One of my favorite comments I get from PR people, journalists, other publishers, et cetera is that they can’t believe the community we have here. That’s what the Internet used to be about, but too many publications got sold to people who didn’t understand that a site like this can only thrive with readers who care. It’s why so many of our peers look at the quality and number of comments we have and express some mix of shock, envy, and disbelief.
This is a good week for media in general, because we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Defector. While this site may have formed under different circumstances and with slightly different goals, the success of Defector was encouraging to those of us who felt there had to be a way back to websites that didn’t suck.
In his celebration post, Tom Ley (who was the one who encouraged us to do a Velour tier, btw) wrote that he wants people to think of it like opening a bar that “welcomes patrons into a place where they might have a few laughs, learn a few things, and pass the time a little more pleasantly than they otherwise would.”
This feels right to me. I want this place to be a fun place to “pass the time a little more pleasantly” than you otherwise might. At the same time, I think we all have an ambition to grow this place and make it more than it is right now.
To that end, we’ve made two strategic hires:
- Brian Silvestro, our new News Editor, who is already making a huge difference when it comes to keeping us up-to-date on what’s happening.
- Griffin Riley, our Video Manager, who is continuing to expand our video offerings.
These last two weeks we’ve experimented with increasing our daily production a bit, while also improving or adding some site features (Night Panel, Glovebox). We’ll also be replacing the current Consent Management Platform (CMP) that a few of you didn’t like with one that should work a little better and be a little less intrusive.
The site’s looked great to me this week, but I’m curious what everyone else thinks. How are we doing? How are you doing? What could we do better? What should we do more of?
Photo: Ford
This is the best place on the internet. Keep doing what you’re doing, I trust y’all at this point.
As for quantity, I try to read most posts but where I would run out in the early days of the site, I never run out these days. The amount of content is very much robust.
Generally, I am obviously quite pleased with the content, as I am still a paying member and also comment quite regularly.
Among the things I like is that you lot come across as fellow humans and not some kind of self-aware superstars. We, the members (and other readers as well) get to know you a bit more personally. We know about Jason’s wife and son, and while we are kept in the dark about Elise’s and Delmar’s real names (IT’S OKAY, none of our business), we know that they exist, and some of their story. (We also know when they got married, approximately, and when Delmar was born, approximately. And we can do the math.) It feels much more personal than with some other news outlets. You are people.
There are a couple of things I don’t like that much. The site is still quite slow to load. That’s one thing. It’s WordPress for all I know, and that can be blazingly fast if you just de-install all of the plugins. Some of which you probably need. Oh well.
Another is your steadfast insistence on using stupid multiples. Instead of saying “an enormous 65-times-2.54-cm cinema screen”, you could just say “an enormous 165-cm cinema screen”. It would be so much easier, as almost everyone on the planet uses SI units exclusively in their daily lives.
You could include conversions to customary (not imperial) units in parenthesis for those poor lost souls still using them.
Are you trolling or actually being that much of a snob? It’s an American website, and I imagine the significant majority of their traffic is from the US.
Yes, metric is a better system. It’s not even close to being enough better to spend billions of dollars to switch everything and have massive confusion for decades. The UK is still a clusterfuck of measurement systems.
It’s really, genuinely annoying. And unnecessary. Yes, the founders are US citizens, but there are Canadians, Britons, Australians writing for the site. It is far from universally an US site.
Then convert them, it’s 2025, you can get browser extensions that do it automatically
Stop being a snob, it super easy to convert. Yes the majority of the world uses metric. But not the majority of readers on this website. Epsicaly because where it’s most important, things like new car reviews, they are writing about US market cars. It would be incredibly stupid to put metric measurements first for an article about a US market car.
Okay. Except for ICE displacment, which is measured in litres these days, even in the US. But put the metric units in parenthesis. But for non-US-market vehicles, putting customary units only is even more incredibly stupid.
Great site, great writers, great community, keep it up! Love the new dark mode and colorful text.
Load speeds still suck, and I wish there was some way to either make the notification bell take me to notifications when I click on it or make it go away (it’s constantly ringing and I have no way to see why, clicking does nothing on mobile). Just small annoyances that take very little away from the overall experience…
About a year ago I found that, depending on which browser you use it works (works for me on duckduckgo but not chrome)
Strike up the “Twighlight Zone” music… I just closed my doom and gloom “regular” newsfeed tab in order to give my brain a little vacation over here. Y’all are doing great!
