Tumblr's Failed Convention: The Story of Dashcon

this video is brought to you by curiositystream get access to curiositystream and my streaming service nebula and check out my nebula exclusive video debater theater when you sign up for curiositystream at curiositystream.comzed with the coupon code sarahzad okay i swear i'm not like a tumblr history channel but this account called heritage posts just got made and they've been sharing a bunch of content from 2013 tumblr and it's been giving me enough war flashbacks that i felt like i had to make this on july 11 2014 at 9 00 pm hundreds of con goers were crowded into a large convention hall in schaumburg illinois they were told the convention they were attending was about to be shut down as the hotel had spontaneously demanded an additional 17 thousand dollars in booking fees if they could not raise that money by the end of the hour everyone there would be kicked out an empty bag was passed around the room and the con goers were asked to put as much money as they could into it some people reacted with anger and hostility screaming at the organizers that they were being extorted and that the story did not add up others gladly helped contributing cash or online donations to the seventeen thousand dollar pool in solidarity hundreds of people raised three fingers to the air in true hunger games fashion organizers led the group in performances of do you hear the people sing and we are the champions as more and more money was raised by 9 45 pm the hour was almost up it was make or break if this collection of tumblr teens and con goers hadn't raised the money the two remaining days of the convention including a steam-powered giraffe performance and a welcome to night vale live show could not go on the mood in that room was a mix of outrage anticipation and solidarity this was dashcon 2014 and it was only the first night of the convention things were going to get weirder dashcon has been talked about before namely by the youtuber internet historian who made a 10 minute mini dock with a bit of backstory and footage about how it went horribly wrong but while i think it accurately captured the particular brand of buckwild that went on at dashcon there's a lot of context and behind the scenes stuff that video missed out on also i don't want to just make fun of the people who went especially when people were excited about a thing is like the least weird thing at that con in this video i want to talk about not just what happened but how and why it happened and why it got so bad it's taken on a near mythical status six years later i want to thank tumblr user heritage posts whoever they are for reminding me of dashcon as well as the editors of the fanmore wiki and tumblr user emoticon indie for being a great research source and compiling a lot of this information dashcon began as an idea in march 2013 cooked up by a small group of 20-somethings who thought you know what would be really cool a tumblr convention where members of different tumblr fandoms could meet up and we could have panels they decided to call this tumblecon usa and on march 11th began a four thousand dollar indiegogo campaign to fundraise for it called the tumblecon startup as you might have noticed that's not nearly enough to organize a con and it can cost well into six figures to organize a successful convention the money wasn't intended to fully fund the entire convention but was instead meant to help them pay for some software we need file additional forms and pay fees for applying for more grants on top of the few for which we have already applied there was no mention of what previous experience the organizers had which grants they were applying for or what their plan was if these grants didn't pan out it's also worth mentioning that the campaign was a flexible funding one basically that meant that even if they didn't meet their goal they would be able to keep their money the rewards varied from getting business cards with your tumblr url on them to a single pouch of ariago tea to a t-shirt and gift basket only two people claimed the 500 t-shirt reward and it's unclear whether they actually got those t-shirts regardless the indiegogo campaign swiftly met its four thousand dollar goal tumblecon was in business now in retrospect a tumblr convention obviously seems like a terrible idea but the culture of tumblr at the time was very different than it is post dashcon fandom tumblr was definitely marked with infighting and drama at times but for a lot of young teenagers tumblr really was a place of respite tons of people at the time referred to tumblr as their home and people were constantly posting concepts like what if tumblr was a school where we all went together or what if we all pooled together to buy an island called tumblr island nowadays these concepts are readily mocked and people joke that it would be a bloodbath but nothing like that had ever been tried before for people who were bullied at school for their nerdy interests and social awkwardness or just were really into niche shows and had no one to obsessively talk about them with in real life a community of people who had the same interests as them and were just as loud and unabashed about those interests was incredibly welcome people constantly posted concepts and mock-ups of what a tumblr meetup would look like whether that was a map of tumblr island pictures of what dorms and uniforms and buildings would look like at tumblr university or schedules that describe the potential classes at said university for example in this fantasy world you could learn about analysis of destiel how to deal with fangirl feels how to deal with loki feels how to deal with regenback feels and tiny whiny and spacey wasty things it's mocked now but that's just what the culture was at the time and that's aided by the fact that a lot of people making these posts were bullied teenage girls who had closer friendships with people they'd met online than people they knew in person and really really wanted to meet those people the idea of having a space to go to where they were accepted could be with their friends and could be open about their interests was genuinely appealing especially when it was paired with a concept like university or living on an island that afforded them relative freedom compared to high school so when this kickstarter for tumblecon was posted people were really really excited i found