Subcultural nostalgia for an internet past: what was ‘vampirefreaks dot com’?
a screenshot from vf, by way of the wayback machine (nov 2005).
if you were an online emo kid, a goth adult, an industrial music fan (or a subcultural groomer) in the 2000s you may have come across a website called vampirefreaks dot com. in its most basic conception, this was a social networking website for (western, english-language) goth, emo and industrial subcultures. it is now been whittled down to an e-commerce website selling subcultural clothing (the social networking aspect was shut down in 2020). imho the website starting losing daily users (1) firstly due to facebook’s growing popularity and centralising effect, and secondly (2) because it ended up becoming a particularly nasty place (with grooming, cultish social groups, hacking and trolling all adding to its eventual demise).
‘vf’ (vampirefreaks) had features commonly found in that time’s social networking sites, such as myspace: message boards, chat rooms, but also ‘art’, ‘music’, ‘events’, ‘cults’ and ‘journals’. again, like myspace, individuals could be ‘ranked’ and ‘rated’ by their peers based on an ever-ephemeral set of social and cultural standards: strenght of friendship, popularity, ‘hotness’, coolness, onliness - take your pick. the content moderation on the website was chaotic because of an unusual rule, here it’s explained by Jonathan Bailey (2006): “moderators can not take any action against premium members, only the site's administrator can do that. While that is fine if the admin is notified and able to act quickly, many times complaints simply do not get passed on or he is unavailable. This gives premium members an extra layer of protection against abuse complaints and makes copyright infringement, along with other abuses, harder to pursue against them.” people on reddit discussing vf often say that this sort of two-tiered moderation system resulted in premium paying groomers running free on the website.
another thing is the rating system. vf’s main landing page had a section with ‘top girls’ and ‘top boys’ listing several usernames belonging to people who had been rated by many people. the rating system was a simple 1-10 spectrum where anyone who wanted to could ‘rate your profile’. being able to rate other people’s popularity/coolness/hotness from 1-10 publicly like this would be an unthinkable feature in today’s digital ecology and cultural sensibilities, mainly because it was public. i think it’s kind of funny that today, we don’t mind being rated if its being done by machinesystems (not our peers, simply speaking) and if the ratings are not publicly visible to our peers (the ratings can stay in the backend of the platform, the ‘black box’). even if we’re bothered by being ranked by digital systems, we understand that invisible metrics and ratings are part of how we access culture (where there is no irl/online dichotomy anymore) thanks to the platformisation and appification of everyday life. it only becomes unsavoury once ratings become a crowd-sourced benchmark of worthiness and personhood, to be decided by online masses in view of everyone.
looking at write-ups and videos lamenting the loss of vf, you can see that the people who miss it most are millenials who experienced the death of the subcultural internet and the centralisation of social networking around big corpo websites. if you want to get a taste of the subcultural net (and you haven’t been morphed into a totally nihilised edge-bot by being on 4chan all the time), you will most likely end up in subreddits (and MAYBE - maybe, some forums) and definitely not on fully-fledged subcultural social networks with landing pages, messageboards, journals, music and event recommendations like vf.
the best part of having access to a subcultural social networking website like vf, as an odd duck in the periphery, was that despite the groomers and abusers (which exist on all platforms - sorry), there was a safe space where you could be a part of a subcultural moment even if you ‘couldn’t be there’ IRL. this was important for someone like me, who for reasons of geography, age and access couldn’t interact with subcultures i was interested in physically. this virtual playground became a place where some of my DIY cultural education happened and where I was able to take in some of the vibes without being physically present in locations in the west.
i think it’s high time for another subcultural network. but who will build it for us and will big corpos kill it before it even becomes a thing?
