Meekly raises hand…
What’s a simp?
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It’s me.
I’m Archie.
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I needed to use an incognito tab to read that.
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It’s incel slang for men who treat women with respect.
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What brought THAT on?
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I must be entirely out of touch with the young people, but how is Archie still going?
I looked outside earlier and it is 2020 now.
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They had a weird kitschy sort of following through the 90’s with the punk and alt kids, together with being the only comics still sold in supermarkets and drug stores past like 1996 and the nostalgia audience from the boomers it kept them going. They were apparently the most profitable comics company during the 90’s bust just on the strength of those supermarket sales.
Bout 10 years or so back they got some new editors or something, and pushed the books in a new direction. Hired a lot of really well regarded young talent. Started updating things, more diverse set of characters. There was a fairly prominent gay wedding. Did some wacky shit like Archie was dead for a while or something. Crossovers with Batman and the Predator.
And started licensing for TV. The new Sabrina the Teenage Witch show is a satanist delight. And the Riverdale teen drama they’ve been doing is apparently mostly a campy comedy.
All of it’s garnered a pretty good following with actual living young people, and attracted a fair bit of attention from long term comics fans.
It’s a bit weird but Archie comics are currently relevant in a way they haven’t been in like 50 years. I haven’t been reading them personally, but I do really like that new Sabrina. It’s like Dark Shadows but well executed and funny on purpose.
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I recall seeing an Archie comic cover ~10 years ago that had a very… sensuous?.. version of the gang. Borderline NSFW. Not quite Alberto Vargas level, but close. It was next to other Archie comics more like I expected; the bikinis were skimpy, but obviously cartoonish.
I stopped reading Archies ~40 years ago, so I must have missed a few changes.
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Ah. Not from watching the videos. Just from posting comments. The comment sctions are usually a wasteland anyway.
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Until today, I dismissed it as an old-timer slang abbreviation of “simpleton”. The connotations provided here seem to be taken from “wimp” and given a dose of “sissy”.
Thanks for the link!
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Archie was uncool for so long that all the people who thought it was uncool are now uncool
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I’ve got a few friends that were fairly into Archie back before the changes. Think those were in the 90’s or 00’s. There was something of a thing for “Swimsuit specials” from comics companies. Most famously Marvel.
There were also some wacky crossovers with Marvel back then. Like Archie meets The Punisher. So some of what they’re doing now is embracing those sorts of weird, half forgotten one offs.
But if I’m remembering it right some of the most famous Archie artists were also famous pin up and fetish artists. So there’s always been a kinda pinup thing going on there, and it’s entirely possible they’ve brought that back too. I know they did crossovers with Red Sonja and Vamparella, which are boob heavy.
Archie was cool because it was uncool for so long it swallowed it’s tail.
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I was struggling to describe the amount of sexy in those comics. “Boob heavy” is perfect!
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As a YouTuber, I can respond to that. Many do ban, but until very recently you couldn’t do it directly from the Studio management app where comments are typically handled. You have to instead go to a computer, manually look the person up by name, and dig through multiple obscure menus to ban them. Combine that with the sheer volume of comments that popular channels get and you see the problem.
There’s a lot of debate within YouTuber circles about whether you even should moderate. First of all, the algorithm rewards user activity of any sort on your channel, and negativity generates more interaction. Second, it’s unclear if moderation is effective. Moderation is a form of “tone setting” in online communities, but that only works if people read the other comments, or are aware they were banned (and why). Neither of those is true of YouTube. The YT commenting style is almost entirely of the “drive-by” variety, not of users interacting with each other. This is evidenced by the fact that you will get 1000 people pointing out any obvious mistake you make in every video. Each person thinks they are being original and hasn’t bothered to read the thread before posting.
This could all be fixed, of course, if YouTube cared about giving us good community management tools and creating a UX that rewards users for being good citizens, but they don’t.
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Wow. So, yes, but YouTube is built to reward creators for maintaining the cesspool? Got it.
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That’s not really fair. It’s more accurate to say they make it hard for us to control their community.
Personally, I do moderate, but my channel is small enough to still do so. It also takes a high emotional toll because you’re subjecting yourself to daily abuse to go in and filter comments a couple of times a day. It shouldn’t be a shock why a lot of creators don’t want to do that. We can’t help it that all of you are monsters.
The algorithmic benefit of keeping garbage comments is not worth it to me, but the actual value of it is unknown (like all things in the algorithm- it’s all heresy).
Fun fact, I would have deleted your comment just now, because it sounded like negative snark off the bat and there isn’t time to stop and give benefit of the doubt. The slightest bit of anything I don’t like and I stop reading and delete. It’s the only way to stay sane and hope to stay ahead of the flood.
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Fair point. I honestly have no frame of reference. I was an early adopter of YouTube and abandoned any hope once the community began evolving. As soon as comment blockers became a thing I deployed them with extreme prejudice.
Definitely wasn’t my intent. At least not snark aimed at you. But that’s why I only comment here. I once had what must have been a teenage girl threaten me with death over comments about Demi Lovato (no kidding!) and learned a valuable lesson about perception of internet comments.
Ok, still learning. 
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Me too. 
This is seemingly the only place on the internet where people can have a mutually respectful conversation about difficult topics. Speaking of community moderation, BoingBoing is the gold standard, in my opinion. This place is a demonstration of what can be done with the right mindset and resources. If only more platforms cared to do so.
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Hell yeah! That’s because we have great moderators (thanks especially to @orenwolf for his hard work and dedication), but also we have a community that takes building an inclusive and safe space seriously.
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http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie_eng.html
<generation=“X”>
Still one server is online, actually.
