It’s Not Me, It’s You: Breaking Up With Jalopnik

"bobkustofawitshz" (bobkustofawitshz)
11/07/2020 at 19:39 • Filed to: farewell

I’ve been here almost since the start, mid 2000s I suppose, what might be considered Jalopnik’s formative years. I remember when Spinelli was still EIC. I remember when Murilee Martin was writing for the site. I remember Ray Wert treating auto shows like conjugal visits. At the time, I was probably too young to fully appreciate what I had stumbled upon, what would become more or less my home on the internet for the next 15 years. The writing, the wit, the community. “Obsessed with the cult of cars,” they said, and they were, they really were.

I’ve been here through multiple site redesigns, leadership changes, ownership changes, and new commenting platforms that enraged the commentariat, while also enabling some of our best work. Staff came and went, but the community, united by a common love of cars, remained. It was a good thing.

It probably wasn’t until a few years after I first visited Jalopnik that I stumbled across Oppositelock, and a remarkable find it was. A community that operated under one simple rule: be excellent to one another. An environment to share the triumphs and tribulations of car ownership, a forum to seek advice and offer it in return, an arena always open for a healthy debate over the benefits of RWD vs. FWD, and a source of some of the best user-generated automotive content on the web. I love this place, and all of you who have contributed to making it what it is today. Thank you.

But now, with Oppo’s days numbered, it’s sadly time to say goodbye. Not just to Oppo (which I have no doubt will find a new home on another platform) but to Jalopnik all together.

Jalopnik today is a shell of its former self. The site, especially over the past few years, has devolved into an utter shitshow that has caused me to visit less, and spend less time on the site when I do. Here are but a few of the reasons why:

The commenting system (Kinja) has never worked quite right since it was introduced, but the most recent changes have rendered the site completely unusable on mobile (iOS). Even when I can manage to log in (which is itself a crapshoot) I can’t comment, can’t reply, cant upload images, can’t star, can’t edit and simply trying to LOAD the comments on an article causes the whole page to crash. This is bullshit, and I’ve had enough.

The fucking ADS have gone from mild to annoying to now being so intrusive and obnoxious that they make it impossible to enjoy the site itself. Pop-up, pop-down, pop-over, header, sidebar, autoplay videos, the clickbait Taboola sponsored BS - Jalopnik has it all, slowing down the whole site and again, rendering it virtually unusable. Performance declined so badly that I finally installed Adblock Plus just so I could read articles again and was SHOCKED to see it reach 145+ blocked ads within a minute of visiting the site. What the hell is going on!?!?

All the good writers have left . I‘m really only here for Tracy and McParland’s stuff, and the occasional batshit insane but thoroughly entertaining Torch post.

The pace of original content has seemingly slowed to a crawl , with a lot of sponsored crap and cross-posting from other G/O sites. Other sites post actual news about actual cars, which may not appear on Jalopnik for days, if ever. There just isn’t that much left to interest me.

The insertion of politics into seemingly every article , whether through subtle jabs our outright hostility. Look, we (unfortunately) live in hyper-polarized times, and everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion, but I’m not here for that. I come here to get away from that. I like cars, and I come here (a CAR site) to read about cars, not to read the snide opinions of new left urbanists who think they should be banned from cities, the incessant bitching about SUVs being too big & dangerous, and the disparagement of entire groups of people for driving certain vehicles simply because we like them. Whatever happened to “Obsessed with the cult of cars?” Enough!

The killing of Oppositelock is the final straw. As Jalopnik self-destructed over the past few years, Oppo was a welcome respite from the chaos, a mainstay of my automotive internet experience, a place that still offered great content, a welcoming community, and a platform that was (mostly) still usable, in stark contrast to the FP.

Now, the corporate overlords, quivering with lawyer-induced fear in our excessively litigious society over changes to the law that Congress MIGHT (but probably shouldn’t) make, have decided to employ the scorched-earth nuclear option and eliminate user-generated content altogether, including our beloved Oppo. And with that, there’s simply nothing left for me here anymore.

