Thursday, April 19, 2012

Revenge Porn No More.

"A day late, a buck short..." Damnit - Blink 182.

Last night could have gone a bit better. I ended up heading out to Hot Damn to hang with Bradman and his boys but I ran out of cash pretty quickly (my habit of downing drinks at rocket speed biting me in the arse), I had no drugs and was batting more like McGrath.

So at about 2am, I decided to call it a fucked night and head home. Once I eventually made it back I figured that although I'm sober enough to realise I'd fucked my credit card debt even further I may as well fap myself to sleep. Let's see what Is Anyone Up has for me?

This is what.

Yep, the day has come. Hunter Moore has sold out and shut the site down.

Honestly, after going through the five stages of grief, I was able to sit down and work this shit out in my head.

Hunter's official story (as posted by him on Twitter) is that he got sick of receiving underage submissions, saw the light and decided to give it up. I believe this story about as far as I can throw an elephant one handed.

My personal theory is that he made a mistake and accidentally posted someone under 18, and they threatened some form of legal action. The main reason he was so vigilant against underage content (and even spoke out against it in most of his interviews) is because that was the one thing that could get him in big trouble. There's no legal defence of ownership/possession for child pornography anywhere, which was the primary defence he had against 18+ submissions that probably violated some privacy laws. But we all make mistakes and he probably made a big one or his photo software fucked up. Whatever.

Anyway, when given the choice of shutting the site down and doing work for BullyVille (the online anti-bullying group who he sold the domain to) or a long and messy legal battle that at best would probably have bankrupted him and at worst sent him to be buttfucked in San Quentin, he made the decision any rational person would have.

Say what you like about Hunter Moore, but no matter how much of a coked-up loser he may act like at times the man is not an idiot. Like any good entrepreneur he knew his target market (emo/scene kids sending in sleazy band members/bandwhores with a few loyal perverts like myself on the fringes of the scene) and created a product that fit perfectly.

As much as I enjoyed the nudes, I think what I'll miss the most is being part of the peanut gallery. I was definitely one of the kindest commenters on the site (on more than one occasion I was the sole voice saying that I would fuck - aren't I just a sweetheart?) but the level of perverse fun I got from watching keyboard warriors savage hot girls and hung guys (when most of them are probably 100 kilos with 4 inch dicks or nasty ass pussy) was the main reason I used to always skip to the Disqus threads.

I come back to one thing Hunter noted in his letter to the fans - that he'd been on both sides of the fence as both a bully and the bullied. I suspect a lot of the most avid contributors to his site had spent most of their lives on the latter side and now were pretty keen to dish out a little bullying of their own - hence the savagery of posted victims for everything from penis size to tattoo location. Me, I was never really into that high school bullshit (even though it amused me) cause I've spent most of my life on both sides.

Sociological analysis aside, where does the sext community go from here? The answer is that nothing changes. People sent each other dirty pix when Is Anyone Up existed and they'll continue to do so even more now. For all his talk about stopping underage sexting surely Hunter realises that one of the few deterrents to sending n00dz out to horny kids was his site. I've had three chicks and a guy refuse to send me photos once they found out through my Twitter that I was a big IAU fan.

As he himself noted, we're now almost certainly gonna see a flood of copycats. It's almost certain that these sites will go down quickly - even if they're as diligent with age checking and other legalese as Is Anyone Up was to the end (which is something I highly doubt) it's going to be almost impossible to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle combination of revenge porn, 4chan savagery/inside jokes and Hunter Moore's sleazy cult of personality that made IAU so great.

(That said, I do think if someone set up a site purely dedicated to self submissions they could be onto something. I'd do it but I lack the coding skills).

Either way, looks like I need a new favourite website. Anyone got ideas?

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