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This Week in Anime
Crunchyroll Silences Their Viewers

by Lucas DeRuyter & Steve Jones,

No more commenting on episode pages or news articles! Crunchyroll has axed their comments section completely. Was this change due to homophobic content or simple corporate laziness? Lucas and Steve try to shed some light on what happened.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Lucas
Heya Steve! I'm not sure what your social media feed looks like, but (in between reminding me that we're living in unprecedented times) mine revealed the other week that Crunchyroll removed its comments section! This, of course, reminded people of a lot of the CR forums purge from a few years back and sparked a fair bit of discourse in the anime fan community! Are you down to chat about it?
Steve
As a big fan of sushi, I am always down to munch on some Crunchyroll. Especially when it's been flavored by a smattering of recent dubious headlines!
Hey, all news is good news, right???

I actually have a background in community management and moderation. So, before I start ranting, I'd love to know what you think of this change. Does it make Crunchyroll better as a service?? Do you think the rumors that it was motivated by the homophobic review bombing of Twilight Out of Focus have any legitimacy???

Well, for one, I certainly couldn't have less of a background in community management. Most of my forum activity over the decades has been of the lurking type if that, and I honestly can't say I've ever left a single comment underneath an anime episode on Crunchyroll or otherwise. But I know they were there, and I certainly read them. Actually, I'd start by saying CR deserves at least some recognition/acknowledgment for keeping them alive as long as they did.
Haha, you're right to want to start with the positive and give credit where it's due. It's great that CR kept comments alive for as long as they did and a part of what makes this development so interesting to me is that it takes place within the broader context of mostly online companies changing their attitude towards user-generated content.

TL;DR, pretty much every company on the internet went from viewing UGC as an amazing way to get free content that they profit from, to a pitfall of moderation controversies and expenses over three or four years. In my opinion, as someone who used to work in tech, I think that's a big part of why so many companies are embracing/pushing for AI right now. They want an infinite amount of free content they can monetize, without putting any work into building up a community or moderating that material.
That's what happens when you trade your eyeballs for big novelty dollar signs, which seems to be a popular cosmetic surgery in the tech executive world. But yeah, the scene certainly has changed. Like, where do you even find comments under video anymore? YouTube? I can remember reading user reviews on Netflix, and I think HIDIVE also had comments at one point. Crunchyroll was probably the last, biggest bastion of that early 2010s streaming scene, and now it too has streamlined itself into silence. An arguably golden silence, but silence all the same.
Oh man, I vaguely remember comments under anime episodes on Hulu, but it looks like those quietly went away sometime in the past decade.

But, I see your point and think it's a fair one that a lot of people hold. Comment sections and forums, especially in the anime space, are known for being pretty toxic and cringy. It's hard to have any emotional reaction to this when most people wouldn't really fight for the content that's now gone.
And it's worth remembering that Crunchyroll had already axed their forums back in 2022, so it's not like this current deletion went against the grain of their current ethos. Since their acquisition by Sony, their business decisions have hewn pretty closely to the other major players in the scene: remove "extraneous" features, streamline whatever is most profitable, and jack up your prices. Unfortunately for them, the anime scene isn't quite analogous to the other pockets of streaming, and whether they wanted to or not, they had built some semblance of community around those threads beneath each episode. So while the forum deletion came and went relatively quietly, the comment section was too visible to do the same.
Yeah, I've talked to a couple of anime community historians (hi, and thanks again, Sam!) and it definitely seems like the forums getting axed were a bigger loss to community documentation efforts than this comments section debacle.

That being said, this development feels super antithetical to the original Crunchyroll brand that eventually became an anime powerhouse. Remember when you used to be able to read manga on Crunchyroll? Remember when Crunchyroll was one of the few legit streaming services that secured rights to Japanese live-action dramas? Remember when Crunchyroll used to be a pirate site? It used to be a genuine hub created by and for the anime community, and now you can't even post a hot take there! That's WEIRD!
Ah, they grow up so fast. And to your point about antitheticals, here we've got former Crunchyroll hotshot (and cool guy) Miles Thomas bemoaning the death of the comment section. I'm still mutual with a bunch of former Crunchyroll employees on Twitter. It really felt like the place was being run by people on my wavelength during the mid-2010s. Not so much anymore.

But like we've said, it's also hard to fully mourn this particular loss because the overall quality of those comments was so low, and any moderation being done was minimal at best.
Ugh, the days of just running into the people running a website like Crunchyroll on an anime convention floor were a bit before my time, but that's incredibly alien to what the landscape looks like today.

Also, to your point on moderation, a lot of people in or around the tech space today like to claim that moderation efforts are a huge undertaking and are an unsolvable problem. Anyone who says that is a liar and likely shilling for a major corporation. Moderating spaces on the internet can be challenging and time-consuming, but if a company actually has values instead of blindly chasing any revenue stream, it's not that hard to set rules and guidelines for what is and is not allowable.

Ironically, AI technology is actually SUPER USEFUL for content moderation and, with a large enough data set, can identify flagged material instantaneously and mark it for review and outright deletion. I'm an AI skeptic but, as someone who's seen some truly heinous stuff while acting as a Community Manager, this application of the technology is a godsend.

