The Tab comments section sucks balls right now

I feel nostalgic for a Tab I never properly got to experience

bbu bring back upvotes Comments section Lament old layout The Tab Cambridge up-votes

Deep down, we all know the comments section is responsible for 99% of The Tab’s success.

Not long ago, to become a regular commenter on this site was to stroll in the same hallowed cyberspace as Greg Hill, Stephen Hawking and Vermin Longtooth.

And to become a commenter who regularly picked up 40+ up-votes was, as far as I can see, to become a winner.

We can all see who is winning here

With the majestic launch of The Tab in six US colleges just two weeks ago, our glorious student paper is well on its way to world domination (#sorrynotsorryreallyunsorry Varsity).

But I can’t help feeling that the nurturing, community vibe of The Cambridge Tab has been somewhat forgotten amidst all of this flourishing success.

The Tab is no longer a gory battlefield of bile and resentment, a battlefield which thoroughly reifies the Facebook fad “justifying completely inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour as banter”, and which successfully got the creative juices flowing at eleven o’clock every morning. This reality sucks. And I’m not trying to be ‘satirical’.

Back in the day, Ken Cheng wasn’t just for Facebook

What on earth is the point of writing a Tab article if it, the author, and a completely unrelated assortment of à-la-mode BNOCs aren’t instantly ripped to pieces in the comments section with a few haikus thrown in? Why read news online if not for the healthy commentic bloodbath? Why has the Daily Mail managed to clasp on to its thriving backbone of anger and stupidity, when our ‘neither funny nor clever’* student newspaper hasn’t? Where are you, A Sensitive Scholar? Must we accept that Nina De Paula Hanikah, Richard Alty, Will Thong and Tinie Tempah are irreplaceable, and no longer a thing? Et tu, Greg Hill? (actually, 1,221 words later we all know exactly where you are and perhaps aren’t altogether the better for it). Still, these remain fine, reasonable questions.

Your glory days are over, GH

I can get over the fact that were I to have been reading The Tab four years ago I could’ve grabbed myself a £10 student discount from Il Barbiere on Mondays through to Fridays.

This, too, was a thing

Features doesn’t even have a section anymore, let alone Fit College. And that’s vaguely ok.

(Mega lol at ‘offended?’)

But the comments section is something I cannot amiably let go of, and it is something we should all be fighting for. Freshers included. I shall not go down without a fight!! The Tab must #BringBackUpvotes

No one is on the making-an-account-to-up-vote hype. Well. Maybe there is that one person. Sometimes a comment gets one up-vote and I just sit there thinking. Who made an account so they could up-vote this?

And you, reader, would do well to hop on the banter-wagon and clatter off into the sunset with us. Someone literally wrote an article about how to buy drugs online this week and there is no comments section on it. WHAT!

We are currently stamping on a vast multiplex of wordplay and strife which took years to carefully construct. It is disrespectful and, frankly, not ok.

Please show your support for the #BBU campaign and feel free to rip every aspect of me, my unfunniness, and, indeed, Ken Cheng, to shreds in the comments section below.

I am a wholly embarrassing person.