some old reblogs from the official kickstarter where people were saying things like i really want to go to this so make it happen and i need this to happen the atmosphere at the time was really one of excitement and earnest shortly after tumblecon reached its goal the founders realized that there were potential copyright issues and confusion in being named after the website and to ensure that everyone knew the con was not officially affiliated with the website renamed it dashcon it was a reference to the tumblr dashboard and was essentially the same as calling a twitter convention timeline con or calling a yelp convention complaint con basically it wasn't officially branded as a tumblr affiliated convention but it was very obviously a tumblr con the dashcon faq has since been scrubbed from the web but a web archive from november 2013 has preserved that dashcon llp was founded shortly afterwards by two organizers named megan ellie and roxanne schweiterman another organizer kane hopkins was not named as one of the llp founders but helped organize the convention and was a roommate and friend of megs from the homestuck fandom oh my god they were roommates kane in particular allegedly had a history of lying to people and scamming them and was met with anonymous accusations of faking a trip to london pretending to have an english accent claiming his birth name was loki and lying about attending an ivy league despite going to art school in florida obviously take everything said about kane with a grain of salt given that these accusations were mostly anonymous but suffice it to say this guy was believed to have an extensive history of grifting it's also worth mentioning so that you have a good idea of who was organizing this that roxanne was only 19 years old at the time dashcon was planned meg was 30 and i couldn't find kane's exact age but his linkedin mentions him first starting university in 2007 so i believe he was in his late 20s or early 30s so roxanne was markedly younger than the other two organizers being a literal teenager but they were all like pretty young and inexperienced the faq made in late 2013 also contains some more interesting tidbits about the purpose of dashcon besides mentioning the founders it also claimed that the convention would be fundraised with art fan fiction and crafting auctions that dashcon would be a yearly event held in chicago that they would be offering special booking rates with the hotel that they estimated three thousand to seven thousand people would be attending and finally that they would be charging a special additional fee for a steam-powered giraffe concert spg is a band where the gist is that they're all steampunk robots they were particularly popular on tumblr in 2013 and are still doing pretty well for themselves now so it was a big deal that they were going to play there a regular weekend pass would be 65 but if people wanted access to the spg show it would be 70. alternatively people could get access exclusively to the show and not to the rest of the convention for 25 they claimed to be associated with the charity random acts which gave them a veneer of legitimacy and assuaged many people's worries about the organizers this will become important later they also opened up applications for volunteers noting that people who volunteered for at least 12 hours would get their tickets comped and people who volunteered for at least 17 hours would get their hotel stays comped as well the dashcon schedule was also put up with the founders guaranteeing that the schedule would stay relatively consistent despite it being eight months before the event it's still up and you can see panels were scheduled like a day in the life of hogwarts can you not exploring the omega verse we don't have time to get into that today homoerotic subtext hateful anons and beyond how to deal with bullies and british men with cheekbones when looking at this list of topics what really struck me is how similar this was to the list of potential classes in that tumblr university post it's a lot of stuff that's seen as very cringy now but really exemplifies the sort of naivete in earnest that 2013 tumblr still had compared to how people on tumblr now regularly refer to it as a hell site it's just a very interesting contrast applications were opened up for panelists who would be subject to skype interviews and would also have their membership compt if enough folks came to their panels and people were hyped one person obviously a teenager asked how to convince my parents to let me drive to a different state to meet strangers on the internet and the dashcon organizers responded with a powerpoint presentation in comic sans which was a popular meme format at the time the powerpoint had pictures of how pretty the hotel looked mentioned the events and suggested that the teenager talk about the ball pit that post was made on july 22nd 2013 so that ball pit had almost a year to be hyped up and people really were hyped for this ball pit this fan made poster from 2013 even mentioned it someone also posted in anticipation of the event a party in the usa parody song on youtube about how fun it was going to be called party at dashcon hey [Music] all in all while some people were suspicious or mocking of the idea of a tumblr convention dashcon was viewed with an atmosphere of hype and excitement for the months leading up to it i didn't go to dashcon and i don't know anyone who did but i know several of my friends were disappointed that they couldn't go because they wanted to see steam-powered giraffe and meet up with their tumblr friends so imagine the disappointment the shock and awe that people felt when dashcon actually happened cause it was bad at this point this wasn't immediately apparent to most tumblr users but there was a lot of bad stuff happening behind the scenes in particular the three main organizers meg roxanne and kane were having some disagreements roxanne's job was to plan and organize artist ally meg was the primary contact for guests and panelists and kane organized interviews it's hard to find first-hand accounts from any of the people directly involved but multiple people who knew the organizers and had low level roles in dashcon claimed that roxanne was trying to get the convention to run smoothly while kane and meg didn't seem to have a very good grip on it once again keep in mind that these are secondhand accounts from folks who