LIVEBLOG: The Good, The Bad, and The Awkward

The Good, The Bad, and The Awkward

Mike Bender (Awkward Family Photos)
Jonathan Standefer (Lamebook)
Helen Killer (Regretsy)
Douglas Chemack (Awkard Family Photos)
Brad O’Farrel (Play ‘em off Keyboard Cat)
Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom)[Moderator]

While we didn’t bring Goatse (sorry/you’re welcome about that), ROFLCon would be remiss to not spend a moment talking about the awkward on the web. Bringing together some of the folks that have done the most to commentate and celebrate that unique kind of fail on the web in the recent year, this panel examines the role that awkward things play on the web culture.

Recorded by: @flourish & @dandthengensaid
Edited by: @alexleavitt

NOTE: This is not a full transcription of the panel. If you have any corrections, please contact alex@roflcon.org.

Johannes: Who wants to start? … Why is your specific product – I mean – you make people laugh about other people. Why don’t you feel bad about it? And why does your culture still exist?

Helen: It’s a lot of fun to laugh at other people’s misery.

Johannes: So please, Mrs. Killer, tell me about your special service and why you think people like so much?

Helen: I think we have become a nation of pussies and liars and cowards and I think that not everything is good nor is it as good as everything else and when you force people to be relentlessly positive you create a rising bubble of discord and letting people puncture that is very satisfying. At least I’m satisfied.

Johannes: I cannot get any satisfaction from this answer. Your special product. Tell about it. There is something really funny cat playing, and you combine it with something really horrible?

Brad: It was a video of a person in a wheel chair falling down the stairs but it was kinda their own fault, and they were trying to ride down by grabbing on to it. I mean it was appropriate because even though they were handicapped they were still stupid. It wasn’t cruelty that wasn’t asked for by being stupid.

Johannes: I expect that. Profiting from cruelty, I expect it. How did it emerge? So you put it on YouTube or something and one guy said ha and two guys said Ha and two million guys said Ha and….?

Brad: I just started seeing video responses that were parodying it, and I submitted it to the editors at YouTube, and that’s what set it off to get more parodies. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that.

Johannes: Who of you does the Lamebook? You do the Lamebook. The thing that you do, the Lamebook, can you associate with your fellow companions here?

Jonathan: Yeah, I don’t think I can put it as well as she did. I run it with my friend Matt and we started it mostly as a way to vent because we were like man there are lot of lame people on Facebook. We gotta vent. We gotta find a place to put all this stuff to vent.

Johannes: How many people know Lamebook? [claps from audience] …enjoy Lamebook? [claps from audience] Think it’s disgusting crap? [a few hands]

Jonathan: Like people who were doing lame stuff.

Johannes: Like masturbation or… ? I don’t know… ?

Jonathan: Actually we’re going to change the name to masturbation book and only post that stuff. Well, speaking sexually, someone sneezed on her, and she thought now she had diabetes, and they said no it’s not contagious, but she also has hepatitis, which I can only assume is a combination of hepatitis and herpes. There is a lot of comedic gold on Facebook.

Johannes: So it’s all user submitted or?

Jonathan: It’s all user submitted, we probably get about 1000 a day of user submissions.

Johannes: When was your first post?

Jonathan: We bought the domain about a year and a half ago, but we started posting about a year ago. We’re just a baby.

Johannes: Awkward family photos. That’s a technology we understand, we can relate to that. So you have this site, people posts picture of other people who look stupid… ?

Mike: On our site, 99% of the photos are submitted by people in the photos.

Johannes: Oh really?

Mike: Yes.

Johannes: Say I’m a classical Midwestern boy born 1975, I look stupid when I’m 10 in 1985, I rediscover the picture and put it online and let the world laugh about me… ?

Mike: Yes.

Johannes: That’s a pretty simple concept. Why?

Mike: I think well, in general, most of us have been humiliated when taking a family photo at some point in our lives, so I think it’s something that most people can relate to, even in the Soviet Republic. I think it’s just a very relatable subject.

Johannes: Yeah! That’s why I guess it was the only panel they gave me to talk about humiliation and stuff. Uh… yeah. So. Are there any stories you could take about one specific image that’s — I got print-out, I mean I always get print-out because our bandwidth is so slow — there is this picture of an old lady, young lady, giant white hair. And that was kind of viral, people reblogged, reTumbled it. So what are your favorite images and the favorite images of the world?