Fuck you Jim Spanfeller, you’re a piece of shit and a fucking herb. You’ve taken a great thing and ruined it. I hope you’re happy when you lose most of your readership and the sites fail. I bet in 10 years there will be a HBS case study about how you took one of the internet’s most valuable automotive properties and ran it into the ground. I’m out, and I won’t be back. Suck my balls, asshole.

For the rest of you, I’ll be over on !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (Bob Kustofawitshz) where I will eventually end up posting my WK2 Grand Cherokee Oppositelock review when I get around to writing it.

I guess this is the end.

Goodbye Jalopnik.

Thanks for the memories, Oppo. See you all on the flip side.

DISCUSSION (9)

Shane Moore > bobkustofawitshz
11/07/2020 at 20:12

Ray Wert dragoning feels SOOO long ago. Man.

Urambo Tauro > bobkustofawitshz
11/07/2020 at 20:13

Strong points; well said!

ranwhenparked > bobkustofawitshz
11/07/2020 at 20:26

I don’t know exactly when I started on here, I think it was around 2006, with a bit of lurking before that. The logo was still some Jalopnik intern with mirrored sunglasses. I avoided Oppositelock when it first launched, because I was trying to limit how much time I spent online and just didn’t want to add one more thing, but Clayton Smith (crazedclay) really gave a good pitch and got me on here in 2013.

I remember it well, because I had to cut a weekend in California short to fly back home for a godawful week long work “planning conference” at the Shawnee Inn in the Poconos, and started subtly going onto Oppo that week to occupy myself while the boss got drunk on Glenlivet and droned on and on about meaningless shit we were never going to accomplish.

Gradually, I started to spend more and more time here than on the FP, and mostly stopped visiting the FP entirely the past 1-2 years or so. Mainly because the comments no longer load right and the whole thing is really slow and glitchy, but also because the whole tone and attitude of the site has changed. Very, very, negative and doom and gloom, sky is falling, everything sucks all the time, etc. and very political, even in articles where it isn’t even relevant. The language has also gotten rather crude and mean, probably for shock effect or to be edgy, but it comes off as unprofessional and immature. It just isn’t fun or entertaining anymore, for the most part, a couple of writers are doing their best to keep things together - Stef, Torch, Tracy - but they can’t carry the whole thing themselves and the user experience is now so cumbersome as to make them hard to enjoy.

Anyway, its been fun, but nothing lasts forever, I suppose.

Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com > bobkustofawitshz
11/07/2020 at 20:52

Sentiment reciprocated.

I think it hit me how lost FP is when I found someone commented “Hurr Durr, Jackie Chan founded a race team? WTF”. I mean what’ s the point if the depths meta is so low they don’t know his partnership with Mitsubishi nor watched Thunderbolt.

I just gave up after that...

Tripper > bobkustofawitshz
11/07/2020 at 20:56

Totally agree on most points particularly politics. It’s what will keep me out of the next iteration.

50ford500 > bobkustofawitshz
11/07/2020 at 21:54

I may pop in from time to time just to see what the above writers mentioned are up to along with our good friend Miss Mercedes since she made it on staff but I honestly could care less about their whole media empire. I’ll be oppo till I die though

A Boy and His Longtail > bobkustofawitshz
11/08/2020 at 10:44

Is Drive Tribe the new plan for Oppo? I don’t want it to go!

bobkustofawitshz > A Boy and His Longtail
11/08/2020 at 11:24

I don’t think there is an official “new” Oppo yet, from what I gather mods are still discussing it and folks have decamped to various other platforms. From what I’ve seen, DT seems to be a decent substitute, probably the most similar to Oppo on Kinja in terms of format and post creation. A number of Oppos have already migrated.

Unfortunately none of us have a choice in the matter. The powers (herbs) that be have dictated 11/16 to be the last day, with all content to be wiped shortly thereafter. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if it happened sooner.

A Boy and His Longtail > bobkustofawitshz
11/08/2020 at 16:49

I’ll try to get some last C ON T E N T in before then