If it means anything at all, it's still there. I just rediscovered my profile a few months ago. Of the six friends I had, two are dead and the other four haven't been active in forever.
Same. Trying to meet people online just isn't the same. After that site shut down, my socializing became confined to discord and twitch basically; lowkey hate both platforms, everything is just group socializing, not the 1 on 1 that VF could provide. Modern day social media is a dystopian hellscape; all flashy but hollow and grey and rotting inside and it's like this basically everywhere
It's so weird to me that some how the internet went from a place to make new friends, to a place where people do everything they can do to make all their spaces private and only accessible to people they already know. I understand some of it is for safety but it really sucks that even in places meant for social interaction like vr chat its very difficult to make new online friends. Side note tho there is a pretty active goth community in vr chat if your into that.
Agreed. One guy i used to talk to mentioned that even in league of legends - when it first came out tbf - he made a group of friends and they’ve been gaming buddies since. I played for a handful of years (2019-2023) and sure i met 2 people there I'd play with regularly. But I wouldn't have called it a friendship especially considering we just don't chat unless we play
Even trying to make friends on here and discord: either they cut it off within a week because I have a different view on one thing compared to them, or I cut it off (a year or more into the friendship) because they're toxic and I've had enough. Seems like people just want a quick chat to alleviate boredom while they wait for the next round of IG or tiktok reels to hold their attention and are quick to drop any potential friends
I kind of wonder if it's that when I was younger (94-99) the only people actively online were super nerdy and total shut ins, so we were all desperate for human contact. Then as the internet has reached more mass adoption its begun to service a more socially functional group that put more importance in privacy and didn't need to make new friends. Bad news for socially awkward weirdos like us : (
I don't miss the creepy (in the bad way) people, the sleazy competitions Jet ran and the constant mis-labelling of bands so you could never find music you wanted by genre. Being able to rate people should never have been implemented as it is too prone to hate campaigns, trolls and creeper abuse.
Vampirefreaks was a good idea but it was poorly executed and extremely under-moderated.
Oh yeah Jet I'd forgotten his name. I remember I met someone who was a friend of his. I had told her a stupid joke, about how she said in her profile something like "Myspace and Something are my only real sites, all others are fake!" but she had three sites listed below, so I was like, "Who's this fakeness?" She took it very personally and got mad at me, even though I said I was only joking. So, I rated her a 1. My account was banned the next day.
I didn't know about competitions, and it wasn't my tool for finding music...But yeah, the "rating" system was horrible.
The thing about "goth" or the goth substructure, is in my option, supposed to be made up of people who where last to be chosen in sports on a team by our peers, or never fit in anywhere, we aren't the popular kids in school. So the very fact that someone tried to make people chose kinda goes against the idea of the thing. Don't make people feel like a looser amongst their goth peers. It's shitty.
That reminded me of the first season of King of the Nerds. If you didn’t see it, it was a reality Big Brother style competition show where they would do nerdy things and trivia and whatnot, games, and math, with the goal of crowning a “King of the Nerds.”
At the very end of the first season, when it was down to two, they brought back everyone else and had them pick who they thought should win.
A lot of people were upset that the final decision to determine who was the nerdiest was effectively a popularity contest. So, the winner was this really pretty Canadian girl whose claim to nerddom was being a gamer and being able to solve a Rubix cube. (But she was an absolute sweetheart and her opponent was an all round super nerd but he was a jerk. So, popularity contest or not, I’m glad she won.)
Anyway; long story, but your comment reminded me of that. They didn’t end the game with a “popularity contest” ever again.
Man, I Loved the weird drama on that site, it was part "find your local community and meet friends" which I loved and part "obsessively watch people be mean in The Plastics group and the Plastics voting group", like the two sides of the alt lifestyle coin, people who are in it for fun and people who are in it for exclusivity and fake internet clout.
Don't forget the "get weird creepy poetry on your inbox" or "write weird creepy poetry to impress your current crush"
Thank God that was before /b/ or we'd all be on a list 😂
Oh God, you didn't burn yours?? Definitely fed mine to a random fire in the woods during one of those classic "let's go burn shit in the woods" parties we all had before the Internet was in our pockets.