Mike: We have a photo called iContact, it looked seeming like it was normal family photo, but they were sitting, but there was only one eye visible, so it was just a strange photo and it took people a while to catch on to it. We got a photo called The Dribbler, and he’s just gone to the bathroom and he’d peed on himself just a little bit, and now he actually signs his emails The Dribbler.

Johannes: It happens often that people get famous because they’re stupid and then they have to get adjusted to it. Like — if five million people know you as the Dribbler, then you are the Dribbler.

Mike: He’s not The Dribbler.

Johannes: Favorite photo?

Doug: We have an Easter photo of an Easter bunny that appears to have jaundice, and it was really freaking out the girl sitting on it’s lap, and it really opened up an area no one knew existed about people sitting on the laps of freaky bunnies.

Johannes: So it creates a memetic long tail of similar pictures?

Doug: It started a long line of people remembering that they had similar photos and then they’d find them and post them for us.

Johannes: It almost sounds like a self-help group.

Doug: It’s a celebration of all our awkwardness, which was sort of our goal.

Johannes: I like this. I like this. If I could be able to access Facebook I would like it I guess. Okay. Going back to you Mr. Cat, in lack of other terms, why — tell the story of how you actually found — the video of the nice cat playing keyboard was not yours, so you violated copyright, yes?

Brad: Yes. The video was filmed before I was born by Charlie Smith (he was born in 1986), he filmed the cat, I basically used it for making fun of people. I didn’t have his permission at the time, but once it started taking off, I wanted his permission, but I also didn’t want him to take everyone else down, so everyone could violate his copyright. It ended up working out well for both of us, because he’s been able to franchise keyboard cat way more than I have.

Johannes: I think it’s always good to violate copyright and then make money! The Chinese actually make a very good deal with this I guess. We don’t really like this. I think they are like a dog giving milk to the wrong puppies, but — let’s leave it like this. You are born in 1986 the year of the disaster at Chernobyl. So what do you think will be the future of people laughing at other people on the internet? It seems like a very interesting medium for such a thing. First there was porn, now there is never ending laughter! A utopia of humiliation. So what do you like best to humiliate people on the internet?

Brad: I guess like on the internet all anyone had is their ego, and you can only really see people get embarrassed on the internet, but you can’t really kill someone on YouTube. But people really like to see people get their ego hurt, it’s the most fun thing to do on the internet.

Johannes: But what is the difference between something like a jackass and the stuff that you do except that they’re making more money than you?

Brad: They are making fun of themselves and I’m making fun of other people. I guess everyone is making fun of other peoples.

Johannes: OK, they say it’s a service for them and for all of us and you say I just laugh at people. You’re almost like Steve Jobs and they’re like Bill Gates… maybe it’s wrong.

Brad: Well, sort of. I guess everyone is making fun of other people.

Brad: Yes? Kind of?

Johannes: What do you think — that’s why we’re all here making fun, that’s the point.

Helen: Yeah, that’s why I came here from CA is to do this.

Johannes: And burning lots of kerosene, I guess. Basically the same question: What’s your favorite project on the internet about other people making fun of other people?

Helen: I really don’t know what that question was. Is there something I’ve done that I like? Or?

Johannes: I mean — what is the thing that you like about making fun of other people on the internet?

Helen: What do I like about making fun of other people on the internet. Well it’s fast. People complain about the anon on this site. The thing you like is that you let people hide behind this veil of anonymity. Some people don’t have a problem putting their name on it. But that’s how it’s structured. If you go to anywhere, YouTube, people post comments from behind a screen name. The anonymity has never really been a problem for me.

Johannes: How many people use your site? How many people please here? [hands and claps] Not so many!

Helen: How many is yours?

Johannes: We don’t even have one so…

Helen: So it’s not.

Audience Member: What site do you like?

Helen: I like Brad O’Ferrell who blogs LOLcats. I look at that every day and I steal things from it. You don’t really make fun of people as much as you might think I do. That picture of I could kill you with my bear hands. They’re hand puppets! Bear hands.

