The same week that the Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog made its triumphant return, the home of its various amazing and talented writers did the one thing no OG Deadspinner thought was possible.

They made a fucking slideshow.

You know slideshow sites. You hate slideshow sites. Slideshow sites are the ones that constantly pop up at the bottom of the articles you like to right. “These cosplay outfits went too far! You won’t believe number 6!”. You know the ones.

The old Deadspin — or rather, the actual Deadspin, rather than its re-animated, shuffling corpse — railed against the exact kind of insight-less content. Here’s an article about Bleacher Report and how much it sucks, which might not be the original slideshow mill, but is probably one of the most successful. On original Deadspin, Ley details B/R’s SEO analytics, and how the use them to reverse engineer crap headlines like “Why Tom Brady Is the Most Overrated Quarterback in History”, even if the actual body of the work has nothing to do with that.

It’s hard to look at Deadspin’s homepage and not see the “CLICKS ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE” influence permeating a site that was once lauded from its ability to be successful without doing that shit.

“The Best No.1 Picks of the Last Decade? We Ranked Them,” blares one headline. Because I am an idiot, I clicked on it, expected to a good ol’ fashioned underexplained list, perhaps a NuDeadspin attempt at an actual Deadspin favorite. What I clicked on instead was an entirely new page format, and the exact sort of shitty Bleacher Report material I used to pump out when I was too young and too dumb to know better.

Also on Deadspin’s front page are two articles detailing the most underrated and overrated NHL players of all time. An article detailing why Tom Brady is “the most overrated quarterback of all time” is still, curiously, on the front page, despite being written over a month ago. “Lebron James is Better than Michael Jordan Regardless of His Finals Record” screams another article.

These articles are devoid of the kind of wit and insight that made Deadspin worth reading in the first place. Even their articles about Jalen Hurts’ draft position and the hypocrisy of Trump cheering on protestors ignoring stay-at-home laws while calling Colin Kaepernick a son of a bitch lack the biting wit and insight of Deadspin, even though they are solid, mildly journalistic endeavors.

What made Deadspin so special, and what is increasingly missing from a media landscape being consumed by huge corporations and private equity scumholes, was that it felt no desire to talk down to base audiences with the kind of content that someone from Barstool Sports might angry click on. It populated even it’s most seemingly irreverant articles with a denseness and a newsiness that cut through the bullshit narratives. It examined not just sports on the surface, but what made sports great and also infuriating underneath, the politics and machinations of sports. It made you fucking think. Some of us still like thinking.

It didn’t gleefully fart out a listicle of number one picks from the past decade to generate some cheap clicks from people who searched “NFL draft” on Google. It instead chose to examine how and why the NFL draft is probably the dumbest circus on planet Earth, and how none of the general managers seem to actually know what the fuck they’re doing, and how they needlessly complicate simple shit in an attempt to look smarter and wiser than they actually are.

Actual Deadspin understood that sports are a lens through which we can actually view the world. That the sports we watch and the content we consume says something about us as human beings, as a country, and as a planet. That there are literally hundreds of websites churning out easily digestable shit for the masses, and that if you want to diversify in a rapidly dying field, you do so by appealing to the people who want more from their fucking sports coverage than just what happened and who’s the best and what the score was.

I can Google who the first pick in the NFL draft is going to be with no problem. There’s no shortage of sports blogs and blog blogs and verticals and content starved newspaper websites and content farms who can rank 10 dudes with some pictures and text. There’s nothing hard about it. G/O Media can keep chasing the folks who absent-mindedly click on shit, but they’re doing so at the expense of an audience handcrafted across nearly a dozen sites who come explicitly for something resembling a different point of view from the dozens of other sites that are telling you that the world is fine, and that your biases are cool, and all you need to know about sports are the scores and which player is overrated and which player isn’t, so the Jimmys and Joes can “escape from the real world” by watching content that is overwhelming powered by obscenely wealthy white men exploiting a talented, diverse work force and charging fans an arm and a leg for the privilege of being treated like dog shit and be looked at with scorn.

I can’t explain what keeps compelling me to check in on Deadspin. I understand that most people don’t. I guess I keep looking for some sign of life from the place I went. The Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog is just that; temporary. The content creators that I love are strewn across the internets. Some have landed softly, some are still look around for jobs in a space that is shrinking thanks to the greed and fear of the exact same powerful people that Deadspin was willing to take on, and only pop up once in a while in the same place. I miss those perspectives. I try my best to emulate them, because I admire them so damn much.

I guess what I’m looking for is, do the new writers at Deadspin feel the same? I understand that jobs in journalism are obscenely hard to get and probably harder to keep. But do they understand the thing they’ve been entrusted with writing for? Do they care?

…Hold on, one sec, I just came up with an idea.

The Top 6 Things I Could Do Instead of Hoping a Spanfeller-Run Deadspin Will Ever Be The Same Again

1.) Keep writing for DeadSplinter, to honor the legacy of the the things we all love.

2.) Enjoy the Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog while it exists.

3.) Pray that our ragtag group of writers is able to find and cultivate a home that is all their own on the internets somewhere, and hoping they know how many people will pay for it.

4.) Clear my search history so it stops defaulting to “Deadspin” instead of “Deadsplinter”.

5.) Get hit by a bus.

6.) Realize that “Deadspin” is dead, no matter the fact that the domain still exists, and sports stuff is technically still written on it. But that it still lives on, in the spirit embodied by its writers and of its community.

Deadspin is dead. Long live Deadspin.