I probably shouldn't write this, so don't tattle on me.

I work at CollegeHumor as a cartoonist. I wasn't there in the days of Jake and Amir or Adam Ruins Everything, but I work with people who were, and I can tell you that the environment has changed significantly.

The staff that I work with is filled with remarkably talented writers and artists who want nothing more than to make quality content, but there are ever-growing pressures to make whatever it takes to get people to click on links, and a good joke or a good skit can be hard to sell in a headline / thumbnail on Facebook, from which most of our traffic comes.

The simple truth is that clickbait keeps the site up, because it's what people click on. They pretend to hate it, they complain about it, and in my opinion it hurts our brand and results in people feeling the way about us that this thread seems to indicate, but they click on it, and that's all our advertisers care about. So then we discuss what works, and it invariably ends up being 'sex' and 'disney', and those are the barrels we scrape.

But we DO make a lot of good content, in my opinion. Mostly comics, which then get taken and put on Imgur and Reddit, more often than not without source links, and people don't associate them with the CollegeHumor brand. We're on the front page of Imgur basically every day, and no one knows it.

Part of what I've endeavored to do while I'm here is create content that has a clear voice, that people will see and remember where it came from, but it's a challenge to do it within the restrictions that are in place.

Hardly Working and Jake and Amir and basically everything people love about old CH was the product of funny people doing stuff that they thought was funny and good without backward-thinking about performance, and it did well because yeah, it was genuinely very good stuff. I think that's something we should be doing more -- to quote Tina Fey, "Hire talented people and get out of their way."

Anyway, that's my take on why the perception of CollegeHumor has changed so much, I guess.

But forreal don't get me fired, be chill.