Helen: They were doing a story on the WSJ asking about the blog, but I don’t have any anymore, I just read aggregators, you have to get everything so fast, I mean you only get 140 characters on Twitter, and you have to be done. If you like something, you can go to read more about it, but it’s so fast.

Johannes: I think most people don’t even read the YouTube comments!

Helen: Just the hidden ones.

Johannes: There has to be some incentive to read them, that’s right. Now: you. Same question. What do you recommend? All these people are sitting there with their handheld phones and they want to instantly laugh at other people’s misfortune. Where should they go?

Jonathan: Are you guys familiar with dontevenreply.com?

Johannes: Don’t Even Reply?

Jonathan: It’s one of our favorites. It’s this guy, I don’t know who it is, he pretty much trolls Craigslist and messes with people. A guy is looking for a car for his 16 year old, and he lists all these things wrong with the car and just keeps listing things for $2k, and the guy replies and says “Are you serious? and he replies with more things wrong with it… Or one with people looking for a caterer for their wedding. And he listed his menu which is like crackers and cheese whiz on it and PB&J sandwiches.

Johannes: OK. Yeah that’s the thing there are so many possibilities out there to laugh about other people’s misfortune. How could we actually find all that?

Jonathan: I don’t know.

Johannes: In the meantime the generations of such sites, it’s like two weeks, a site is updated, then another. I remember a site named ‘fuck my life.’ Can you relate to ‘fuck my life’?

Mike: Yeah, we know the site. Yeah, definitely, I mean who hasn’t felt like fuck my life at some point, or had something really awkward or bad happen to them, yeah, it’s totally relatable.

Johannes: OK. Do you think that in the future, because your site works that old family photos will be put up online. If we fast forward the next ten years, there’s all this discussion of privacy and all the young kids they put all their stuff on Facebook — but isn’t the whole generation putting their stuff on Facebook and the people who don’t won’t get hired because they’re suspicious? You don’t put your stuff up: who are you? Why is there no puking picture of you on the internet?

Mike: Hm. I’ll tell you this much. Occasionally on our site we will people on Facebook like kids in high school will put up pictures of them on Facebook, and we’ll find out from the other person that they were putting it up there to make fun of them at school.

Johannes: Are there stories about that? That’s very interesting. You click there and you have such power in your grasp – how can you actually be fair or do you have to be fair? Equidistance?

Doug: Basically the policy of the site to make it feel as family and celebratory, when people find out that there is a photo sent in of them, we’ll take it down, because that’s not the purpose of the site.

Johannes: So part of the site is only people who are in the picture can submit the picture.

Doug: That’s the idea of the site.

Johannes: That narrows down the possibility of abuse, but you know, there is 4chan, and — wasn’t there something like Denial of Service attack on your site, like, if a million people start putting up their pictures, how much time do you take to verify the identity?

Doug: There is no way to verify the ID when dealing online, so we have an honor system. Once we’re notified that it’s been put up by someone else, then we’ll take it down.

Doug: Very often people are letting their family know that they’re going to put the picture off. It reconnects families. We have entire threads of photos that are people posting pictures of their family. Like The Dribbler they’re like “Oh my god, I remember that…”

Johannes: So you, you, you helped the Dribbles, in a certain way.

Doug: We helped the Dribbles.

Johannes: That’s very nice of you. So. Do you have your own site, Mr. Cat? Where do you put your stuff on? Are you maintaining a site?

Brad: Not really, I have like a YouTube and Tumbler and a Twitter, I don’t have like a Keyboard Cat homepage or anything. That was the end of my answer. I wanted to ask you something. You guys were talking about you guys were talking about how most of your pictures have implied consent, do you have trouble with your stuff with people getting angry and dealing with copyright stuff.

Helen: Well, yeah, they do, but it’s comment and criticism, and so it’s not a copyright infringement, and stuff gets sold! I mostly get comments that it’s not nice, and I don’t really care, honestly. I’ll take it down if you ask me to but if you comment and you’re calling people a fucktard and things — no. That happens a lot, people get in a flame war and they go ‘oh I want to take this down’ and I’m like, oh, no, you’re playing now. But occasionally you get people, every once in a while, maybe 1 of every 6 people have really been kind of unhinged. I put one down the other day that was a black guy who was naked and wearing a map of Africa map as a necklace on his ass and he was calling it a butt shield and he wrote to me and said I was a racist and making sexually harassing comments and I was like dude your ass is in your listing! He turned me over to the police, and then he turned me into Facebook for hate speech which got me taken down for all of an hour, then he started sending me photos for lynching. I took it down pretty early, but then it kept going on. He wrote a letter to Random House to try to get my book deal taken away. A lot of people get bent out of shape and they say “If you don’t like my stuff then just don’t look it! and I’m going to get your site taken down!