I’m so happy this site is so successful – you all rock! I keep this tab open all day and it’s the site I visit most often. I’ve been a huge fan since before day one (March 32nd has a special place in my heart) and I’m really happy that the membership thing is working out. My first comment here, under my old screen name of Dar Khorse, was to urge you to start a membership model, as I was sure that your fanbase would happily contribute to the site, and I’m really happy that has been borne out. I joined as soon as memberships were available and have been a member ever since (except for a 6 month break while I fought off The Cancer and decided to come back with a different screen name).
My only complaint is the slowness of the site (as many others have also pointed out). Get away from WordPress if at all possible. It’s fine for little sites but I’m constantly worried that a site as large as this one is going to collapse under the weight of the sloppy coding and patchwork of plugins that is WordPress. You (and we, your readers) deserve a much better infrastructure than what they can provide!
Edit: I’ve been gently corrected by my wife, who runs her own website and is more knowledgeable of such things than I am: WordPress is the basis of most of the biggest sites out there and works fine as well as it’s got a proper template and is well-maintained and has the minimum number of plugins. So I think the speed issues here are fixable, with the right tech support.
Keep doing what you’re doing. I’m not as interested in new car reviews so much as I’m interested in car culture, odd wrenching stories, and deep dives on weird European buses made out of aluminum and powered by natural gas. New car sites are a dime a dozen; I think a lot of the appeal for this site are the personalities and the projects and quirks you bring. I’d rather see Torch buy another bizarre vehicle, Mercedes road-test an RV, SWG try to revive another shitbox or Adrian critique a terrible design.
+1 to the pageload issues—it is pretty slow.
Honestly I agree, I care less and less about the new car reveals the older I get.
I enjoy the writing, the diverse subject matter and the majority of the commentary.
However, after being the subject of an ad hominem attack by a self described assh&%# member a few weeks back I have stepped back from participating in any dialog on the site.
I enjoy the site and the majority of the commenters, (the sniping at boomers is tedious and boring) and I try to abide.
I need a way to reach out privately… I’m reviving a ’62 Corvair.
Cannot help you on the Corvair front.
Last time I worked on one was in the late 70’s helping a friend build a midengine crown conversion 66.
I am accumulating funds and looking for a candidate project cars that I hope to get started on sometime over the next few years.
Jump on to one of the Corvair boards on the interwebs. Mostly good people with lots of experience.
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner. I only log in once a week now.
Cheers and good luck with your project.
I use them often, may have found my issue. I need to pull all belly pans and reset valve lash – an old school mechanic I trust thinks that is my no run problem.
Could be. Good luck, that’s a tedious job.
Dang jerkwads everywhere. Apparently “boomer” just means “anyone over 40” now, which suits me OK since my physique is not unlike that of a nuclear submarine.
Chiming in to say – you are one of the few websites I happily pay for. The mix of shenanigans and long-form passion pieces is great and it seems you are putting effort into finding different motoring perspectives to write for you.
But you could definitely rummage through the bench seats and find some change for we site optimization or CDN. On mobile especially the site is woefully slow to load any pages and things like the notification bell are completely non responsive.
I understand Ohio is the end of the earth but surely the pipe to here isn’t that long ????
CDN and some expert attention to the Chrome developer console would go a long ways and save hosting bills, though I can see why they’d want to wait until they migrate to a different Consent[sic] Management System.
I just wish the video embeds didn’t freak out my browser.
The bell works for me on duckduckgo so it may depend on browser
Doing great, my favorite website for sure. Just two things I’d recommend.
I’d love to see more F1 content and discussion.
Well, no. Because then you would have to include Indycar because it’s actually about racing instead of being People magazine for men. But there are ample sites to get racing reporting (I like Racer). An occasional “atmosphere” piece like the Miami GP one is fine, but I’d prefer Autopian stay out of racing altogether. Open the door a little bit and before you know it we’ve got monster trucks and NASCAR.
That said, I’d love to see what reporting could come from the SCCA National Runoffs and SCCA Solo Championships.
I loved the NASCAR tech and strategy deep dives from an insider. But yes, covering races should not be this site’s forte.