knew the organizers and they may have had an incentive to misrepresent things but after reading multiple accounts from multiple different people who knew the organizers there's a pretty consistent picture that roxanne was trying to fix the con and make it run well while kane and meg weren't putting in much effort in the months leading up to dashcon allegedly roxanne was staying up until 2am answering emails booking panelists and attending meetings while kane and meg would regularly go mia and simply refuse to answer roxanne's emails again meg was supposed to be the contact for guests and panelists and would frequently not answer their emails or stay in contact with them leading to multiple panelists dropping out in the months preceding dashcon kane was also the one in contact with dashcon's lawyer but eventually stopped answering his emails leading to the lawyer quitting and leaving dashcon lawyerless kane and meg also allegedly used their dashcon phones for personal calls racking up massive phone bills to the convention finally kane and meg did not like roxanne and would refuse to speak to her while she tried to organize the convention according to roxanne it was her job to submit tax information for dashcon which she couldn't do because meg would frequently refuse to respond to requests for the relevant information roxanne eventually had to step in and handle emails from the panelists side because meg would simply refuse to answer emails and calls roxanne also allegedly sent a group email with a potential dashcon budget which the other two organizers ignored one low-level dashcon organizer named sycamore who was a teenager at the time reported that although she initially felt roxanne was overbearing during the planning process it later became apparent that that was because she was the only person there trying to get things sorted whereas the other organizers didn't seem that interested i couldn't find specific details on what led to the initial rift between roxanne and the other two or why they all entered a business partnership together when they disliked roxanne so much but this rift would only deepen as the convention continued honestly the relationship between all three of them is a little odd given that kane and meg were both about in their 30s when they entered this business partnership and roxanne was a teenager and the way the two organizers allegedly disliked and targeted her was equally strange one dashcon account from a man named matthew j hellscream mentioned that him and his wife were asked to fly all the way from australia and attend dashcon matthew initially used alice in wonderland's pseudonyms in his account to refer to the organizers and later revealed who was supposed to be who matthew also didn't refer to his wife by name so i'm just gonna use a pseudonym as well so let's say she was called susan i couldn't find her actual name i really hope it's not actually susan if it is i'm very sorry the gist of his account is that susan was internet friends with meg who asked the couple to come to dashcon to which they agreed after susan noticed that meg seemed really stressed about the convention susan asked if she could help manage dashcon's social media after which she was promptly put in charge of the entire vendor hall at the convention this woman had no history organizing conventions was not asked if she was up to the task and was not going to be paid she was like hey i'm a little nervous about this and meg told her it was fine and she'd get appropriate training before the fact unsurprisingly this didn't happen according to matt she never got any training or guidance and while roxanne was nice to her and tried to help kane and meg offered susan no direction or support and repeatedly tried to drag her into their personal drama this was the situation a lot of people running the convention experienced they were mostly unpaid volunteers many of them teenagers and were given no training or guidance as to how to run the actual convention as a result of the discord and poor planning behind the scenes multiple panelists who were supposed to be booked and paid in advance never received any money for their airfare or hotel bookings many of them were told the money would come sometime after the convention was finished and they had made their money off ticket sales some waited and some flat out dropped out of the convention in advance among those they refused to pay were steam powered giraffe and successful horror podcast welcome to night vale as a result spg cancelled and no people who paid special money for steam powered giraffe tickets would not be receiving refunds in particular it's worth mentioning that steam powered giraffe publicly canceled in january 2014 seven months before the convention there was loads of time for the con organizers to issue refunds they just didn't want to spg themselves seemed to be under the impression that dashcon would refund people since according to their blog the fine folks at dashcon told us they intend to refund anyone for their appearance but you should contact them for the details yikes a lot of people were disappointed about spg cancelling since they were arguably the biggest name dashcon had booked funnily enough a few people had accurately identified that this was the convention's first major red flag well besides the fact that it was a tumblr convention run by a team with no experience according to this particularly prescient tumblr user what happened the first ever tumblr convention will probably fall apart now svg was their main guest and the reason most people were going my friends and i were planning on driving 15 hours to be there why did this fall through if you remember that long list of planned panels it's probably unsurprising that the vast majority of them never actually ended up taking place by the time the actual convention rolled around things were in total disarray behind the scenes while the organizers put on a positive face to the public which brings us back to july 11th 2014. it was the first day of the convention and among the organizers mishandlings and refusal to properly budget and plan they had promised the hotel that three thousand to seven thousand people would be attending the convention many of whom would be booking rooms there in actuality about 500 people showed up that day that's 16 of their lowest estimate and 7 of their highest the convention opened to empty rooms