Brad: Not everyone fully realizes that when you put something on the internet you’re opening yourself up to people.

Regret: People think it’s like a family album and only their friend will see it.

Brad: It’s not like it’s deviant art. They’re trying to sell this crap.

Regret: Yeah and it’s not like I’m going into their living room. They’re selling it.

[from the audience]: How does Etsy feel about Regretsy?

Helen: You know, they’re amazing. The first email I got from them I was still undercover, and they found me, and I was like SHIT. And I was already to go commentary and wide birth and blah blah. And they said “Could you just not use our colors?” And I was like “Okay, thanks, bye!”. They’ve been quoted in articles as saying it’s driving traffic to our site and helping people sell stuff and it’s been great.

Johannes: So the Etsy people are human beings!

Helen: Yes, which is more than you can say for some of the sellers! as business people they understand that it’s driving sales and they’ve been great about it.

Brad: It’s like three wolf moon, the joke’s gonna sell the product.

Helen: Like I say, if you make wall art with masturbating dinosaurs they’re not going to find you via a key word search.

Johannes: Isn’t it more and more important nowadays to talk legalese? Maybe it would make more sense to put your work up elsewhere? In India or somewhere? So it can’t be taken down?

Helen: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s governed. There are no internet police, if you were talking about out sourcing.

Johannes: Not outsourcing! If the server is somewhere else, then the local laws are there –

Brad: Well, for like child porn and killing people, maybe. If you’re just making fun of people the FBI doesn’t really care.

Helen: So far we’re safe.

Johannes: What are you trying to do in the future? Is there any more growth in your site, or – is it just going to be? Lamebook – you will not be able to sell it to Google or something.

Jonathan: Yeah I don’t think we could sell it to Google. We got a book deal, which will come out in the fall. We plan on keeping it around for a while, it is unbelievable how much content we get and how much people submit.

Johannes: So you’re digging through all the stuff and finding ‘best-of.’

Helen: What’s the permissions for that?

Jonathan: As far as that goes, for profile picture, they can send their photos in and you can use them as a book. By doing this you might be admitting that you have an STD in our book.

Helen: So you don’t need to get approval of people who make the content?

Jonathan: We’re not IDing them, Facebook is all public content, so we don’t have to worry about it.

Johannes: How long will it last?

Jonathan: I don’t know how long it’s going to last.

Johannes: Will there be a coffee table book of awkward family photos coming ou?

Mike: We have a book coming out May 4! Next week!

Johannes: Pitch it! Pitch it! They’re sitting here!

Mike: The book is a collection of ones we really like from the site, 1/4 of it are pictures people have never seen, we had to go out and get permissions from all these families. We have photos we have stories we have people telling stories about the pictures. We have people writing to us, and sometimes the things they’re writing is even funnier than what we write about it.

Johannes: So we can look forward to stuff that was never ever seen by the public.

Mike: The majority of the book is stuff people have never seen. We’ve been getting stuff we wanted to post but we put it aside because the publisher wanted us to.

Johannes: How long did it take you to get all the waivers signed for the book?

Mike: Doug did a lot of that work and it took six months. And there’s one family that was in the book that was in Latvia so they could get to the fax machine like once a week and there was a lot of chasing them down and.

Johannes: You seem to be the one that cannot publish a book. How do you make money?

Brad: I was actually thinking if anyone wanted to publish this it’d be like a flip book with a greeting card song built in, but I don’t know if that’ll happen.

Johannes: Any investors here? Raise your hand if you’re an investor!

Brad: There was a hot topic shirt for a while, but for some reason hot topic made it like a really feminine girly shirt, but I imagine it’s more of a male audience for keyboard cat, so it didn’t sell too well.

