I think by now most rational people have a pretty good idea of how insane music fandom is, but as a member of a semi-infamous update blog I saw some pretty fucked up, maybe illegal things on a daily basis. I was a member of one that started early on and exploded shortly before 1D itself did.
This is, if u will, the oral history of our downfall.
The girls who started the blog (there were three) were well known in the twitter fandom with thousands of followers each, and each was from a different continent. I knew one of them through her less popular tumblr so she invited me on because I had made photoshop commissions for her before. And I could make gifs. I wasn’t a ‘founding’ member, but I was ‘original’.
Everything was chill for awhile. We had a tumblr and a twitter, and some girls tried to branch out to Facebook and Instagram, but our real success was the twitter (of course it was). Within a few months, we had thousands of followers, and broke a few stories to the twitter fandom (I’m not saying which, but…..think shit that happened around the time This Is Us was happening. That was our Peak.) At the end of 2013 we had around 20.000 followers spread over our five sites, I think it was. Maybe 25.000. There are people who would kill me for being wrong lol
Founding member A, not the one I was close with, decided to bring on more people to manage everything, especially because we were like beginning/midway through WWA and there were too many videos and pictures coming in each night for us to manage all of it. By the time the tour ended we had 25 members assigned to a different team each, five for each boy (I was on Harry/a floater for Niall, which you’ll hear more about in a second). We had one big group chat and one chat for each team.
This is when shit starts to get fucked up and illegal. As an ‘original’ member, I and two other girls were given preference by the ‘founders’, we were given credits to our personal accounts and assignments and the group banded together to win one of those other girls tickets to one of the shows of OTRA I think but maybe it was WWA? I don’t fucking remember. She got VIP passes.
So of course that made the 19 people who weren’t ‘originals’ fucking mad. We straight up had a class system, the later you came in the more you were treated like dirt doing menial tasks like sourcing and searching. And you never got thanked. I was a team leader for the Harry team so I started to notice how fucked up this was and I mentioned that we should help the other 19 people with things they needed help with, contests and attributions and everything to the founder that I knew before the update account. She agreed and said she would bring it to the other two founders.
I wake up the next day and everything was wiped. I was kicked out of the Harry team, passwords were reset, and they left me in the big group chat so I could see them tearing me and my friend apart. They ousted her too. By the point I had accumulated a lot of insider sources from DMs and knew image accounts so my friend and I said fuck it and started a new account, taking some of the disgruntled people from the first update account with us. We refused to post when they were liked or retweeted, and we memorised their personal accounts so we never retweeted or reblogged from there either.
Now the illegal stuff begins. It turns out, Founder A’s ‘friend at a label’ who was getting us information before anyone else was the result of some guy hacking a server at a major gossip site. She was fucking him to keep him going. Really fucking wild shit. He was arrested for unrelated leaks and all of a sudden everything just crumbled and she came to our second site all in tears and said we had been given a lawsuit and numerous cease and desists relating to our time there. Paps had found that we were attributing their pics as ours, even though we though we could put watermarks on our edits, and an agency was going to sue.
The hacking had been connected to that update account and it seriously looked like people were going to get arrested over having updates before anyone else, like, not even kidding. So it comes out Founder B (not the one I knew lol let’s just call my friend C) was selling the site out, she was profiting from it without telling anyone by doing subtle sponsorships (like posting 1D promoing those products or something) and the paps could say we had profited from their work because of it.
Like, 25 people were in this mess. There were 12 of us on the second site. Someone straight up got on FaceTime and had to be talked down from suicide because of the way she had been treated as a member of Team Louis (which had a secret fucking 29 year old Larrie even tho we had a policy we only used ships for RTs and none of us actually shipped that shit)
Zayn left the fucking band???
There was no resolution. Like one day everything was deleted. It’s all gone. The group chats, the sites, everything. Our edits float around because they were stolen by basically everyone, but we didn’t hear anything else about the lawsuit so me and the second site team figured that the other people had resolved that shit and none of us had been approached again so we kept going.
Yesterday Founder B popped up in our DMs and admitted that she was pretending to be three other people who had been members of the team (low tier, bullied members) and she had told Founder A about the lawsuits and her selling the site out and that it was all made up, she didn’t know about A’s source being that fucking guy at the time but once A told her that she had found ‘a hacker’ for us (probably some loser that in reality got her nothing, she found these things on other sites and from DMs on her personal) she ran with it and spun this wild story with her in order to destroy the site. The levels to the lies. I’m.
Because she had started a new one. On her own. With old tactics.
Also I still have tracking for certain planes and cars from my days on the team and Jesus Christ we were basically the NSA.
backup from Tumblr 