Recently I made the mistake of sending a close female friend this video of Alysa Liu and telling her how happy I was that Alysa made "Stateside" blew up.

My friend was like "WTF, how could you fall for this Tiktok influencer while there are countless actually talented figure skaters out there??", and then sent me post on a figure skating Facebook group where people were dissecting Alysa's performance with comments like: (not in English so this is a rough translation)

- she's so fat that the sound of her landing after each jump made them think the ice rink would collapse
- female skaters from a decade ago were so much better; kids these days just use Tiktok followers to trick the Olympic committee into giving them medals

And a few days later my friend sent another post about Alysa changing her pronoun from they/them to she/her on Insta, telling me "Aren't you gay? Shouldn't you be cancelling her?" I was like "What did this poor girl do to you? What did I do?"

But then I realized this is exactly the kind of discussion we would have here on ATRL, just for popstars instead of athletes

I know that those commenters might be knowledgeable and their comments might be technically correct, but the toxicity/nastiness just seems so off-putting for an outsider like me that I don't want to have anything to do with them anymore.

Does this mean we can only stick to our niche little online bubble these days, with no chance to welcome anyone? What do you guys think?

Outsiders don't view ATRL. Close thread.

No that person just sounds like a hateful weirdo

Tbh she would fit right in here!

This is a forum with a few thousand active users at any time, so I don't think large swaths of outsiders pay attention to this place. But this forum does sometimes sound like stan twitter/snark reddits which absolutely sound like that.

Edited March 7Mar 7 by Aston Martin

yes atrl is all of those things, no you don't have to be like that here. The number of executive decisions I make every day to determine whether a thread is going to be like rats in a sack probably goes into the dozens but you can still avoid all that and have a relatively nice time.

Tho tbh would I tell people "come here, this is a nice place", god no, it's just that everywhere on the internet is bad one way or another, popjustice is closed and I keep deleting Reddit accounts cos it's worse

No cause people are funny here.

I want to be different so I'm going to agree with you

When you put a bunch of gays in a room things will always get bitchy. You just have to embrace it. It's more fun if we all call each other ugly fatties.