Johannes: Is it from a gendered perspective – many women like it!

Brad: That’s true but they probably wouldn’t… well, I just imagine it’s all young men on the internet who find it funny, I don’t think it’s really girls who shop at hot topic. Clearly not, since it didn’t sell too well.

Jonathan: [to Brad] Can you play the keyboard song?

Brad: I probably can, because it’s been in my head all day. It might not be very good.

Johannes: FAIL! [audience cheers]

Brad: You can kinda remember what it sounds like!

Johannes: You unlearned it?

Brad: Well, I wasn’t the cat, so.

Johannes: Sorry, I mixed it up. – Audience, is there any question from you? OH, they’re up there! Oh. Oh, my non-existent god! Okay, less moderation, okay, okay, ah okay. Panelists! What’s the most amount of IRL harm you’ve managed to inflict making fun of someone?

Brad: I don’t think I’ve inflicted any IRL harm, I’ve been afraid of getting IRL harmed myself. I changed all my passwords and stuff. I didn’t want Anonymous to get me, but they probably will now that I said that.

Mike: What is IRL harm?

audience: IN REAL LIFE!

Johannes: It’s not URL, it’s IRL.

Mike: Still haven’t heard it.

Audience: IN REAL LIFE!!!!

Johannes: But they are the good guys! So I think they wouldn’t tell you even if they did know.

Doug: A family submitted a photo that has a photographers watermark in it, and everyone went to his site and crashed it, and he got pissed at us. I don’t know if this is answering IRL. I think that’s the best IRL sorry I have to tell.

Johannes: It’s actually a legal story?

Doug: With the watermark?

Johannes: I’m so stupid! I didn’t actually understand the story. Now I understand the story.

Helen: I don’t think I’ve harmed anybody to be honest with you, I’m selling a lot of shit. The most harm I’ve done is hurt people’s feelings, people who don’t want criticism of their crochet or toilet paper cozies or thinks their jewelry is really beautiful. I don’t think I’m hurting them. Well I did get an email recently that said YKNOW WE GOT 4,000 HITS TODAY they were really pissed THAT’S LIKE 4 TIMES WHAT WE USUALLY GET and I was like well, congrats, that’s wonderful! And they said it doesn’t do me any good if they don’t buy anything! If you look at your views on Etsy, if you look at the number of times people look at your work. Those are all people who looked at your work and didn’t like it enough to buy it! That’s how it works, lots of people need to see it in order to get it. People get annoyed that I’m sending them traffic, but that’s a really bad lawsuit.

Brad: In general, you’re putting something on the internet, you want people to see it!

Helen: That’s kinda the point, I agree.

Brad: So making fun of people – I mean – that’s what makes people put it up in the first place?

Helen: What about you?

Jonathan: Well, IRL – we haven’t done much, there was one, called Jason’s monster fail. There’s this girl driving into town – she’s like ‘Hey everybody I’ll be there in 2 hours’ to like 10 people, and this guy responds to all, ‘Hey sorry I can’t make it, please don’t tell I slept with Sylvie or whatever. But the girls are in the post. Somehow he finds out about it, and he gets arguing, we’re like don’t do it, just leave it alone. Someone posts his full name, so it turns out he’s an aspiring actor, and it turns out he had some really bad video on YouTube, some short films. He was all right about it at first, but he got really upset about it.

Helen: So is that harm you did or is it harm that he did himself?

Jonathan: Good question! We’ll put it back up tomorrow!

Johannes: OK, another one: At the beginning did you rely solely on your own searching of the internet? Re: what is posted on your sites, has your job become easier or harder as you’ve become more popular?

Mike: Yeah, it started with a photo that was actually in my family’s house. We had some family and friends give us awkward family photos, we took a few from the internet. What ended up happening was as we started to get more traffic, people started recognizing themselves and we were like “Oh shit, we’re going to get killed” and instead they were like “Well, if you think that’s awkward, check out this one!” and it’s sort of continued from there. But has it gotten easier? Yeah, for sure. Now they come in and we’re amazed every time we come in and we open them and we can’t believe that somebody sent in a picture of a water birth, so yes, it’s gotten easier.

Johannes: Your stuff is at YouTube so you just have to look at the replies and –

Brad: I don’t have to do anything, I just got to take credit for people remixing my thing.

