Oh No They Didn't
| File:ONTD logo.svg | |
|---|---|
| ONTD screenshot ONTD posts on June 17, 2009 | |
| URL | http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com |
| Slogan | The celebrities are disposable. The content is priceless. |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Collaborative blog |
| Registration | Moderated, required to post content |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Launched | June 26, 2004 |
Oh No They Didn't, also known as ONTD, is the largest[1] community on LiveJournal, with over 90,000 members.[2][3] The community focuses on celebrity gossip and pop culture, with most of its posts taken and sourced from other gossip blogs.
The community publishes an average of 150 member posts per day[4], each post getting between 100 and 300 comments on average. The blog boasts over 300,000 page views daily, according to Popmatters.[5] The community moderators post a weekly post called Free for All Friday which allows members to post off-topic comments. When LiveJournal increased the comment limit on posts from 5000 to 10,000 comments, ONTD contained the first post to reach this new limit.[6]
Editorial style
In addition to members submitting the posts themselves, ONTD relies heavily on user participation in the comments section, where members can express their opinions on posts. Members often illustrate their reaction to a particular news item by posting an animated GIF image which represents their feelings. After the death of Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, according to MSNBC, "users expressed their collective grief by posting a Fantasia Barrino gif, in which the American Idol star wails and flails her arms wildly,"[7] while other users expressed concern over the continued use of a popular GIF taken from "Thriller" music video featuring a scene of Jackson eating popcorn, an image that is frequently posted on the community in anticipation of a controversial or "flame-worthy topic."[7]
Oh No They Didn't's popularity has resulted in a series of spin-off communities which follow the same format, but with a different or specialized topic. Examples include ontd_political for politics, ontd_lost for Lost, ontd_tennis for tennis, ontdhp for Harry Potter, ontd_ai for American Idol, ontd_spnparty for Supernatural (TV series), ontd_glee for Glee (TV series), ontd_timewarp for posts related to things happening prior to internet popularity, and ontd_startrek for Star Trek related posts.
Awards and recognition
ONTD won the Best Gossip Blog award in the 2008 Weblog Awards, beating out other popular celebrity blogs like D-Listed, Perez Hilton and TMZ, with a whopping 44% of the vote.[8]
ONTD has been noted in O, the Oprah Magazine[9], cited in Life & Style[10], and artist Lily Allen referenced the online community in the March 2009 issue of Playboy Magazine[11].
The Swedish newspaper Metro described the community as "Gossip on steroids."[12] The paper also noted that with a high volume of posts, the reader would "find a lot of highlights, and often before newspapers get their hands on it".[12] The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that the "scandal-mongering community overflows with interactive snark" and encouraged the reader to "imagine a gossip clearinghouse run by teenagers with bad attitudes and sharp tongues".[13] In December 2009, the users of ONTD were derisively referred[14] to as "jackals" because the stories posted on the blog are taken from other sources. In response, the users embraced[15] the term and repeatedly used the term in later posts, as well as manipulating their icons to include photographs of the animals.
Exclusives
The most notable ONTD exclusive was the Pete Wentz photo scandal, colloquially known among members as Peengate '06, which occurred in March 2006, when nude photos of Wentz were posted on ONTD. The original poster reported that she received the photos third-hand, and that Wentz originally sent the pictures to a woman with whom he allegedly had romantic interests.[16] This event was alluded to in a blog post by Wentz himself in December 2006.[17] This went on to be parodied in Fall Out Boy's video for "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race".
ONTD was also the first community to break the news of Jamie-Lynn Spears' pregnancy, after leaking OK! Magazine's unpublished front page cover,[5] and was the first to report that Kirk Acevedo had announced via his Facebook status update that he had been fired from the Fox drama, Fringe.[18]
When the rumors of Jon from Jon and Kate Gosselin's infidelity started appearing in February 2009, a photo of Jon out on town was posted on ONTD, which showed him posing with two young women in a local bar. National gossip magazines picked up the news, and a screen grab of ONTD could be seen in Star[19] and US Weekly.[20]
The most scandalous and notable events are often given nicknames to distinguish them in future posts, such as the January 2008 hospitalization of Britney Spears, which was dubbed Hostage Brituation '08 by the community's members. This nickname was later picked up and used by Rolling Stone.[21] The abuse case between singers Rihanna and Chris Brown was dubbed Domestic Disturbia '09 by the community's members[22], and the community was also credited with starting a meme ("Gokey is a douche") connected to American Idol contestant Danny Gokey's negative comments and pictures regarding fellow contestant Adam Lambert.[23] The forced removal of "#gokeyisadouche" from Twitter's trending topics list prompted a discussion on Twitter's censorship.[24]
LiveJournal downtime
In the end of January 2009, ONTD was the first LiveJournal to surpass 16,777,216 comments (2^24), effectively breaking LiveJournal's previously-unknown limit on comments.[25][26][27] This resulted in almost a week of downtime for the community, while LiveJournal worked to fix the issue. A second community, ontd, was created and members posted and commented there until the issue was fixed.
