Recently the publication that used to be the Onion started “blocking” its critics on the website that used to be Twitter.

That the onetime giant of satire would be so thin-skinned as to resort to plugging its ears, squeezing its eyes shut, and humming loudly to drown out all the meanies is surely a sign of the times. A kind of ending, too, a surrender.

But there’s also a mirror-image symmetry to it, the closing of a circle 20 years in turning, that your happy warrior is in a rarefied position to appreciate.

I got my start at the Onion. Mostly as an intern, and mostly for the A.V. Club — the back half of the paper (it was a physical newspaper) that peddled not comedy headlines but hip culture writing, film and music reviews, interviews, and listings.

All the other dudes who went out for the internship had been bona fide scenesters, much more qualified than I was. This was the height of that whole Brooklyn Thing, when the porkpie hats were not yet punch lines but were worn with deadly seriousness. There was Pabst. Off-brand cigarettes. Everything you’ve read about.

I had no business beating out those guys for a job that required me to have opinions on the next week’s lineup at Cake Shop or Mercury Lounge or KGB. But I turned out to be okay at it, and what started out as an unpaid gig turned into steady if poorly paying work.

In a dynamic I’d later recognize in The Devil Wears Prada, my editor chose me, I think, precisely because I was such a bumpkin — earnest and moldable, too clueless to be cynical or glib. This put me in a unique position to see, for the year or so I worked out of their offices on Broadway and Spring Street, the transition from the republican era of the Onion to the imperial one.

When I started, most of the comedy staff were still O.G.s from Wisconsin or Chicago, and theirs was the original ’90s-Onion sensibility of midwestern Mystery Science Theater goofiness mixed with Lettermanesque ironic detachment. All of us, even the untouchables at the intern table, were invited to pitch jokes, and a couple of mine — rough stones polished by my betters to a high-mirror shine — even found their way into print.

Make no mistake, though, it was not a democracy. It was an aristocracy of beer guts, ruled by snobs with impeccable comedic taste whose only ethic was funny.

But changes were afoot. The Onion had moved its center of gravity from Madison to Chicago to New York in 2001 (they opened on September 10, as I recall). By 2007, when I got there, the Ivy Leaguers, the Millennials, and the dread Ivy League Millennials had started to infiltrate.

Things were getting noticeably slicker and shinier. Large numbers of people were hired to do things other than write jokes. The word “content” started getting thrown around promiscuously. There were a “pivot to video,” “editorial partnerships,” even a “first-look deal” inked with Miramax and its high-flying head, Harvey Weinstein. These changes caused some tensions that were visible even to me, the marginal.

Perhaps the thing that best captured this was the debate among the editorial staff over whether to add a comments section to the website.

The Onion’s motto from its earliest days had been Tu Stultus Es — “You Are Stupid” — and a goodly number of the editorial staff believed it. That old guard wanted their stuff to be funny and to sell enough ads to furnish their paychecks, but they weren’t interested in granular reader feedback.

I recall one especially curmudgeonly senior writer saying something to the effect of “Why would I ever give the tiniest f*** what some a**hole on the internet thinks about my jokes?”

The anti-comments-section contingent was sizeable and influential. I agreed with it. In the end, though, the forces of “audience engagement” and “community-building” won.

The effect, borne out in the years and decades since, and not just at the Onion but across the vast digital wasteland, is plain and terrible to see: democracy, good and hard.

“The comments section” became a synecdoche for the worst dregs of humanity. “Audience engagement” became a heckler’s veto, and the hecklers through their sheer malicious persistence insinuated themselves into all the institutions they heckled. And at last the Gen Xers not giving a sh** about other people’s opinions gave way to the Gen Zers not able to countenance other people’s opinions without weeping. Stulti sumus, indeed.