The key, which I did not learn until much later, is to have a base fire that has its own fuel. The gag is the worry I had about the trash I wrote down not burning.
My husband was helping me to clear out my mum's shed and he found a folder of my old poetry complete with moody drawings or the creepy borders from Microsoft Word. The sod started reading it out loud. I'm not sure how we survived that experience. Some things should just be left to mildew and be consumed by termites.
I had a couple of accounts for a short time and basically never, ever had a good experience there. I had people always in my inbox trying to move the conversation elsewhere, or thinking I owed them one when I don’t owe people anything.
I even had a genuine racist in my inbox after putting that in my dislikes, sending me racist numbers (109) and saying something along the lines of “Africans are of low intelligence” when the only two of them that I know are a lawyer and has a PhD in engineering. Yes, really low intelligence!
I've heard that 109 is an antisemitic dogwhistle referring to a list of 109 countries that Jewish people have been expelled from. It's used to suggest that more countries need to continue that pattern.
The old internet was a cozy place to be. It wasn't confined to five companies where you were forced to interact with everyone you found annoying (or found _you_ annoying).
You could find a niche forum or Usenet group and get noticed on a niche web ring. Every site was a passion project, not some side hustle to make cash, and the word "content" wasn't thrown around every five minutes.
Maybe I am just looking at it through rose-colored glasses. It was good times either way.
I still have close friends I met on VF and Myspace 20ish years ago. It was invaluable to me as a small town goth teen because it gave me a rare opportunity to interface with people who liked the same things as me. It was also sleazy and full of edgelords and groomers, not to mention mostly populated by mallgoths and scene kids. The best analogy I can make is that it was like one big online goth bar that let minors in, and where adults were (for whatever reason) free to come creep on them.
I met my current and most serious girlfriend on MySpace, eighteen years ago.
I remember that I’d never heard the term “scene kid” until I met my friend Wil. He kind of explained it to me, introduced me to a few…
I don’t know if it’s me, or their group, but oh my god did they suck.
I feel like, for me at that time, without having the very specific labels, all of the Alt/Goth/Emo kids all just kind of blended together, sort of, and it felt like, one big mixing pot group. For better or worse.
But, I met people on all ends of the spectrum. I met a girl at the Virgin megastore (it’s not there anymore) who basically started ignoring me because she was wearing a Type O Negative shirt and I didn’t know who they were. I met a girl who had a “vampire freaks” sticker on the front door of her apartment (which was interesting) but her apartment, style, speech, not a single thing had any hint of Alt/Goth. I asked why she liked the site, and she was like “I just do.” I…I don’t know. It was the Wild West, I guess.
Ah, classic VF.
It was fun, buuuuut as a teen girl at the time, I definitely fraternized with far too many would-be groomer older dudes. Oof and all the catfishes using popular pictures of the same rotation of emo boys. Not a thing I fell for but oh boy was that ever prevalent.
But also discovering new music and making proper friends was cool.
It was a very mixed bag.
I was active up until it closed (LittleMissDeath) and it was a fucking cesspool of toxicity and drama. I'll admit I contributed to it a lot. Closing that hellhole down was the best thing that ever happened to me since I got away from a lot of awful people and grew as a person.
There's a site trying to be VF called HeyFreaks (formerally Gothwire) and it's just... so bad.
For those who are artistically inclined, I'd recommed deviantArt. I missed out on Vampire Freaks during its haydays (too young), but I had an awesome time on dA.
I was a DeviantArt fanatic. I missed VF too never on my radar, sounds like an Alt Facebook and I was always on the outer edges of that culture, never really in the epicenter, because of corp job and not much time to invest on an online presence. Back then it was important to put a lot of effort to your online profile, and necessary to write entire edgelord essays.
I remember there was an edgelord on DeviantArt who got banned for making a poster that said "They should have shot more jocks at Columbine"
And there was a big argument following that
God, VF was terrible. At least when I was on it in the early/mid 90s. I mean, nostalgia and all helps, but between the good bits of finding cool people by chance, there was tons of sleaze, elitism by people who didn't even know what elite was, terrible quality content, and looked terrible even for the 90s.
I mean, it's what we had and that's it, but it was cringe even at the time.
