tskirvin | The AV Club died today

I've been reading The AV Club in some form or another for, what, twenty-some years now? It started out as zine-style media reviews in the back of issues of The Onion; they were fine, and I read them casually and learned about stuff I'd want to read or watch or listen to. And when everything went to the Internet they adapted, hiring a bunch of really good reviewers and (eventually) focusing heavily on TV reviews. They've been the best in the business for years, even as the site has shriveled.

They threw it all away today. It turns out that the site had been bought by the Gawker guys a while ago, and Gawker got bought by Univision. So today they converted to the "official" standard software for the corporation - Kinja - and made the site unusable. The navigation is borked beyond repair, the RSS feeds are broken, old articles are at best discoverable with a search engine, the new design is white-space awful, and (worst of all) the comment section, which was a gem in the same way that Usenet was once a gem, has been blown away and replaced with something much less usable, harder to navigate, and hostile to both commenter and lurker.

I was expecting it to be bad. This is far worse than I expected. And I'm seriously wondering how I'm supposed to find out which new television shows or movies I want to watch now, let alone figure out where to read discussions of the latest episode of the shows I already watch.

Can we please stop undervaluing community? Gaah.