Happy weekend DUANs. See you on Monday.
Favorites, in no particular order:
dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese mac, Hatey McLife, and SponsoredbyV8 played an awesome game of kick-the-can in the Kids And Their Dunks thread. I love to see commenters riffing on each other's stuff. cheese mac had another gem in the Manny Ramirez thread.
And those are the only favorites for what was a graveyard of a day in Deadspin commenting.
Total Fucking Duds:
Deadspin I-Team posts are often especially terrible, because many people seem to think that the appeal for information somehow lifts the requirement that comments be funny. Friday's I-Team post was no exception. Unstarred commenters ScarletSquire and BarbarobicsInstructor did their part to reinforce the common perception of Deadspin's comment threads as safe places for ignorant, obnoxious, borderline-offensive bullshit, with this and this, respectively. Boo on them both.
Also, unstarred commenter HelenaHandbasket earned a mention for an utter failure to simply read the rest of the Manny Ramirez thread before dropping this turd in it. This comment would not be funny even if it was remotely original, and it is not remotely original.
All in all, Friday was a pretty rotten day for commenting, which is consistent with my general sense that Fridays are a weak day for commenting.
Happy weekend DUANs. See you on Monday.
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