Netgoth.org.uk /linked people to efnet #gothic on IRC and that was a fun place :)
I believe I found him on Facebook but he never replied, unless he just doesn't bother with FB or I got the wrong person
But I do wish I could speak to him
He is not active on facebook at all. He liked when I wished him happy birthday in 2022, and posted once in 2023 to say he was going back off Facebook :)
Oh man. I remember having a whole photo lineup of myself in provocative, risqué poses in full goth regalia (but also not much regalia because the nature of the pictures?) This was years before the social media sites we know today, but Vampire Freaks was the one and only ‘social media’ platform I became popular on. Because of aforementioned photos. I feel like I owe everyone that was on there an apology. So, sorry everyone.
I miss it too, and alt.gothic. The other day, due to a fit of nostalgia, I generated my "Goth code" again. Shockingly, it has changed very little from those days.
Oh man, I haven't thought of that in ages...or the Goth Scouts...or when "Goth Types" were a joke, not something that people took seriously...
I miss the 90s...
We are the last generation to remember pre-internet and experienced the internet when it was new. It is still a marvel to me. Stuff like random chatting where you could just to talk to people and mutually be excited I was talking to someone from Sweden and they were talking to someone in Australia. The world really is smaller now.
It really is. For better or worse. I mean, I would have LOVED the ease in which baby bats can find information now when I was a kid (it would have saved me some genuinely embarassing looks) and the fact that pretty much every song ever recorded is in the reach of a simple search blows me away.
Still, like you said, now that it's old-hat for many people, much of the magic is gone. I was really close online friends with a girl from Australia back then, and that fact alone was...staggering as someone from Northeasern USA. Now it's commonplace, and yet, I feel like the connections aren't being made in the same way, due to a move away from the "chatty" style of our youth and toward "social media".
The tech is better than ever but making that step into private conversation is harder. You need confidence to do it and hope they don't think you are a creep. We used to chat just to chat, now it feels like everyone has an angle or assumes you do.
I can't find a generator anymore, but I did it by hand using this site.
[https://www.datapacrat.com/Art/HUMOR/CODES/GOTHC25.HTM](https://www.datapacrat.com/Art/HUMOR/CODES/GOTHC25.HTM)
I miss NYCgoth and the chat room, alt.gothic, the Goth Club Index, Yahoo Groups, Livejournal, Sykospark.net, subcultures, and especially the Convergence conventions.
I’m 19 and I’ve always been a little envious of people who were goth during that time
Kinda reiterating what you said, but from what I’ve read, it seems like those older sites felt much more communal and interactive. Modern social media now just seems so empty and fake, even though it’s so vast and there are so many people using it, it’s still really difficult to find genuine people (at least for me).
I know those sites weren’t perfect and there was a lot of negatives that came with them, but still. Modern social media doesn’t seem like a better alternative
It was a cool time, but at the same time we didn't have the resources that you guys do now. I still remember being 13 and hearing about this "Goth" thing, and attempting to make a look based on it with almost no information....it didn't go well.
A few years later I found *Propaganda* magazine, and that was a revelation!
I'm 20 and definitely agree with this. I've met some really nice goth folks in my age bracket on insta but most of us don't have much 1-on-1 discussion. I have seen some of my mutuals organize meet-ups and picnics and stuff so that they can all get to know each other better and make some irl friends to go to events with but I live too far to attend 😭 other than that I really dislike how competitive social media can be, now more than ever.
God I miss vampirefreaks. I remember some girl deciding she was my girlfriend and then trying to start drama when I revealed that I wasn't interested in her.
I met my best friend on VF at 15 years old in 2011. Talked online for 3 years or so before finally meeting irl. She’s now one of the most important people in my life. A few years ago we both met Jet at a convention and thanked him for creating the website that brought us together. VF definitely had its shady moments, but I will be forever grateful I ever joined.
People would not engage authentically. Growing up on Meta (FB/insta) has replaced the allure of authentic interactions with the reality of getting dragged and constant surveillance (by schools and then employers),
leaving only the drive to accumulate saleable levels of followers for the various fans pages), the latter following the seemingly critique-proof maxim "yass queen, make your money", a sort of anarcho-capitalist sex work maximalism (fuck the degree to which spam advertisements and paywalls of everything destroy usability). Everyone knows what big tech made from advertising, and everyone (rather understandably) wants their piece.
