There was this one morning back in January 2019. I was sitting at my usual spot in a Starbucks on 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, working on a Ruby on Rails application that would check the size of PDFs uploaded by clients at a law practice in Florida to make sure they were under 5MB. I knew some of the other regulars there, had a few friends among them, but that place was my “office” just as Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, Panera, Whole Foods, and other chains’ locations are for millions of other independent workers who take advantage of free wifi – or did before the Coronavirus pandemic fucked things up for that non-sector.

I’m on my own when I look up from the screen and crack my knuckles after getting one piece of the application deployed to Heroku. But since I’m not in an office, there’s no water cooler, no printer, no coffee counter to go to bullshit with coworkers in between tasks. So instead I open up the Hill via Disqus and see “Exclusive: Trump team should be allowed to ‘correct’ final Mueller report, says Giuliani“. I don’t believe there’s any context necessary here, if you know the political history of the United States in the last decade then you know exactly what was going on there.

So without even reading the article – the headline said all I needed to know – I post a comment that says, verbatim: “Trump laundered money for single handedly used his kung-fu skills to defeat 20 Russian criminals and falsified his taxes to hide the profits saved the world by deactivating their singularity laser bomb seconds before it was going to detonate” which got a shit ton of replies and upvotes… 285 votes and twenty-something direct replies, I believe.

Then about 90 minutes later it was gone. “This comment was deleted” it said in its place. There was no profanity, nothing vulgar, nothing violent (beyond the cartoonish violence alluded to).

No explanation, no warning. Moderator never bothered to tell me why they deleted it. Just gone. What I believe happened was, because there’s a setting in Disqus that allows for a comment to be automatically deleted once it’s flagged a certain number of times, right wing trolls did just that. Of course it is entirely possible a moderated removed it manually, but we simply don’t know.

Now really think about that for a minute. What kind of dogshit organization would allow for the top comment on their top story for half a day to be simply deleted because it angered a handful of people who didn’t want others to have a laugh at their messianic president’s expense? Seriously, in what fucking world does that make sense that the most popular contribution to a forum erased on the petty whims of either some asshole moderator making $15 an hour or some trolls who gamed the system? That was a funny joke. People freaking loved it. And then someone ruined the fun on purpose. I am very far from the only one vexed by that. Plenty more here can attest.

At the same time there is a debt of gratitude owed on my part. In the same way a flower appreciates the shit that it grows from, I too appreciate The Hill’s Disqus threads for where they got me. There are tens of millions of dead, derelict blogs out there. They all started the same way: Some asshole got up one morning and said to themselves “Ooooh Let me start blogging about my sex life as a furry” or “my adventures antiquing in Eastern Tennessee in between my sex life as a furry” and they limp on for a few weeks. Maybe four five long thought out posts with zero comments and then just abrupt silence in October of 2013 forward. WordPress and Blogger are littered with them, a massive virtual graveyard of incomplete ambitions. Two of which are mine.

They aren’t about furries. They’re about a fictional character named Timmy Spartan. The first was his blog about getting caught shoplifting, and accidentally leaving a DVD for a porn video called “Karate Fist Fest 9” in the case for “Madagascar” which belonged to his employer Blockbuster and got rented out to a parent and yeah. The second was Timmy’s job with his cousin Jimmy, the editor of a fictional local newspaper on Long Island and all the hijinks that ensued there.

They were set up to fail because there was no audience for them. These simply existed in a void. That did not happen this time, thanks to a built-in audience I had cultivated on The Hill.

So if someone wants to tell me “So what you got 285 upvotes on some stupid website comment” this is fucking what. Right here. NationalZero.com with tens of thousands of monthly visitors, over half million unique lifetime, a co-editor/teammate with real journalism experience mentoring me, and all the internet strangers who became internet friends on The Hill supporting us as we grow and build toward making this a real legitimate competitor to inferior aggregators like Raw Story.

Shutting down their comment threads with zero warning whatsoever in the dead of the night was still a bullshit move on The Hill’s part, executed with the same arbitrary capriciousness with which they ran the moderation. There was still plenty of of fun to be had with troll baiting. I still did it up until the day The Hill pulled the plug even if National Zero was my primary focus. I lament the loss mildly and I know for a fact that some people are absolutely devastated. For many National Zero is not going to fill the hole left by The Hill. It just isn’t. There’s a different vibe here, even if some of the names and avatars are the same. It’s far more contemplative than combative.

As JoeMyGod, a Hill regular who runs an LGBTQ-focused news site that partially inspired National Zero, wrote this morning: “As some of you may know, The Hill arguably had the most active Disqus comments section of any political site, with some posts getting tens of thousands of responses. The site was also unusual for its seemingly even mix of hardcore Trumpists and liberals,” something that is going to be virtually impossible to find elsewhere for those bloodthirsty for the vicious comment combat that we had there over the years. I don’t know what else to say for those mourning the end of Disqus at The Hill other than keep looking and best of luck.

For the rest of you just tuning in for the first time or coming back after past flirtations, window shopping, breeze-bys, dalliances, non-conversions, whatever the hell you want to call it, welcome.

We’re National Zero.

And don’t die on that Hill ?