barely attended panels and desolate landscapes for example there was a gaming room that had a single console in it my favorite picture and probably the most memorable iconography associated with the convention is the glorious ball pit that had been hyped up for almost a year which was just a tiny kiddie pool filled with plastic balls there was also a rumor that someone from 4chan peed in the ball pit which i can find no accounts of actually happening but the fact that it was even a believable rumor in the first place is telling of what the atmosphere that first day was like despite the low number of attendees volunteers were stressed and overworked largely because they were given little to no direction as to what they were actually supposed to do according to eyewitness accounts from these volunteers although roxanne was up and running in the morning kane and meg got drunk in their hotel room late at night and then slept in until noon during every day of the convention and security teams didn't recognize either of them because of how little they were actually there by that point kane and meg were continuing to turn on roxanne susan claimed that on the rare occasions that she got the time of day from kane and meg during the convention all they would talk about was how much they disliked roxanne once again they were about 10 years older than her she was now 20. they were the adults here according to susan kane and meg dropped off a legal document the day before that would have demoted roxanne to their secretary and asked her to sign it i haven't seen the actual document but according to one of meg's former friends they wrote it themselves and it's very poorly written remember that dashcon's actual lawyer no longer worked for them because kane stopped replying to his emails as far as i can find roxanne did not sign it furthering the rift between them the rest of the day continued to go i mean not horribly the staff was overwhelmed and barely anyone showed up but some panels certainly did happen if that's your baseline at about 5 p.m susan went to the hotel room with her husband to rest between two panels she was supposed to be hosting only to find out that her key card was disabled and she couldn't get into the room they both went to the front desk and asked about it and were told that there was an issue with the rooms regarding payment and they wouldn't be let in until it was sorted they waited outside the room for things to be sorted and as they were waiting a group of young con goers walked up to them and this exchange took place is it true is what true we asked the post on the blog what post on the blog we asked the one where it says the hotel is trying to close the convention down because they don't like the attendees and you need seventeen thousand dollars by 10 pm to keep the convention going wait backup it turns out because the number of attendees was less than what roxanne kane and meg had anticipated they made a lot less in ticket sales than expected and suddenly could not afford to pay the hotel booking fees that had been promised more specifically they were short seventeen thousand dollars instead of just telling people hey we way overestimated the number of attendees and now we can't pay our booking fees please help they instead inexplicably opted to lie the organizers made a post on the dashcon tumblr that read as follows hello dashcon please help the upper management of the hotel is threatening to shut down dashcon unless we give them 17 000 by 10 p.m central time tonight please go to dashcon.org and click the donate button and give her anything you can unless we get this by tonight everything is cancelled we suspect it's due to the fact that upper management doesn't like the people at the con please please donate what you can thank you we have an hour yeah they just straight up told people the upper management didn't like them and were extorting them for money and that they had an hour to raise those funds zero willingness to admit to the real reason the con failed the dash con organizers then crowded everyone into a room and explained out loud that they needed to raise the seventeen thousand dollars as quickly as possible they assured people for some reason that it had nothing to do with the hacker known as 4chan and that the hotel simply told them out of nowhere that they were going to need to come up with more money than expected by the end of the night currently have a donation button up on our website and any little bit that like helps ten dollars one dollar anything helps for us to stay here until the rest of the weekend not 4chan um we're trying to handle it with as much grace as possible but we do not want to let the system beat us at this point because everybody's having a very good time until about five minutes ago and that's where we were at the beginning some people were pretty angry at this ask demanding their money back for the convention while others gladly helped pass around the money bag and contributed their own funds to it by the end of the hour based on the money bag and online donations the dashcon attendees successfully managed to raise enough to keep the hotel for the rest of the weekend after they announced that they had raised enough money people whooped and hollered in joy hugging each other and seeing a group rendition of we are the champions in a clip that would be memorialized as one of dashcon's low points for years to come [Applause] [Music] even after the hotel fees were supposedly paid off many of the hotel keys were not reactivated for example after spending hours volunteering at the convention with no attempts to keep her in the loop susan and her husband returned to the hotel after the money was raised and was told that her hotel key would not be reactivated because dashcon had cancelled their room apparently part of how the organizers made back their owed money was by providing the hotel with a list of rooms that they would no longer be paying for suddenly and without warning shunting the responsibility to pay for their hotel rooms back to the many panelists and con volunteers who had been promised a comp room keep in mind from that earlier post that they only promised to compensate hotel rooms in the first place for volunteers who spent at least 17 hours volunteering so they were really screwing over the people who did the most work for them this would have consequences later on into the