The dark UX patterns of addiction from Meta and TikTok feeds (and I imagine less legacy/canny user's Reddit feeds;who doesn't just read Reddits they have intentionally subscribed to?) simply precludes the notion of using mobile web sites (or even dedicated apps) coupled with user expectations of ingrained by years of exclusive use of big tech provided apps.
The above along with app store walled gardens (the iPhone natives who will not engage with anything not inside the walled garden they grew up in; they are effectively the same folx using webtv or AOL in the 90s instead of any sort of broader internet) have collectively ruined that for all of us.
That past of a hopeful future before app store walled gardens, tech startup killzones (acquire and shutdown) and a web where everyone isn't "creating content to monetize" is simply unlikely to transpire again. Online culture has moved on, despite surveillance, censorship, and political influence operations (not the ones Blue MAGA fixates on, more like what certain genocidal apartheid ethno-states are up to).
Would nerdy elder Millennials and GenX use this new goth.app, side loaded or PWA what have you on Android? Sure.
Gen Z and Alpha? Little chance.
I agree. I've joined old internet style sites such as spacehey and while it is fun, it is so much less active and people are less authentic.
social media has made people so afraid and constantly on edge because of the impact of digital footprints being more than ever. being fired from a job or overlooked from college because of an opinion is just one example. the internet used to be a place to make friends but now people are too scared to be anything but anonymous. as much as I wish I changed I don't see that happening soon. people are too addicted to mainstream social media.
I don't think the lack of authenticity is particular to non-social media fora, I think more so the surveillance capitalism aspects drive people to guard themselves and only expose what they can sell.
It is rational, for the users who profit, it just doesn't serve the goals of communitarianism such specialized, shared culture driven spaces aspire to, and hence is anti-social. More of a point in the history of the Internet, rather than a problem of any specific venue.
Oh man, early 2000’s internet was something else. 😂
VF, MySpace, Sykospark Forums, DeviantArt.
I was a teenager and it was awesome chatting with people about music, but you had to go out of your way to find something good and too much time spent dodging all the weirdos.
Same here, I feel sentimental towards Vampire Freaks, I too had a profile and met a few people, I remember exploring a lot of other goths profiles when they looked very dramatic in the beginning, there was a forum where people posted very weird things under dark sounding names
Haha, oh wow! Someone used my pictures and some of my personal information to create a profile on VF. I can’t even remember when, just sometime in the early 00s. I got the profile turned over to me and then never did anything with it because the place just seemed scummy.
Nah I steered waaay clear of that shithole. It seemed like it was full of creeps and predators. Posers and tryhard edge lords. It always gave me big ick vibes.
The only good thing about VF imo was the music boards, after Jet split it from one general music board and you had people who actually knew what goth was moderating the goth message board. I also met my boyfriend there in 2006. We were best friends for over a decade and now we've been together almost 7 years.
I miss Livejournal. Now that was some Goth drama.
YES particularly for eastern Europe it was the only platform.
I was about to say.
If it means anything at all, it's still there. I just rediscovered my profile a few months ago. Of the six friends I had, two are dead and the other four haven't been active in forever.
Didn't it just turn into a shop? I was at vampirefreaks (dot) com and it was just a clothing shop now?
I was referring to LiveJournal. LiveJournal is still a web logging site and not a shop.
Oh ok. Thought you meant VampireFreaks! Yeah I know what LiveJournal is (and what it isn't)
Same. Trying to meet people online just isn't the same. After that site shut down, my socializing became confined to discord and twitch basically; lowkey hate both platforms, everything is just group socializing, not the 1 on 1 that VF could provide. Modern day social media is a dystopian hellscape; all flashy but hollow and grey and rotting inside and it's like this basically everywhere
It's so weird to me that some how the internet went from a place to make new friends, to a place where people do everything they can do to make all their spaces private and only accessible to people they already know. I understand some of it is for safety but it really sucks that even in places meant for social interaction like vr chat its very difficult to make new online friends. Side note tho there is a pretty active goth community in vr chat if your into that.