I might enjoy that, but would prefer to stay away from race reporting, silly season, driver feuds, etc. My specific objection to NASCAR and F1 is that personalities are emphasized more than the racing itself.
NASCAR was my introduction to motorsports and I moved to North Carolina because Richard Petty showed me that the South was a much kinder place than the Northeast. But that was before Brian France screwed the pooch. F1 was always an elitist soap opera with little actual competition and I’ve personally never cared for it.
As a Tween ,TNN was a constant cable TV presence. They covered NHRA, NASCAR, and numerous local racing in the late ’80s. It was often on TV in the background as we kids did other stuff. But it influnced me, as they may have had the best motorsport and car reporting at the time.
IndyCar is my favorite series by a long shot (maybe not long shot, I love IMSA/WEC too) so a world where there’s more of that is a world I adore.
They need to send me to a Grand Prix to do an atmosphere piece.
No way – Darlington for you!
I would pay more to send Adrian to Darlington. I’m nowhere near local, but my company has a facility nearby and I’m in the region frequently.
Does Jason have a hide-a-bed he can sleep on?
Raliegh/Durham is quite a way from Darington.
Just good old boys, never mean’en no harm.
Maybe SWG is closer. Or Jason can get the RV running.
Oh I would so be down for that.
Well, as a Brit I suspect he can drink beer. And it’s always cold here!
Bristol, too.
You’re thinking something like Hunter S. Thompson at the Kentucky Derby?
Not familiar with that piece but if it’s anything like I imagine, yes.
“I was well into my eighth Natural Light of the morning when a pneumatic woman in a faded Dale Earnhardt tee shirt offered me a menthol cigarette thinner and longer than her blonde hair”
Wherever you go, I’ll go for that one AC.
My man. Make it happen, Hardigree.
Does the 48 hours really matter?
Good.
The only criticism that comes to mind is that the “my content and settings” section is basically unusable with night panel active due to the teal text on the standard white background.
Otherwise keep on keeping on!
I agree, Teal on white probably is entirely readable on a larger screen, but on an iPhone it is much less so.
Content-wise, great fun. Excellent collection of writers talking about cool and relevant stuff. Some of the thinly-veiled product promos are a little TOO thinly-veiled, but that’s just the nature of the game.
Website-wise, my biggest gripes are about embedded content, and I don’t think many, if any of them are y’all’s fault. Instagram and Youtube especially really don’t like to load within articles for me, so I tend to get a lot of white space where I just imagine a sweet car or funny joke or badass demo vid would be. But if, for some reason, you are the reason that I keep getting “enable cookies to watch this content” messages over Youtube vids, know that I am never, ever going to do that. I don’t recall seeing that message anywhere before, ever.
Community-wise, I’m going to be the stick in the mud. While by and large there are a lot of great, smart, funny posters around these parts, the absolute lack of moderation (which, admittedly, is acknowledged, admitted, and agreed to in the legalese ToS) makes for some pretty hostile posting at times. The weird racism against China in particular, not-so-subtle transphobia (more on this in a second), occasional bouts of sexism, and generally aggressive sniping and information-less shit-slinging perpetrated by certain people about certain topics (and then strawman-ing into others) gets really tedious. For a group of people who “just want to talk about cars” there’s an awful lot of projection going on here. I’d be very interested to see what the user demographics here are.
The aforementioned transphobia: I am literally here because of Mercedes. I’m a member of another forum and, in a thread discussing various chuds in the automotive world and the lamenting of relatively few actually decent car outlets on the internet, someone mentioned the Autopian and the fact that they have a trans staff writer. “Holy shit,” I thought to myself, “that’s amazing.” Because, y’see, I am myself a trans gal. But I also grew up working on big rigs (you think dropping the oil plug for your car into the pan is bad…), wrenching on other people’s projects, listening to the old guys complain about computers and fuel injection, and so on. Car shit is my jam. But no one out there seems to get that overlap. “Queer people… can like… cars??” It short circuits car guys. So finding a place where the brass don’t just acknowledge that fact but also, like, hire and pay those people, too? I’m there.
But then there’s the non sequitur “bathroom” chat. The use of California as “queer liberal high-tax hell hole” dogwhistling. While I haven’t seen it directed at Mercedes specifically (and bless ‘er if she sees it and doesn’t talk about it), but those of us who come here not just for the content but for the mission statement of cars being for everyone, it just… irks me. It bugs me. It makes me feel unwelcome simply for existing in the same (virtual) space with people so stridently and casually hateful. It definitely turns me off from the idea of attending a meetup if there’s another one in my area.
