Did anyone else use to read The Consumerist primarily for the comments? Back when The Consumerist had an open commenting system, tons of people would leave comments, often with good advice or interesting experiences.

The commenting system was hacked or spammed, so they shut it down. After a year or two they opened it back up to an inbite-only system, but hardly anyone got invites and there were almost no comments. Within the last month or so they removed commenting altogether without announcing it. What a shame.

It's a shell of its former self without the comments. Consumerist tends to be, how to say it, alarmist at times. The comments helped buffer that with someone coming out of the woodwork to bring perspective. "True, but it's not nearly as egregious as played up to be because..." Or other times the comments were a confirmation.

But without the comments the shrill, mountains-out-of-molehills Consumerist isn't much use to me anymore.

You get more of what you measure. Rate software testers by how many bugs they enter, and you'll wade through mountains of bullshit bugs while the crashing edge cases get ignored. Having "sales goals" for a diagnostic is ludicrous. Would you go to a doctor that had "sales goals"? In this case, of course, mis-guided sales goals add to Office Depot's bottom line, so they are "shocked! Shocked that the fake diagnosis of viruses is going on in this establishment!"