Oh No They Didn't was briefly suspended due to an explosion in usage following the death of Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009. The amount of traffic the community received brought all of LiveJournal's servers down, resulting in downtime for the entire domain.[7] During this time, members migrated temporarily to ontd once again.[28]
See also
- Kermit Bale, meme with its origin in ONTD.
References
- ↑ "Livejournal Inc. – About Us", retrieved on 2009-02-27.
- ↑ "ohnotheydidnt - Community Profile", retrieved on 2009-02-27
- ↑ "Exact number of comments", retrieved on 2009-03-04.
- ↑ "ONTD! Calendar", retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Through the Grapewine", PopMatters, 2008-06-09. Retrieved 2009-06-19.
- ↑ Livejournal (September 2009). LiveJournal: The First Decade. Blurb. http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/4403/page1ca.png.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Popkin, Helen A.S.: "'Net Big Enough For Michael Jackson and Iran", MSNBC 2009-06-26. Retrieved on 2009-06-26.
- ↑ Best Gossip Blog - The 2008 Weblog Awards
- ↑ Winfrey, Oprah: "Guilty Pleasures", O, The Oprah Magazine June 2008. Retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ "Is Taylor Growing Too Fast?", Life & Style, October 2008. Retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ "Playboy Music Awards", Playboy, March 2009. Retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Nanok Bie: "Ett himmelrike för skvallertanten", Swedish Metro, 16-02-2009. Retrieved on 11-06-2009. "Oh No They Didn’t är en skvallersajt på steroider. I stället för att några utvalda ”journalister” skriver inläggen är det här medlemmarna själva som skvallrar. Och med fler än 50 000 medlemmar blir tempot på skvallret högt och kvaliteten högst varierande. Men om man älskar skvaller och orkar vada igenom mer än 100 inlägg om dagen så hittar man många guldkorn, ofta innan de större tidningarna fått upp ögonen för det."
- ↑ Chonin, Neva. "Surfing for the Superficial". San Francisco Chronicle. 2006-08-14. Retrieved 2009-06-19.
- ↑ Leins, Jeff. "Perez Hilton Ironically Declares Avatar a Failure" News in Film. 2009-12-21. Retrieved 2009-12-27
- ↑ [1] "perez continues to be a moron- ontd gets a mention"] 2009-12-22. Retrieved 2009-12-27.
- ↑ The original post: "ohnotheydidnt: (...) FOB Lead a Stupid Ass!", retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ Pete Wentz's blog. falloutboyrock.com. December 20, 2006. Retrieved June 9, 2009.
- ↑ Karger, Dave. 'Fringe' star Kirk Acevedo announces firing on Facebook?. Entertainment Weekly. May 20, 2009. Retrieved June 18, 2009.
- ↑ Star (magazine), issue 03-04-2009, page 58-59.
- ↑ US Weekly, issue 03-11-2009, page 42.
- ↑ Kreps, Daniel: "Britney Spears Hospitalized After “Hostage Brituation” Involving Her Two Kids; Released Next Day", Rolling Stone, 2008-01-04. Retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ Wednesdays Word Up: Domestic Disturbia
- ↑ Montgomery, James. Danny Gokey Detractors Take Their Fight To Twitter, Google. MTV News. June 18, 2009. Retrieved June 18, 2009.
- ↑ Seth Abramovitch: How a Photo of Adam 'The Ferosh Hulk' Lambert Ignited a Gokey-Hating Revolution. Movieline, 2009-06-18. Retrieved on 2009-06-19.
- ↑ Lewis, Nick. Web of Gossip. Calgary Herald. February 11, 2009. Retrieved June 9, 2009.
- ↑ Livejournal responds: "Minor database maintenance -- ONTD!!!1", 2009-01-28. Retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ Continually updated ONTD post detailing the issue: "It appears that ONTD has reached an undocumented limit - journals can only have approximately 16.7 million total comments made to them before running out of room in the database to store more comments.", 2009-01-28. Retrieved 2009-02-27.
- ↑ "Oops" - ONTD,
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