convention so keep the fact that they did that in mind susan and her husband were told that dashcon who had earlier promised to pay for all three nights of their hotel stay would no longer pay for any of their accommodations so if they wanted to stay for the rest of the weekend they would have to spend just under 400 out of pocket and it wasn't like they could just go home because if you remember they flew in from australia they attempted to contact meg who assured them that it would all be dealt with in good time they were eventually let back into their room but were forced to pay for it themselves after having a panic attack helping out a little bit the next day and making sure roxanne and the other volunteers would be okay without her susan left which honestly good for her despite horrible planning and overestimation of the number of guests and behind the scenes drama the con goers came through and the con would go on all that drama and that was just day one day two of the convention arrives people on tumblr who were previously excited about the joy and fun that dashcon would bring have caught wind that whatever the [ __ ] is going on in illinois it's bad the atmosphere quickly turns from excitement to cynicism as more and more second-hand information is spread around regarding the missing money and the hotel lockouts people begin clowning on dashcon on their own blogs and the missing seventeen thousand dollars quickly becomes one of the major talking points to do with the convention in an attempt to save face and hopefully clarify the situation the dashcon organizers make a much longer post on their blog titled the explanation the post which i've somewhat shortened here but you can find in its entirety on the dashcon blog reads first we did owe the hotel money and that is nothing i can get around it's extremely common to owe a hotel money for an event at the door and we made our prepayments beforehand we have an extremely good track record when it comes to making the appropriate payments for the appropriate things and doing so in a timely fashion we worked out a plan with the hotel to give them money slowly for the entire course of the weekend which was more than 100 feasible for us however 12 hours later one of our admins was unexpectedly pulled into a meeting with higher level hotel staff at which point they were informed that convention management had to procure twenty thousand dollars by the end of the night unfortunately the money we needed to pay that amount would not have been coming in until seven twelve in the form of walk-in attendees as is customary for conventions saturday is always the biggest day while the hotel was aware of this they still required the money to be provided by 10 pm cst below is an official letter from the hotel proving that this money was indeed owed and we had no other route to pursue they posted a picture of a receipt most of the identifying information was censored but it mentioned that the balance due was twenty thousand dollars those who donated via paypal we will be refunding you guys after the convention as soon as possible starting with the largest amounts and moving down from there for those panels which were rearranged they will be rescheduled to the best of our ability and will be happening tomorrow looking forward to this weekend well unsurprisingly the explanation 100 did not help their cause first of all their assertion that they would have been able to pay off the fees if the hotel had waited one more day is really doubtful because their estimation of how many people were going to show up was so ridiculously off that unless attendance literally sept tupled the next day and hit at least three thousand it wasn't gonna happen as it turned out about another 500 people showed up the next day far fewer than expected secondly a lot of people were skeptical of the claim that dashcon would be refunding people after the convention because one a lot of people donated by putting money into a large bag and it's very doubtful that those people would be identified and repaid and two people already figured that this convention was very very doubtfully going to make any money at all it wasn't even close to meeting its estimated goal and it was doubtful that it was gonna break even let alone have enough money to repay thousands of dollars worth of donations and thirdly people just generally did not trust the word of the dashcon organizers after they lied last night and claimed they were only being asked to pay the hotel because the hotel staff just hated them for no reason the explanation was generally clowned on as outsiders laughed at the [ __ ] show that was dashcon and insiders demanded justice and immediate refunds it's also worth mentioning that in internet historians video on the topic he analyzes a series of paypal transactions posted by the dashcon staff and notes that dashcon's claim of being short 17 thousand dollars was a lie in the first place and they were only in fact short a few thousand meaning they raised far more money than they actually needed a series of paypal receipts revealed that the organizers used several thousand of those dollars on personal expenses and potentially pocketed the remainder although this wasn't common knowledge at the time the numbers still weren't adding up for the general public who quickly recognized that dashcon was lying and they weren't going to be refunded back at the actual convention center things weren't going so hot either remember how i said they refused to pay the welcome to night vale cast early and the cast said they wouldn't perform without being paid in advance which by the way was a very smart decision on their part given how much the con was hemorrhaging money yeah the con organizers did not communicate that information to the public the night vale panel was supposed to start at 12 o'clock p.m at 12 50 p.m nearly an hour later the welcome to night vale cast was still not there and none of the audience was provided with an explanation of why people were concerned and getting pretty antsy little did the people sitting there know the con organizers were busy updating the dashcon website to specifically mention in the rules that people would not be getting their money back finally at 1 15 pm one of the organizers came forward and explained that the show would not go on okay so basically um how i know you guys have been waiting for an extremely extremely long