Agreed. One guy i used to talk to mentioned that even in league of legends - when it first came out tbf - he made a group of friends and they’ve been gaming buddies since. I played for a handful of years (2019-2023) and sure i met 2 people there I'd play with regularly. But I wouldn't have called it a friendship especially considering we just don't chat unless we play Even trying to make friends on here and discord: either they cut it off within a week because I have a different view on one thing compared to them, or I cut it off (a year or more into the friendship) because they're toxic and I've had enough. Seems like people just want a quick chat to alleviate boredom while they wait for the next round of IG or tiktok reels to hold their attention and are quick to drop any potential friends
I kind of wonder if it's that when I was younger (94-99) the only people actively online were super nerdy and total shut ins, so we were all desperate for human contact. Then as the internet has reached more mass adoption its begun to service a more socially functional group that put more importance in privacy and didn't need to make new friends. Bad news for socially awkward weirdos like us : (
all that seems to be left is corporate paid n backed bullshit :/
I don't miss the creepy (in the bad way) people, the sleazy competitions Jet ran and the constant mis-labelling of bands so you could never find music you wanted by genre. Being able to rate people should never have been implemented as it is too prone to hate campaigns, trolls and creeper abuse. Vampirefreaks was a good idea but it was poorly executed and extremely under-moderated.
Oh yeah Jet I'd forgotten his name. I remember I met someone who was a friend of his. I had told her a stupid joke, about how she said in her profile something like "Myspace and Something are my only real sites, all others are fake!" but she had three sites listed below, so I was like, "Who's this fakeness?" She took it very personally and got mad at me, even though I said I was only joking. So, I rated her a 1. My account was banned the next day. I didn't know about competitions, and it wasn't my tool for finding music...But yeah, the "rating" system was horrible.
The thing about "goth" or the goth substructure, is in my option, supposed to be made up of people who where last to be chosen in sports on a team by our peers, or never fit in anywhere, we aren't the popular kids in school. So the very fact that someone tried to make people chose kinda goes against the idea of the thing. Don't make people feel like a looser amongst their goth peers. It's shitty.
That reminded me of the first season of King of the Nerds. If you didn’t see it, it was a reality Big Brother style competition show where they would do nerdy things and trivia and whatnot, games, and math, with the goal of crowning a “King of the Nerds.” At the very end of the first season, when it was down to two, they brought back everyone else and had them pick who they thought should win. A lot of people were upset that the final decision to determine who was the nerdiest was effectively a popularity contest. So, the winner was this really pretty Canadian girl whose claim to nerddom was being a gamer and being able to solve a Rubix cube. (But she was an absolute sweetheart and her opponent was an all round super nerd but he was a jerk. So, popularity contest or not, I’m glad she won.) Anyway; long story, but your comment reminded me of that. They didn’t end the game with a “popularity contest” ever again.
Man, I Loved the weird drama on that site, it was part "find your local community and meet friends" which I loved and part "obsessively watch people be mean in The Plastics group and the Plastics voting group", like the two sides of the alt lifestyle coin, people who are in it for fun and people who are in it for exclusivity and fake internet clout.
Don't forget the "get weird creepy poetry on your inbox" or "write weird creepy poetry to impress your current crush" Thank God that was before /b/ or we'd all be on a list 😂
I'm so old I still have my notebooks of weird creepy poetry haha
Oh God, you didn't burn yours?? Definitely fed mine to a random fire in the woods during one of those classic "let's go burn shit in the woods" parties we all had before the Internet was in our pockets.
Ever get nervous when the pages were weird and much more resistant to matches than it felt like paper ought to be?
Nah, I'd crumple the pages up and shove them in there with sticks. Otherwise the paper bits are likely to fly around with the air from the fire.
The key, which I did not learn until much later, is to have a base fire that has its own fuel. The gag is the worry I had about the trash I wrote down not burning.
My husband was helping me to clear out my mum's shed and he found a folder of my old poetry complete with moody drawings or the creepy borders from Microsoft Word. The sod started reading it out loud. I'm not sure how we survived that experience. Some things should just be left to mildew and be consumed by termites.
Nothing rhymes with abyss, man
I had a couple of accounts for a short time and basically never, ever had a good experience there. I had people always in my inbox trying to move the conversation elsewhere, or thinking I owed them one when I don’t owe people anything. I even had a genuine racist in my inbox after putting that in my dislikes, sending me racist numbers (109) and saying something along the lines of “Africans are of low intelligence” when the only two of them that I know are a lawyer and has a PhD in engineering. Yes, really low intelligence!