Because the thing is: car culture is inherently political. From industry practices and policy, to manufacturing, to specific subcultures and geographic trends, to who we share our Cars and Coffees with, that part is always there. Nothing is completely independent or divorced from “politics.” The word doesn’t just mean “Things I hate and wish would go away.” So yeah, I appreciate what seems like a pretty neutral stand on content. But in the comments? Where the actual people hang out and converse? Over time, you’re just going to end up with the same gross weed patch if you don’t take time to prune, and it’s a lot easier to get one dandelion early than a whole yard going to seed at the same time.
(Do I have actionable suggestions? No. That’s entirely up to y’all, because the solutions aren’t easy (or cheap.) But consider the mission statement.)
I’m a little bit surprised to read this. While there have been a few knuckleheads with open or very uncleverly hidden hostility towards the non-cis-het-male community, they’ve been resoundingly shut down by other commenters and/or the staff once they’ve been made aware of such instances. I’ve reported a couple, which were taken down within the hour.
Of course it’d be better if we didn’t have any of that garbage and hate. I can’t speak for members of your community about how hurtful it is (as a cis-het-white-male I’ve been shielded from basically everything), and certainly won’t ask you to ignore it or be less sensitive or some other crap. The car community in north america is heavily skewed towards white men of a certain age, a group not known for its sensitivity to people not like them, but on the whole this has been the least toxic community I’ve seen on a mainstream car/tech/hobby site.
I’m glad you mentioned this because a variety of perspectives make the world a better place.
Have you seen the Discord? It’s a friendly bunch and inappropriate behaviour gets handled swiftly and resolutely. And it’s not just a bunch of dudes, even in the wrenching channel.
More constructively: a “report this” button that triggers an alert to the staff after some threshold of reports has been reached, or when the reporters have shown they’re not brigading idiots, might be a relatively easy solution.
I somehow missed that the Discord isn’t members-only. I will check it out. When I have some brainspace.
I do agree that the community does a pretty okay job at shutting the more egregious folks down, but lord, do they still persist.
Yeah 🙁
There’s only one member-only channel. Dozens are open to all.
Heck!
Come hang!
Join the party, it’s pretty great in there!
(but I’m biased)
Do come check it out. You might catch me denigrating readers taste in real time!
Seconded… overall this site is fantastic. I still read the Old Site on occasion, and the comments are toxic. We have a good, respectful community here – and I want to do my part to keep it that way.
Hello Ricki! I’m just going to re-iterate that we still absolutely believe that cars are for EVERYone, and that includes you, so if you’re seeing something that feels wrong here, you can email me directly, whenever. I hope you will feel comfortable going to a meetup if we have one by you; I’ve only ever seen Autopians at meetups being warm and welcoming, and I desperately want to believe that’s what you’ll find.
Trans people are welcome here, always, I just want to make that clear. That’s not going to change. I’m sure some jerks will slip through the cracks every now and then – this is, after all, Earth – but we’ll keep trying to do our best, as best we can.
Genuine thanks to everyone that has commented on this. Moderation is a thankless, complex, and shitty job, and no one wants to do it. I do feel like people have my (and others’) back here, both readers and editors. I want to be clear, also, that I don’t think you’re being brigaded by malicious culture warriors so much as ignorant ones, and maybe that’s on their (or my?) inability to read a room. Regardless, the problem as I see it isn’t pervasive, but it’s almost inevitable that a reasonably popular story (and pretty much anything discussing the Chinese auto industry) is going to have those posts in ’em. Maybe just keep an extra eye on ’em, I dunno.
A big reason I didn’t suggest solutions is simply the ability for assholes to weaponize them. There isn’t a report function that hasn’t been abused, any automated system is going to be gamed if someone wants badly enough to be shitty. I don’t know what the solutions are if someone genuinely wants to be a bad actor, but the main thing is that I hope there’s some guiding principle somewhere for when top-level action is needed. Sometimes people need to be reminded what the greater internet’s “don’t be a dick” clause actually means.
