For years, The A.V. Club’s comment section was the part of the site worth reading even when the article was not. The publication began in 1993 as the entertainment pages of The Onion, and its readers took the reviews seriously enough to argue about them at length. Regular names reappeared under every piece, trading in-jokes and running corrections until the comment section had a culture of its own. Regular names reappeared under every piece, trading in-jokes and running corrections until the comment section had a culture of its own.
Identity, built one comment at a time
Nothing about the setup encouraged community. The A.V. Club comments worked the old way: article, byline, a box for your opinion. What made it stick was recurrence. The same handles turned up everywhere, developed running gags, and held each other to the site’s tone — witty, precise, allergic to hype. Staff noticed. The site itself still describes that history as central to its identity: The A.V. Club’s current About page says its commenting community helped the publication establish a larger place in pop-culture discussion and that loyal readers have persisted through redesigns, ownership changes, and hosting changes.
The 2017 Kinja migration
Ownership changes proved easier to absorb than a systems change. In August 2017, The A.V. Club moved onto Kinja, the publishing platform used across its corporate group. The site’s own migration announcement promised that existing comments would be ported and that Disqus users would be able to claim matching Kinja identities. Even with that effort, the interface and habits changed enough that many longtime commenters regarded the move as a rupture.
More owners, more disruption
More ownership changes followed, and the site itself went through repeated staffing and platform disruption. For the commenters, the practical question was always whether the discussion would remain worth showing up to.
Return to Disqus
Paste Media acquired The A.V. Club in 2024, and that year the site returned to Disqus. In Disqus’s announcement of the July 2024 return, Paste founder Josh Jackson said the active commenting community was one reason the company wanted the property and that readers repeatedly asked for Disqus back. Commenters responded with genuine relief: “Oh, thank GOD. We’re back, baby!”
What keeps a commenting community alive
The A.V. Club’s commenters outlived two owners and a hated platform change because the identity never lived in the software. It lived in recurring people, shared jokes, and accumulated memory. The Kinja move showed what breaks: a new empty room that forgets everyone’s history. What let the community reassemble was continuity of identity — regulars could reclaim Disqus accounts from before 2017, and the familiar platform came back. A commenting community persists not because the owner is stable, but because the same people can find each other again in a familiar place.