That makes sense to me. IF there is any ethical application of AI tech, I think internet comment sections are both low-stakes and fraught enough to justify its use. Basically, all I'd want is the cleanup of spam and offensive content. Clearly, that's feasible. Other places do it. Because I do find the episode pages on Crunchyroll disconcertingly empty now. Sometimes, I would scroll down, look at those comments, and read something so incredibly incorrect or moronic that I would construct an entire episode review around refuting it. I miss that. I think there was value in that. I'm not joking.
For a while now, this post-merger version of Crunchyroll has been accused of being more interested in profiting off of the anime community than in fostering its growth, and this change only adds evidence and examples. I don't think these community spaces need to be sacred or persist forever, but they need to exist somewhere! Especially with Twitter collapsing and both Reddit and Discord letting their ambition cloud what made those platforms appealing in the first place, it feels like there are fewer good places than ever for anime fans to congregate online. This community needs physical and digital spaces if we want to have any kind of identity, and not just be a group defined by consumerism.
It's dire out there. Chris and I just had a chat about how those physical spaces are also succumbing to the same late-capitalist rot eating away at Crunchyroll's constituent parts. And in this digital world, very few spaces seem willing to put in the work necessary to foster a decent, welcoming gathering of weebs. Like, there's that adage that any community will inevitably be defined by the worst behavior allowed in it. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of rancid behavior online.
Community issues are always best addressed by the people in the space with the most power and influence, but bottom-up solutions are possible too! That's why we appreciate everyone on the ANN comments/forums who is cool; and open to sharing and hearing opinions from other people who care about anime enough to add constructively to the space.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I wasn't too surprised when I heard about the (alleged) causal link between the shutdown and the bigoted comments posted about Twilight Out of Focus.

I suppose, whether you're a floundering comment section on a major streaming site, or whether you're a teenage boy getting in touch with his own budding sexuality, life comes at you fast.
Man, what an unfortunate narrative to now be associated with a pretty solid romcom from this season.

This is why all platforms need rock-solid moderation policies and tools, though. Even if this homophobic bombardment wasn't actually the straw that broke the camel's back re: CR's comment section, it ruined what fun people could have there and made people not want to contribute. A lot of people think that rules get in the way of people having fun online or in IRL spaces, but they're actually vital to keeping the vibes right and disincentivizing bad behavior.
Exactly! Without basic rules and moderation, it is way too easy for a small number of bad actors to completely corrode a place. And Twilight Out of Focus was far from the only show to suffer homophobic comments throughout Crunchyroll history. I'd be curious to hear why the bigwigs suddenly decided that enough was enough, although I doubt we'll ever get a statement beyond their aforementioned canned one.
Yeah, did people lose their jobs over this or are they now in the process of being transferred to a different department? I know the CR comments section didn't have a ton of activity, but someone had to have been on the hook for moderating/maintaining that feature. This decision also speaks to the fact that most streaming companies style themselves as tech companies rather than media companies, and that space has been defined lately by mass reductions in roles that interact with userbase.

You're right, though. I can't think of many industries that are great about transparency, but the anime industry DEFINITELY isn't one of them and these questions will likely go unanswered.

We, however, have Opinion Column privilege and are allowed to not mince words: whatever the precise machinations were, any blame lies solely on Crunchyroll's big orange shoulders. They, as a company, allowed hateful comments to be posted, and they decided it was more lucrative to axe the feature than improve it. They don't care about their community. They care about their bottom line. That's all them, and no amount of business-speak will wash the stink off that.

But maybe, just maybe, a slight rebranding will.

Boy, what incredible timing on these seemingly unrelated events! Really makes the community abandonment feel like an incremental process.

Also, I can hear the cattiness in my tone as I type this out, but maybe if your rebrand is so slight that you have to post a video showing the redesign process so that people notice the difference, you shouldn't do a rebrand! IDK, maybe more substantive changes at Crunchyroll will be announced at SDCC, but right now this seems strange and superfluous.
I actually think graphic design is a tremendously fascinating discipline at the intersection of art, business, psychology, and sociology. I also think the gratuitous pomp and circumstance thrown at every obscenely rich conglomerate's rebranding is the funniest thing ever. Look! They capitalized the C! Don't you love anime so much more now?

Every time, it reminds me of that legendary leaked Pepsi document. Just utter quackery tailoring the emperor's new clothes.
God, how much do you wanna bet that a big motivation for the rebrand is that mainstream trade outlets kept asking if the first "C" was capitalized because wide swaths of that writer's pool don't have experience writing about anime or the anime industry?

Also, CR's branding boiling down to "We Are Anime" feels more malevolent now that they're a near monopoly in anime licensing and distribution.
I mean, not to read too much into such a coincidental juxtaposition, but damn, if this doesn't feel emblematic of where CR, the anime industry, and basically every other industry are at right now. These companies' values and valuations have never been more disconnected from their customers. They're too wrapped up in the speculative, in the kerning between the letters, then the letters themselves. They're putting more money into a font than into the people who translate their product and make it accessible in the first place. I think about this stuff and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but this is just our present reality. This is "good business." Until it's not.
I agree, and a big part of why I keep up with labor issues in niche industries is because they often act as testing grounds for new forms of corporate oppression and worker-organized resistance to those decisions and policies. It's not a great look to be launching a snappy and clearly expensive rebrand while still nickel and diming the translators/localizers that play a critical role in delivering a product to your user base. Seems like weird priorities to me, man!
And I guess that's the source of the majority of my resentment at the removal of the comments. It's another symptom of an anime scene that could be thriving if not for rampant greed, mismanagement, and the pursuit of perpetual, impossible growth. It's not "just" the comments. It's everything else that could be better, but won't be, because the people in charge don't care.
Same as it ever was~ Same as it ever was!

While this all feels super defeating, a big part of why I love the anime community is because there are still a host of grassroots and independent efforts to foster the interpersonal and human side of this space. Will that ever be the face of this community again? Probably not, but anyone whose opinion on this media or community I care about knows who's doing the important work in this space, and contributing to that work.
Anime fans would know a thing or two about scrappily defying seemingly impossible odds through the power of camaraderie. So yeah, there's always hope. And, for better or worse, there's always the ANN forums too. Just be cool about it, everyone
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