Charles Bartlett

Or: How I learned the value of online communities from tentacle porn

Since the point of this little project is to restore a sense of community around my work, it might be relevant to tell you how I discovered the value of online communities for the first time.

Way back in the mid-2000s, I was working as Road Test Editor for a little blog called Jalopnik. That was brand new at the time, and more of an experiment in trying not to be another boring car website than it was a viable business. I was 25 or 26 when I started there, and was brought on as the voice of experience, and a sign of legitimacy, since I’d actually had a job at an actual magazine before.

Like the other sites owned by Gawker Media, there was a function where readers could leave something called a “comment,” under articles. There was never any unifying thought process behind this feature; you got the feeling it was more a box one of the Hungarian developers didn’t know they were supposed to check to disable when they copy and pasted whatever code they used to put the sites together. And a…