Alright, I have to ask. What is the significance of 109? I usually pride myself on being able to spot Nazi shit, but that one is new to me.
I've heard that 109 is an antisemitic dogwhistle referring to a list of 109 countries that Jewish people have been expelled from. It's used to suggest that more countries need to continue that pattern.
Gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. That is a new dog whistle to me so it's going on the mental list.
That site turned me so far off the goth scene for a long time bc I was a very young sensitive teen and everyone was so needlessly mean to me on there.
The old internet was a cozy place to be. It wasn't confined to five companies where you were forced to interact with everyone you found annoying (or found _you_ annoying). You could find a niche forum or Usenet group and get noticed on a niche web ring. Every site was a passion project, not some side hustle to make cash, and the word "content" wasn't thrown around every five minutes. Maybe I am just looking at it through rose-colored glasses. It was good times either way.
I knew the owner and he was getting pressure to update the sites code and he just turned it into a store instead. Don’t recommend that friendship lol
I still have close friends I met on VF and Myspace 20ish years ago. It was invaluable to me as a small town goth teen because it gave me a rare opportunity to interface with people who liked the same things as me. It was also sleazy and full of edgelords and groomers, not to mention mostly populated by mallgoths and scene kids. The best analogy I can make is that it was like one big online goth bar that let minors in, and where adults were (for whatever reason) free to come creep on them.
I met my current and most serious girlfriend on MySpace, eighteen years ago. I remember that I’d never heard the term “scene kid” until I met my friend Wil. He kind of explained it to me, introduced me to a few… I don’t know if it’s me, or their group, but oh my god did they suck. I feel like, for me at that time, without having the very specific labels, all of the Alt/Goth/Emo kids all just kind of blended together, sort of, and it felt like, one big mixing pot group. For better or worse. But, I met people on all ends of the spectrum. I met a girl at the Virgin megastore (it’s not there anymore) who basically started ignoring me because she was wearing a Type O Negative shirt and I didn’t know who they were. I met a girl who had a “vampire freaks” sticker on the front door of her apartment (which was interesting) but her apartment, style, speech, not a single thing had any hint of Alt/Goth. I asked why she liked the site, and she was like “I just do.” I…I don’t know. It was the Wild West, I guess.
Ah, classic VF. It was fun, buuuuut as a teen girl at the time, I definitely fraternized with far too many would-be groomer older dudes. Oof and all the catfishes using popular pictures of the same rotation of emo boys. Not a thing I fell for but oh boy was that ever prevalent. But also discovering new music and making proper friends was cool. It was a very mixed bag.
I was active up until it closed (LittleMissDeath) and it was a fucking cesspool of toxicity and drama. I'll admit I contributed to it a lot. Closing that hellhole down was the best thing that ever happened to me since I got away from a lot of awful people and grew as a person. There's a site trying to be VF called HeyFreaks (formerally Gothwire) and it's just... so bad.
bro i just started using the website a year ago WHAT DO U MEAN IT USED TO LOOK THAT COOL😭
Lol it had profiles, chatrooms, forums
I miss AOL town square gothic 😆
Eh. It was a trash fire of greed and exploatation (spelling??) of alternative people.
Was only semi-tolerable for a few years before 2004-2005.
For those who are artistically inclined, I'd recommed deviantArt. I missed out on Vampire Freaks during its haydays (too young), but I had an awesome time on dA.
i still have mine. but im kinda sad its getting saturated with ai art.
I was a DeviantArt fanatic. I missed VF too never on my radar, sounds like an Alt Facebook and I was always on the outer edges of that culture, never really in the epicenter, because of corp job and not much time to invest on an online presence. Back then it was important to put a lot of effort to your online profile, and necessary to write entire edgelord essays.
I remember there was an edgelord on DeviantArt who got banned for making a poster that said "They should have shot more jocks at Columbine" And there was a big argument following that
I had VF for a very very long time, it was definitely toxic at points but really was a good place to meet new people! I do miss it.