time but um unfortunately what i have to tell you guys is that basically night vale uh just walked what okay if everyone would like to collectively like grown inside together that's what i've been doing so we can take a second to do that so on three we're all gonna side together okay so one two three they wanted everything up front which and they didn't want to wait until after their panel like we had to go run to a bank and they refused to wait until after their panel to let us give them the rest it's worth mentioning that since steam powered giraffe cancelled welcome to night vale was undoubtedly the most famous group of people who were supposed to be at dashcon maybe doug jones but not enough people know who he is nightvale was definitely the most famous group of people with dashcon's core demographic and a good chunk of the reason why a lot of people went to dashcon in the first place understandably people were pretty pissed at this and especially at the fact that the rules were just changed mid-convention to say they would not be getting their money back the dashcon organizers once again returned to tumblr to post a half-baked explanation for the night vale cancellation and this is where one of the most iconic quotes from dashcon came from for those of you who had reserved seats we are giving you guys an extra hour with the ball pit as well as an entry each into a raffle where we will be giving away a framed stan lee autograph a framed richard armitage autograph a framed walking dead photo with the full cast autographs a signed martin freeman autograph and more so many cool prizes additionally you'll be allowed first come first served places at the time crash concert tonight for what extra room we have for those who bought just daily tickets to see night vale you're welcome to a free sunday daily badge the potential to win an autographed photo and an extra hour in the ball pit which once again was a literal plastic kiddie pool filled with balls that could fit maybe two people at once as a compensation prize for several dozen people at least and also the ball pit wasn't like a timed thing it wasn't like before this you had to pay specifically to use the ball pit and they timed how long you got to be in there getting an extra hour with the ball pit is not only something no one wanted but is also literally meaningless it would be like if you were sitting on a rickety bench in a public park and someone stole your money but told you it was okay because as compensation you could sit on that rickety bench for as long as you wanted it was just nothing the phrase extra hour in the ball pit quickly became its own meme and was circulated outside of tumblr and widely mocked by everyone who saw it some people even went to other cons later cosplaying as the dashcon vulpit people who weren't actually at the convention were mostly a mix of upset for the people who got scammed and living for the drama of it all this ball pit and the fact that it was genuinely being offered as compensation for a missed panel was the perfect symbol for the mix of earnestness and incompetence that dashcon had to offer remember the non-specific goodie bags that were being offered on the indiegogo page as a backer reward back when dashcon was tumblecon usa the bizarre list of other compensation items led some people to speculate that these items came from the goody bags from the original indiegogo although without confirmation as to what was in them it's impossible to say if that's true or not remember that thing earlier about how when they ran out of money the con organizers just ditched all the panelists whose hotels they promised to pay for and made them suddenly pay their own way on the same day night vale dropped this happened to the baker street babes a group of women who hosted a sherlock holmes themed podcast and were supposed to do a panel at the convention they subsequently threatened legal action and left the convention early the same thing also happened to featured artist noelle stevenson yes that noel stevenson and popular geekbloggers lindsay faye and being geek chic in particular noelle mentioned she had to sleep on a couch offered to her by the night vale people because no one would let her into her actual hotel room this led to many of them dropping out of the convention only a day after it began leading to an even worse experience leading to more attendees getting mad on top of panelists dropping because they weren't paid the con experience was getting worse and worse vendors paid 150 each for a spot in artist alley and after way fewer people than expected showed up they began to leave as they weren't making enough money to justify being there this created a snowball effect as fewer vendors meant fewer people checking out artist alley which meant fewer sales which meant fewer vendors the remaining panels were not the worst thing in the world but were mostly pretty bad not because the panelists were at fault but because the con had no money and almost no one was there among them included games where hotel mints were given out as prizes and panels where there weren't enough chairs for all the speakers a dashcon organizer who i believe is roxanne tweeted a picture of herself crying on the official dashcon account the charity random act who if you recall dashcon claimed to be affiliated with released a statement telling people they had nothing to do with the convention miners were rumored to be allowed into adult-only panels and people also claimed that actor doug jones had also left the convention early on sunday morning long story short the rest of the convention sucked on sunday the organizers hosted an official apology panel and in meg's words there were a lot of mistakes made on a lot of different people's parts and we apologize for the parts that were us meg also mentioned wanting to make the convention better in 2015 which well we are first timers but we intend to learn from our mistakes to make 2015 even better the final day of the convention ended with relatively little fanfare in person and lots of people absolutely losing their minds online folks were making memes laughing at the organizers and con goers and demanding their money back so that was the actual convention in a nutshell the organizers recruited a bunch of unpaid teenagers with no experience to run things on the ground and the only people it was worse for than the attendees were the panelists