In any case, I don’t plan on going anywhere, even if I occasionally disappear for weeks at a time, lol. Y’all are the only “print” media I read for car stuff. (And I guess boats and motorcycles and airplanes and whatever.) Long live RSS.
Maybe a “report this post” button that is only visible to paying members could work. It might at least negate randos.
I would like to decry the overall lack of ads for sketchy plastic surgery clinics and hot singles in my area. Is that because everyone on this site is already good looking and swimming in smokin’ babes/dudes?
I bet that’s it…
My complaint here is why is the Autopian not seeking out fuel tornado or whatever an old racer in need of money can be paid to shill ads? I would enjoy that surrounding a piece by Huibert on the intricacies of suspension geometry.
This site is part of my daily routine and I like my routines. I always use a desktop so I enjoy quality photography. Mercedes seems to have a good eye. I’m quite impressed with the level of civility from 99.5% of the posters. Once in a while a sorehead tries to start something and usually they’re just ignored. Way to go, everybody. I still love the fact that years ago I said to myself, “I wish David and Jason would start their own site.”
I’m still waiting on my Jatco Xtronic CVT deep-dive article with furthering impatience.
Maybe you could write one and pitch it to David?
To be honest, at your prime you were one of if not the best CVT and then continued to outperform many of your peers over each one of your warranty + 6 months lifespans. 🙂
Loving the site, and doing my best to send as many car weirdos to visit you as possible.
I didn’t know about Defector until this article. They seem to be beefing with perennial third-tier try-hard VC barnacle Jason Calacanis. That’s a good sign.
I’m not a sports person, and I’ve been considering a membership just because of the snark and political/cultural coverage.
Please please please actually update the platform. The site is frustratingly slow to load and has been from day one.
You’re doing a really good job for a lean and mean outfit.
If I had an area I’d like to see covered more, it would be driving infrastructure. How are roads built and maintained and funded? How are parking lots and garages designed? How do these things go wrong? How do all of the pieces get coordinated? You definitely cover these things, but I’d like even more.
Streetlights, stoplights, signs and speed bumps are all a huge part of the driving experience, and I think there’s more that can be mined from these things too.
Excellent idea!
You’ll find Paved Paradise full of absolutely wild tales. The one about Chicago selling its parking rights…whoa boy.
Want to go DEEP into the weeds on road safety in cities? my NGO published this guide about 10 years ago—it’s got all the curb/crossing/intersection diagrams you might want. It’s not so much anti-car as it is pro-pedestrian, which is a major issue in developing countries.
After all, the World Bollard Association runs several popular social media accounts.
Streetlights, people
Livin’ just to find emotion
Hidin’, somewhere in the night
Don’t stop believin’
Hold on to that feelin’
Streetlights, people
Your website is a nightmare for me. On my home desktop, after deleting cookies/cache for a separate issue (no, it was not to delete porn search history), Autopian now asks me for an email address so I can get a confirmation code. Multiple attempts and I never got a confirmation code. I am still logged in via my work laptop, but I have a replacement laptop waiting at my hotel that I will arrive at on Monday. I assume that I will not longer be able to log into Autopian once I get my new computer.
On my soon-to-retire work laptop, I cannot vote (as in the voting panel never shows up) on the shitbox of the day. I cannot vote on my desktop, even though I can see the the voting box, because I cannot log in.
This will likely be my last post on Autopian once I get my new laptop due to log-in issues. I’m guessing that most people won’t care, but there could be someone with comments that are worth reading that are in the same boat as me. Something is wrong with the Autopian website. PC user running Firefox.
Email Matt – he can help, I’m sure. Don’t give up yet!
I will do so. I love the community.
I had/have a similar issue (Safari on iPhone), I just never get my login link. Until I realized that for a reason unknown to me, the link does arrive immediately, just not in my Mail application on the device. But it is there if I open the webmail interface (on my iPhone, log into iCloud). Have you checked everywhere, including the Spam folder?
Yes, I have looked for Autopian in my email search bar (which searches everything including spam/junk/trash), and it looks like I stopped getting notifications around the first week of August.
I had a lot of trouble with login in the first year of the site, and gave up and made a new account. Currently on my iPad I can’t get it to log in on Safari (at least as of the last time I tried 6-12 months ago), but on this same iPad I haven’t had any trouble logging in from within my RSS reader, which uses the same WebKit back end AFAIK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A new username is definitely a possibility. Thanks
Since I just figured out this week that Mozilla’s Pocket has been shut down, I’m very excited that the Glovebox feature has been added, as a good chunk of the things I was saving over there were from The Autopian.