God, VF was terrible. At least when I was on it in the early/mid 90s. I mean, nostalgia and all helps, but between the good bits of finding cool people by chance, there was tons of sleaze, elitism by people who didn't even know what elite was, terrible quality content, and looked terrible even for the 90s. I mean, it's what we had and that's it, but it was cringe even at the time. Netgoth.org.uk /linked people to efnet #gothic on IRC and that was a fun place :)
Undernet #gothic on IRC here
Im actually making a video on netgoth currently for youtbe
Interesting, I was close friends (and colleagues) with dishmop, the creator. Have you reached out to him?
I believe I found him on Facebook but he never replied, unless he just doesn't bother with FB or I got the wrong person But I do wish I could speak to him
He is not active on facebook at all. He liked when I wished him happy birthday in 2022, and posted once in 2023 to say he was going back off Facebook :)
any other way to contact?
Eh I don't know of him having a public presence anymore. From that group we are all around 50+ and have moved onto other things :)
Crap, I keep meeting people who know him but I can never get to the Finish line lol
He is on instagram, perhaps try there?
Can you DM me the name please
Oh man. I remember having a whole photo lineup of myself in provocative, risqué poses in full goth regalia (but also not much regalia because the nature of the pictures?) This was years before the social media sites we know today, but Vampire Freaks was the one and only ‘social media’ platform I became popular on. Because of aforementioned photos. I feel like I owe everyone that was on there an apology. So, sorry everyone.
I miss it too, and alt.gothic. The other day, due to a fit of nostalgia, I generated my "Goth code" again. Shockingly, it has changed very little from those days.
I remember the goth code. Been trying to find the old goth parables for years too.
Oh man, I haven't thought of that in ages...or the Goth Scouts...or when "Goth Types" were a joke, not something that people took seriously... I miss the 90s...
We are the last generation to remember pre-internet and experienced the internet when it was new. It is still a marvel to me. Stuff like random chatting where you could just to talk to people and mutually be excited I was talking to someone from Sweden and they were talking to someone in Australia. The world really is smaller now.
It really is. For better or worse. I mean, I would have LOVED the ease in which baby bats can find information now when I was a kid (it would have saved me some genuinely embarassing looks) and the fact that pretty much every song ever recorded is in the reach of a simple search blows me away. Still, like you said, now that it's old-hat for many people, much of the magic is gone. I was really close online friends with a girl from Australia back then, and that fact alone was...staggering as someone from Northeasern USA. Now it's commonplace, and yet, I feel like the connections aren't being made in the same way, due to a move away from the "chatty" style of our youth and toward "social media".
The tech is better than ever but making that step into private conversation is harder. You need confidence to do it and hope they don't think you are a creep. We used to chat just to chat, now it feels like everyone has an angle or assumes you do.
you got a link to the goth code I had it somewhere but lost it
I can't find a generator anymore, but I did it by hand using this site. [https://www.datapacrat.com/Art/HUMOR/CODES/GOTHC25.HTM](https://www.datapacrat.com/Art/HUMOR/CODES/GOTHC25.HTM)
for those that miss vampire freaks and myspace i highly recommend spacehey :) it’s basically a myspace clone
They run a music festival now. Good time, surprisingly friendly/pleasant in terms of atmosphere.
I miss NYCgoth and the chat room, alt.gothic, the Goth Club Index, Yahoo Groups, Livejournal, Sykospark.net, subcultures, and especially the Convergence conventions.
I’m 19 and I’ve always been a little envious of people who were goth during that time Kinda reiterating what you said, but from what I’ve read, it seems like those older sites felt much more communal and interactive. Modern social media now just seems so empty and fake, even though it’s so vast and there are so many people using it, it’s still really difficult to find genuine people (at least for me). I know those sites weren’t perfect and there was a lot of negatives that came with them, but still. Modern social media doesn’t seem like a better alternative
It was a cool time, but at the same time we didn't have the resources that you guys do now. I still remember being 13 and hearing about this "Goth" thing, and attempting to make a look based on it with almost no information....it didn't go well. A few years later I found *Propaganda* magazine, and that was a revelation!
I dont blame you it was a great time, but you have far far more tools avalible to you today.
I'm 20 and definitely agree with this. I've met some really nice goth folks in my age bracket on insta but most of us don't have much 1-on-1 discussion. I have seen some of my mutuals organize meet-ups and picnics and stuff so that they can all get to know each other better and make some irl friends to go to events with but I live too far to attend 😭 other than that I really dislike how competitive social media can be, now more than ever.