although eyewitness accounts placed roxanne as the only organizer making any effort to make the convention better the other two repeatedly attempted to push her out of the organizing work and she was still complicit in the financial mess that was dashcon many people who went to the convention described it as not the worst thing they'd ever done but still you know not a very good con so that was dashcon itself but what happened afterwards and where are they now several days later on july 17th meg released an official statement on the website which she called separating fact from fiction in it the dash con organizers made several claims these claims were as follows they did not misuse any of the seventeen thousand dollars and all of it went to paying con fees and maintaining the convention as per internet historian's earlier analysis this is likely untrue anyone who requested it before july 19th would have their paypal money refunded anyone who requested it after july 19th would be ignored besides the fact that this only gave people a two-day window to ask for their money back the aforementioned refunds did not end up happening the volunteers and panelists were not comped their hotel rooms because of a clerical error which happened for reasons still unknown which they were working on resolving the reason meg was not answering any of the panelists calls was because her phone reception was shoddy in the convention center rumors about actor doug jones leaving early and miners being allowed into 18 plus panels were both untrue they would uphold their rules and would not be offering any refunds for any cancelled events dashcon 2015 would be happening the same weekend next year interestingly enough meg's account only mentioned herself and kane and there was no mention of roxanne anywhere in the post finally meg thanked everyone for their patience and included a donation button at the bottom of the page which amazing meg continued to respond to people on the dashcon tumblr blog for the next short while reblogging the official statement multiple times and assuring people that they would get their money back unsurprisingly people did not get their money back in the months following dashcon kane and meg formed a new corporation for next year's dashcon and kicked roxanne out they renamed it emoticon 2015 and ignored people's requests for refunds in favor of working on emoticon roxanne was also denied access to any remaining dashcon funds it's rumored that they kicked her out because she was the only organizer who actually wanted to refund people which is possible but based on earlier accounts it sounds like kane and meg had a problem with roxanne for a long time before that kane and meg assembled a new team to help them run emoticon most of whom were again people in their early 20s with no con experience and almost all of them were called out on tumblr for various injustices within the week some of these organizers were called out for defending blackface others were called out for harassing dashcon panelists on their personal tumblr accounts kane and meg quickly removed references to these organizers on their website but didn't mention if any of them had been fired this was also when susan and her husband matt posted their account of dashcon and meg responded on her own tumblr saying there's no way they got the full story because they spent less than 24 hours at the con despite you know being main volunteers and being kicked out of their hotel room because the organizers decided to stop paying for them this earned meg even more backlash which she earnestly responded to calling her haters narrow-minded and telling them to suck a bag of dicks the emoticon website is no longer up but it was a complete mess even reusing paragraphs verbatim from the dashcon website also their privacy policy was copy pasted directly from the league of legends website the website also claimed to no longer be a tumblr convention and was for and i quote tumblr reddit youtube facebook and 4chan the website was quickly circulated on all of these sites who readily mocked it kane and meg also organized a series of online forums for discussing emoticon and set up a language filter on the forum that auto-corrected roxanne's name to voldemort again these people were in their 30s emoticon was met with a lot of distrust and hostility from people who knew about dashcon as well as incredulous reactions that they were genuinely going to try to do the convention again after the colossal mess that it turned out to be despite this distrust the emoticon organizers were quickly exposed for deleting any comments on the official emoticon facebook page that were critical of the convention leaving the veneer that people were supportive and excited about the con despite erasing negative comments about emoticon the staff couldn't pretend forever that the convention was going to be a success and on december 9th 2014 the official emoticon blog made a post claiming that the convention was cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales and refunds would be issued several people responded with a list of additional questions including whether dashcon was liquidated why roxanne auto-corrected to voldemort on her forum and whether the planned guests for emoticon would be refunded for any travel they plan to do meg responded to none of them and promptly abandoned the emoticon tumbler dashcon 2015 and the hopes of any future dashcons died with it according to the blog emoticon indie who claims to be run by people who know the organizers meg was later fired from her job filed for bankruptcy and now spends most of her time role-playing homestuck online and kane later got a shoplifting conviction from walmart and is still lying about attending an ivy league school both of them are holding on to the dashcon funds and have still not refunded people to this day meanwhile roxanne has apparently been doing well for herself after unsuccessfully hiring a lawyer to get access back to the dashcon corporation is all this actually true i don't know and it seems almost too good to be true that the bad guys of the story got some kind of karmic justice while the only organizer who made an actual effort is doing well it's also worth mentioning that the link on emoticon indies tumblr showing that meg filed for bankruptcy is real but is also from 2009 so i don't think it's related to her dashcon organizing in any case