Speaking for those of us who religiously read the footnotes, and for wrestling fans everywhere, that joke simply cannot be the reason Buzzfeed stopped responding to you. That's not just a tame wrestling joke, it's THE tame wrestling joke, which every single person makes. Sure, it's (probably) not as funny as how this guy phrased it: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cu2JP48r2fT/ but there are knock-knock jokes with more edge than that.
While I agree with you about all of this, I think maybe you're failing to remember what the social and political atmosphere of 2015 was like. SCOTUS had finally made gay marriage the law of the land, and there was a huge push to shut down anything and everything that could be taken as even mildly critical of gay rights, with BuzzFeed leading the charge. It's entirely possible I'm wrong with my speculation here, but it was where I landed at the time.
But it could have been a lot of things. The piece of mine they published was also highly critical of consumerism, which could have put a damper on potential sponsor relationships. So maybe that was it! Or maybe they were just growing too fast and I was one of many contributors who fell through the cracks.
Ryan Long is great, though. His comedy has done a lot to get me through the insanity of the last few years.
That's all fair. I mostly just wanted to post the link because it's hilarious. But it's very correct that I was misremembering 2015, because my initial thought was 'If he can get away with this in 2023, ain't no way somebody would get cancelled in 2015!' But, yeah, it was a completely different world in many ways.
BuzzFeed *did* do some good work in their heyday (I remember a long-form piece about XXXChurch and the ex-porn movement that really impressed me), but I don't think they ever had the requisite discipline to build anything lasting journalistically. After they published the Steele dossier, I found it impossible to take their work seriously anymore.
Oh well. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it," as our friend Upton Sinclair told us. If I had ended up on BuzzFeed's (or Vox's) payroll, I probably would have been right there with Alissa, defending the rot of mid-2010s internet publishing. While I like Alissa okay as a person, I've always really struggled to get through her writing—she seems to write with an eye constantly on RottenTomatoes and Twitter, always carefully making sure that her opinions align with the Correct™️ ones. But sometimes that's what you have to do to keep your job. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the internet would make everything so boring?
You're a millennial? Hrmph. Figures ...
I’m on the cusp! Born 1985
Speaking for those of us who religiously read the footnotes, and for wrestling fans everywhere, that joke simply cannot be the reason Buzzfeed stopped responding to you. That's not just a tame wrestling joke, it's THE tame wrestling joke, which every single person makes. Sure, it's (probably) not as funny as how this guy phrased it: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cu2JP48r2fT/ but there are knock-knock jokes with more edge than that.
While I agree with you about all of this, I think maybe you're failing to remember what the social and political atmosphere of 2015 was like. SCOTUS had finally made gay marriage the law of the land, and there was a huge push to shut down anything and everything that could be taken as even mildly critical of gay rights, with BuzzFeed leading the charge. It's entirely possible I'm wrong with my speculation here, but it was where I landed at the time.
But it could have been a lot of things. The piece of mine they published was also highly critical of consumerism, which could have put a damper on potential sponsor relationships. So maybe that was it! Or maybe they were just growing too fast and I was one of many contributors who fell through the cracks.
Ryan Long is great, though. His comedy has done a lot to get me through the insanity of the last few years.
That's all fair. I mostly just wanted to post the link because it's hilarious. But it's very correct that I was misremembering 2015, because my initial thought was 'If he can get away with this in 2023, ain't no way somebody would get cancelled in 2015!' But, yeah, it was a completely different world in many ways.
BuzzFeed *did* do some good work in their heyday (I remember a long-form piece about XXXChurch and the ex-porn movement that really impressed me), but I don't think they ever had the requisite discipline to build anything lasting journalistically. After they published the Steele dossier, I found it impossible to take their work seriously anymore.
Oh well. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it," as our friend Upton Sinclair told us. If I had ended up on BuzzFeed's (or Vox's) payroll, I probably would have been right there with Alissa, defending the rot of mid-2010s internet publishing. While I like Alissa okay as a person, I've always really struggled to get through her writing—she seems to write with an eye constantly on RottenTomatoes and Twitter, always carefully making sure that her opinions align with the Correct™️ ones. But sometimes that's what you have to do to keep your job. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the internet would make everything so boring?