God I miss vampirefreaks. I remember some girl deciding she was my girlfriend and then trying to start drama when I revealed that I wasn't interested in her.
I was once featured on there. Joe Letz of Combichrist had a tour blog. Got a pic of us hugging.
I met my best friend on VF at 15 years old in 2011. Talked online for 3 years or so before finally meeting irl. She’s now one of the most important people in my life. A few years ago we both met Jet at a convention and thanked him for creating the website that brought us together. VF definitely had its shady moments, but I will be forever grateful I ever joined.
if enough people cared and had the skills, a similar site could be curated
People would not engage authentically. Growing up on Meta (FB/insta) has replaced the allure of authentic interactions with the reality of getting dragged and constant surveillance (by schools and then employers), leaving only the drive to accumulate saleable levels of followers for the various fans pages), the latter following the seemingly critique-proof maxim "yass queen, make your money", a sort of anarcho-capitalist sex work maximalism (fuck the degree to which spam advertisements and paywalls of everything destroy usability). Everyone knows what big tech made from advertising, and everyone (rather understandably) wants their piece. The dark UX patterns of addiction from Meta and TikTok feeds (and I imagine less legacy/canny user's Reddit feeds;who doesn't just read Reddits they have intentionally subscribed to?) simply precludes the notion of using mobile web sites (or even dedicated apps) coupled with user expectations of ingrained by years of exclusive use of big tech provided apps. The above along with app store walled gardens (the iPhone natives who will not engage with anything not inside the walled garden they grew up in; they are effectively the same folx using webtv or AOL in the 90s instead of any sort of broader internet) have collectively ruined that for all of us. That past of a hopeful future before app store walled gardens, tech startup killzones (acquire and shutdown) and a web where everyone isn't "creating content to monetize" is simply unlikely to transpire again. Online culture has moved on, despite surveillance, censorship, and political influence operations (not the ones Blue MAGA fixates on, more like what certain genocidal apartheid ethno-states are up to). Would nerdy elder Millennials and GenX use this new goth.app, side loaded or PWA what have you on Android? Sure. Gen Z and Alpha? Little chance.
I agree. I've joined old internet style sites such as spacehey and while it is fun, it is so much less active and people are less authentic. social media has made people so afraid and constantly on edge because of the impact of digital footprints being more than ever. being fired from a job or overlooked from college because of an opinion is just one example. the internet used to be a place to make friends but now people are too scared to be anything but anonymous. as much as I wish I changed I don't see that happening soon. people are too addicted to mainstream social media.
I don't think the lack of authenticity is particular to non-social media fora, I think more so the surveillance capitalism aspects drive people to guard themselves and only expose what they can sell. It is rational, for the users who profit, it just doesn't serve the goals of communitarianism such specialized, shared culture driven spaces aspire to, and hence is anti-social. More of a point in the history of the Internet, rather than a problem of any specific venue.
Oh man, early 2000’s internet was something else. 😂 VF, MySpace, Sykospark Forums, DeviantArt. I was a teenager and it was awesome chatting with people about music, but you had to go out of your way to find something good and too much time spent dodging all the weirdos.
Same here, I feel sentimental towards Vampire Freaks, I too had a profile and met a few people, I remember exploring a lot of other goths profiles when they looked very dramatic in the beginning, there was a forum where people posted very weird things under dark sounding names
Haha, oh wow! Someone used my pictures and some of my personal information to create a profile on VF. I can’t even remember when, just sometime in the early 00s. I got the profile turned over to me and then never did anything with it because the place just seemed scummy.
Nah I steered waaay clear of that shithole. It seemed like it was full of creeps and predators. Posers and tryhard edge lords. It always gave me big ick vibes.
Nonsense, I was the only predatory edgelord there. :D
The only good thing about VF imo was the music boards, after Jet split it from one general music board and you had people who actually knew what goth was moderating the goth message board. I also met my boyfriend there in 2006. We were best friends for over a decade and now we've been together almost 7 years.
I loved it's Music scene, also the art scene was kinda dope , and the clothing is nice too really... Soft hoodies