Hot Chocolate: The (Mostly) Sweet Reaction to Dark vs. Milk
“Don’t read the comments.” “Comments are the worst.” “Comments sections are cesspools where empathy and democracy and humanity go to be stomped on and then cleaved in half and then burned at the stake, but with, like, a really, really small flame that takes its sweet time so that your consumption by fire happens slowly and with a maximal amount of agony.”
These are some of the things you might hear associated with the institution that is meant to embody the communal, conversational potential of the World Wide Web. Comments sections, far from becoming the public squares of internet-utopian vision, have all too often become, instead, public circles of hell. They are often mean; they are even more often angry; and I say that from personal experience: I am a woman, and I often write about gender, and those two things, combined, make a fantastic recipe for trollish internet commentary.
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But I mention comments, today, not because of feminism, but because of chocolate. Specifically, because of a story we published late last week: “Milk Chocolate Is Better Than Dark, the End.” The story was itself a kind of long-form Internet Comment, in that it was argumentative and opinionated and entirely convinced of its own correctness in a way that would allow for no alternate viewpoints, and also in that it applied its own angry assumptions to a debate that matters not at all. (The story was also a joke; that part was not clear to everyone who read it, though. According to one gentleman who, choosing to overlook the irony, took the additional time to write in: “I can’t believe that I wasted 6 minute reading this trivia. Surely you actually have something to say.”)
Overall, though, the story ended up generating a lot of light-hearted—and, especially on Twitter, very, very funny—controversy. (It also, BONUS, generated some great recommendations for chocolate bars I should sample in order to disabuse myself of my culinary mistakes. I’ll try them with a mind as open as my mouth!) And though there will still, yes, plenty of Angry Comments in the mix—you’re wrong, this it stupid, how could The Atlantic doooooo this—I want to focus instead on the reactions that doubled as testaments to the fact that, even on the internet, people are capable of being good-humored and good-natured and delightful.
We got, for instance, quotes from public intellectuals:
“Milk chocolate is for schmucks.”
~George Carlin
And some poetry:
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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
