Initially, O’Neil was enthusiastic about all of the support and attention. O’Neil started a Tumblr blog called Tumbl-Con, a launch pad for what would eventually become DashCon, named for a Tumblr user’s main page which is called a dashboard. “I saw these posts and I thought, ‘What if there was a Tumblr convention? What if I made a Tumblr convention? And then all of you could also have friends?’” She noticed this pattern a lot: people forming strong bonds with virtual strangers online over things that really mattered to them, things that they didn’t have a network for in their everyday lives. There must be more people like her on Tumblr.” “But when I met my best friend, I was like, well, there must be more people like me on Tumblr. I didn’t really have the ability to connect with people and I didn’t know why,” she said. Over time, she even met one of her best friends on the platform after searching content about her hometown. O'Neil showed off one of her main DashCon outfits in tribute to Tumblr. Like other conventions, DashCon attracted cosplayers who don elaborate costumes. She had always been a fan of Harry Potter, and had started getting into cosplay, anime and the Avengers – all extremely popular subjects among Tumblr users. O’Neil’s Tumblr experience became markedly better once she sussed out what kinds of interests were big on the platform. “I started on Tumblr writing traditional blogs about mouse genetics,” she said. O’Neil, who is now a costume designer and also works at an exotic animal sanctuary, always had an interest in small animal husbandry. “I saw one of my neighbor’s accounts where she would just post pictures of hipster hairstyles and One Direction members, and I thought ‘What is this even for?’ But my friend assured me it was cool, that you could blog about whatever you wanted,” O’Neil told CNN. She started using Tumblr in 2012, and it took her a while to really figure out what the platform was for. Like so many other Tumblr users, O’Neil was just a nerdy teenager with cool interests looking for other people like her. The idea can be traced back to Lochlan O’Neil who was only 17 at the time DashCon took place. Whose failure it was, exactly, is a thornier question. To say DashCon was a failure is a simple fact. It taught us how difficult it is to translate the social media experience into the real world, and that sometimes, even with the best intentions, what happens online should just stay there. It was a legendary failure, plagued by low attendance and mismanagement, summed up in one iconic image of a single, sad child’s ball pit on a hotel convention room floor.įor all its (somewhat hilarious) failures, DashCon immediately became a core parable of our social media lore. The idea was similar to the already-popular VidCon, which focuses on YouTube celebrities, or any number of fan conventions around the world that have been going strong for decades.ĭashCon would not reach such great heights. The result was DashCon, an attempt to bring together Tumblr users from different interests and fandoms for a single event. However, in 2014, its denizens learned a hard lesson when some forward-thinking users thought to gather this amorphous mass of creativity and recreate it in real life. Years of Tumblr discourse have helped shape current structures of entertainment fandoms, social justice language, queer subcultures and all manner of special interests one might see at a comic book convention or Marvel movie premiere. It was – and still is – hailed as a crucible of nerd-dom, where young people gather to trade memes, pop culture observations, poems, musings, fan fiction, art, and absurdist jokes to satisfy even the most niche communities. Though the blogging platform is still active, Tumblr’s unquestionable heyday passed in the mid-2010s. As their rheumy gazes search the distant past, they’ll recall another titan of that lawless age. When the first generations of social media natives are old and gray, they will bounce their grandchildren on their knee and tell them about the old days when Facebook was just for college kids and Twitter wasn’t a place for world-altering political discourse.
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