[audience cheers]

Johannes: That’s how you do it! Maximal impact, minimal input! Except that you have a really nice costume, that’s max input too. – Regretsy?

Helen: It’s actually gotten harder because in the beginning everything was amusing and new, but you can only see so many needle felted vaginas before you just don’t care anymore. It’s sort of like a drug, you need more and more to get high. So you’re going through and you’re like, Oh yeah, Jesus on a tampon, big fucking deal. People who like the site are having the same experience, their level of torture is getting higher too. You never know what you’re going to hit with people, so I just put up stuff that I think is funny, and I hope people like it. But I do get, um, I get thousands of submissions and I only post three times a day. And a lot of stuff has already been posted and they haven’t gone back far enough to see. Like RearGear – the girl who makes stickers for dog asses so you don’t have to see them in a park? And she’s posing next to a dog’s ass with a daisy on it and I didn’t put it up because I don’t like her, and I don’t want to put it up. But I get that submission like 6 times a day so I finally put it up. It just gets harder and harder to post things that are still funny.

Jonathan: Pretty much the same thing, yeah, we get RearGear all the time – we don’t have any recurring ones. We’ve gotten a few. I went back and looked at the old ones and they weren’t really that funny. At the time I guess they were but the bar just keeps getting higher and higher.

Audience Member: Do people fake content for you guys?

Jonathan: Yeah, we think so, but it’s pretty obvious, but if you’re on the Facebook you have the option to delete stuff. We’ve had people try to post some bad Photoshop jobs.

Helen: I get that too, the people on the site call it Regretsy-bait. People trying a little too hard, they’re a little too self-aware. But it gets by me sometimes, and I feel like if you’ve created this persona and I don’t catch it then I guess you deserve your 4 minutes of infamy.

Johannes: Okay, there is a really good one hurl the moderator into the sun. Like capital letters and them imo, but if you shout I guess you don’t need the imo. But it is a panel about awkwardness so you don’t make fun of it! Helen Killer is a sudden burst of cogency, can we let Helen moderate this… no. Lamebook: did you start out just posting your friends’ idiotic comments?

Jonathan: Yeah, mostly friends unfortunately, but I think we only did about 10-12 of our friends and started putting it up before they started getting submissions, and I had been talking about some Harry Potter someone took a screen shot and submitted it. And I was like “Yeah, I deserved that” Most of our friends who are on it know about it.

Johannes: OKAY! Can we… Helen, complaining about me, we’re used to it, it’s fine, there aren’t any new ones? So I have to think of a new question. How much time do we have left? Could you find out? That would be really nice. So. Your first comment, by your predecessor, the Keyboard Cat guy, how was it to meet someone who made you famous before born?

Brad: I just met him like right over there about an hour ago. I mean, I’ve been emailing with him for some times, and I’ve been emailing him.

Helen: The original shirt under glass? So cute. He’s so cute.

Johannes: And he will be on a panel tomorrow, no?

Brad: I’ve barely looked at the schedule, but I think so.

Johannes: Has anybody ever found themselves on Lamebook?

Jonathan: I hope not. You guys know what I look like now! Huh? Mm, no. That’s kind of… tits tits? Something with tits. Teddy bear on the screen has a camel toe. Huh. [audience goes wild] Oh yeah yeah yeah! That’s kind of true. Ah. This panel proves that there’s good awkward and bad awkward. Eh, not bad, not bad? What can we say? There are no good questions on here. Then I would ask you for a last tweet – 140 characters of each of you that makes all the people here go out there and feel happy about humiliation.

Jonathan: Thanks for reading Lamebook, lol, omg.

Brad: Pass

Helen: You can pass though. I’m just going to pass right back to you though. You can think about it.

Brad: Pass again?

Mike: I guess next time you take a digital photo, and you’re thinking of erasing one because something is really bad about it, keep it, and send it to us. That’s a little long, but…

Johannes: There are so many pictures. You can find them at the flea market because they are on the CDROM and no one can read them in 10 years. A big hand for the panelists. It was a pleasure trying to moderate this whole thing. I know you hate me, but I know that it’s good. It comes from my soul, it goes straight to your brain, and I will go home and say I succeeded.