I’ve really been having a blast with the overall membership experience, even though I feel like I’m still lurking. That one’s on me though. ^_^
I’ve been having a blast with the member ship experience too! I’m lurking mainly because I don’t want DT to find out I own a Jeep Liberty because I know how he feels about them.
Honestly, the Liberty isn’t the worst. I’ve come around to KJs.
Wait… it’s a KJ, right. Not a KK? RIGHT?
Hey, the KK wasn’t that bad. I once helped a buzzed Scotsman pull down a pine tree with one, it did the job just fine.
Why yes, it is the KJ. I completely forgot the KK existed which was also around the time of the Commander. I guess I’m not completely in the dog house.
This is by no means a priority but if you could implement a “sitemap” it would be super helpful to find old articles.
The old site had one where you could sort by year the month and day and see every article published that day.
All you need to do is click on one of my articles, then click on my name at the top of the piece and it’ll take you to my author’s page so you can read everything I’ve written.
Keep up the great work, you have built something special here and it’s an honor to have been along for the ride ever since the beginning. It’s a pleasant respite from most of the other content these days that is just designed to provoke or outrage. When you wonderful people try to provoke and outrage, it’s all in the name of good fun or laughable absurdity, and I love that.
I’ll be the contrarian and say don’t allow photos in the comments, because it’s a whole other level of moderation required and I’d much rather have all of you spending time on developing content, rather than checking whatever photos our juvenile minds might be inclined to post. I also love the fact that I can occasionally send a message directly to the staff and actually get a response.
I agree with you about the photos thing. That’s a can of oil we don’t need to spill.
Noticed Night Panel and like it. Otherwise, all is well. Enjoying month 6 of my Smurf blue Civic hybrid hatch, and pleased I made a good choice.
Those are nice cars and you got the good color
I would have preferred more of a smokey gray blue but yeah it’s not bad at all. Not a rich man, but this is my first new car since MY 06 and damnit I deserved it.
Boost Blue FTW!
This is the main site I visit, when I was 15-19 I would go to the library and read all the car mags they had, and popular science/mechanics. This seems to fill that same interest hole as those magazines did, so thanks for that.
Also the comment section and other members remind of late 90s/early 2000s era internet forums where people were chill and engaged in having good discussions.
I like the night mode, site performance seems ok to me.
I guess it’s been a while since Jason posted one of his regular series articles, like on a new topic, he’s keeping up great with the old ones. 😀
I look at it the same way – this is like the car magazines I’d obsessively pour over in my youth, but with the added bonus of being able to talk to the writers and other readers. Instead of “didja see the article Car and Driver had on the Testarossa?” “No! Someone else had the only copy damnit.”
It seems like this is one of the last remaining places online where people leave all their bullshit at the door and do what we came here to do, and what it basically says on the door: just hang out and talk about cars, man. There’s no shortage of other places on the internet to cut each other to ribbons over all that other nonsense.
But here? If you’re car people, get in here. You’ll probably run into some other weirdo who likes what you like. It might even be me. It doesn’t matter what else we may disagree about – if you like burned hydrocarbons and tire smoke and flinging mud and exhaust notes and admiring design and learning cool stuff about cool rigs you never heard of, you are my people. Or at least, you can be my people while we’re in here. Because that’s the agreement.
My first year at Coventry Uni studying car design, I spent all my spare time in the library reading back issues of Car, particularly from the late eighties and early nineties.
I realised later this was part of my coping strategy for making such a big life change.
I entered a depression (and nicotine withdrawl) when I left home for college. The Crawford Auto Museum in Cleveland was a solace in those early months.
It’s strange how our behaviour can change and we don’t always realise what is driving that until much later.
So this – each major contributor has at least once responded to a commnet of mine since inception. It builds community and rapport. I feel a could approach any writer, and most commenters, as a lifelong friend on introduction.
We have disagreements in comments, but it is rarely over the line. More like squabbling siblings. Those who don’t adhere to norms are booted.
I may have mentioned it before but the ability to mark an article read so it no longer appears in the regular feed unless new comments are posted.