wherever the three organizers are now they're at least not in a position to run any future conventions which i think is much more important than whether kane actually shoplifted from walmart or whatever [Music] so that's the story of dashcon and the people who made it what it was from the start dashcon was a poorly organized venture marked with financial missteps internal drama and horrible planning do i think the dashcon staff set out to scam people on purpose no i think it was honestly a mix of willful incompetence a refusal to admit wrongdoing and several people simply getting in over their heads if i feel bad for anyone involved in this it's roxanne i mean i most certainly wouldn't have been in a position to organize a convention as a 19 year old or even now for that matter being a teenager who's brought into a business venture with a bunch of 30 year old children who proceed to ignore you [ __ ] talk you try to force you into becoming their secretary and then fire you and call you harry potter insults has got to be a pretty terrible experience and wherever roxanne is i hope she's doing relatively well hashtag justice for roxanne regardless i don't want to absolve anyone of responsibility here and it is worth mentioning that all of the dashcon organizers including roxanne repeatedly lied to panelists and con goers throughout the whole debacle there really are no fully innocent parties as far as con organizers go most of the people who were booked to be panelists at dashcon are doing quite well for themselves now and no one was forced into financial ruin by it which is a good thing welcome to nightvale noelle stevenson steampowered giraffe doug jones and baker street babes are still all very successful and happy people which is good as for the con goers themselves as far as i can find people who donated never did get their money back i hope at the very least that people got some positive memories out of dashcon i think there's a tendency after the fact to just make fun of the people who went to the convention as though it was their fault dashcon was awful even in the internet historian video the main footage used is from someone essentially going around and making fun of the con goers and i think that's just the wrong message to take from dashcon not only did no one know going into it that dashcon was going to suck because nothing like it had ever happened before but these were also just largely just people trying to meet up with their internet friends and have fun on that note though one interesting consequence post-con is that the atmosphere of tumblr itself very rapidly changed after the con happened i saw fewer and fewer people referring to tumblr as a friendly home-like community for them and more and more people referring to it as a hell site i also never again unironically saw a post wishing there was a tumblr university or a tumblr island i think this shift from tumblr's users loving it to hating it wasn't only because of dashcon there were a number of other social factors at play that i could spend a whole video talking about but dashcon definitely left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths and a lot of folks came out of the event embarrassed to be members of the tumblr community although dashcon is now nothing but a vaguely nostalgic memory and a source of cringe for most of the internet its legacy carries on six years later as both a precautionary tale against attending poorly planned events and a reminder that just because someone has the same geeky interests as you does not mean they have your best interests at heart most importantly dashcon served as a great reminder that no matter how badly things are going for us right now at least we're not spending an extra hour in the ball pit i'd like to thank curiositystream for helping me talk about dashcon for 40 minutes this is wild to me if you want to know more about the awesome people who've supported me and helped me make stuff like this you're in luck because curiosity stream and nebula have allowed me to make exclusive content available only on nebula nebula is a collaborative streaming platform by me and many other creators like lindsay ellis kat black tierzoo and many others it's a really great platform to have because not all videos are best suited for youtube whether that's because of copyright monetization or just money and time constraints for those videos that aren't best suited for a platform like youtube it's great to have a space like nebula where you can access high quality content when you sign up for nebula you get early access to my youtube videos and you can watch my exclusive video debater theater which was made specifically for nebula in debater theater i talk about how to better use arguments to persuade others with lots of cool examples like how people use debating skills in movies the news and even award acceptance speeches when you sign up for curiosity stream you also get your subscription to nebula included a curiosity stream is a great streaming service with thousands of amazing documentaries and educational videos about all kinds of topics like science nature and global issues you can get unlimited access for just 299 a month and when you sign up using my code you also get access to nebula included just head to curiositystream curiositystream.com sarah's ed and use my code sarah's edit sign up that's curiositystream.com sarah's at signing up for curiosity stream and nebula is really good for you because you get access to tons of exclusive content on nebula and curiosity stream made by educational creators it's also good for the entire educational creator community because it gives us a space to make more of the things we love basically it's just great for everyone and i'm so glad to be a part of it [Music] [Music] hey [Music] systems [Music] on top of a special thank you to all my patrons i'd like to specially thank dylan reed nate c and love shaq for joining my 20 plus tier

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,029,459

Rating: 4.9409165 out of 5

Keywords: sarah z, video essay, video essayist, breadtube, twitter, tumblr, internet history, convention, comic con, dashcon, welcome to night vale, she-ra, noelle stevenson, facebook, reddit, lefttube, fandom history, fandom drama, fandom, weird fandom, philosophy, youtuber

Id: HPwgSXZJcok

Length: 50min 2sec (3002 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020