StickyDrama: The Teen Gossip Blog Run By a 31-Year-Old Pornographer
Before 11 year-old Jessi Slaughter was Internet famous for her Youtube videos, she was famous on Stickydrama.com, a gossip website for high-schoolers run by a 31-year-old man. It also has an amateur porn sister site. Delightful, right?
The Pornographer and His Teen Gossip Sites
StickyDrama and its sister porn site, Sticky-n00dz, are two of the worst sites on the Internet, built on exploiting teens and tweens' insecurities and then publicly humiliating them. Stickydrama is a crowd-sourced gossip blog that chronicles the lives of "E-celebs." Sticky-n00dz is similar, but focused on nude pictures. E-celebs are kind of like regular, "In Real Life" celebrities, except their fame exists solely on social-networking sites like Myspace, Twitter, and the live webcam community Stickam.com, from which StickyDrama gets its name.
LA resident Christopher Stone, age 31, founded StickyDrama in 2007 with a business partner. (He spun off sitcky-n00dz in 2008.) It boasts 250,000 unique visitors and about 1 million pageviews per month, according to Stone's numbers. Before that, Stone worked in porn as a videographer at "several Adult production studios in New York City over the 9 years I lived there," he told us over email. (Here's a picture Stone took at this year's Exxxotica Expo.) Now he runs a website whose favorite subject is a 16-year-old E-celeb named Kiki Kannibal.
The majority of E-celebs on StickyDrama are "scene kids"—they sport spiky dyed hair, dark eyeshadow and gossip about each other via webcam while listening to terrible electropop/emo music. You've seen them at the mall. "E-celebs are usually not wealthy or beautiful, as we think of IRL celebrities," Stone told us. They are not the cool kids at school.
Many of the E-celebrities covered by StickyDrama are extremely young. "Most of my readers are in their late teens to late twenties," Stone says. But the majority of people covered by the site are between 11 to 20 years old—and mostly female. Eleven-year-old Jessi Slaughter became E-famous on StickyDrama when a user wrote a post calling her a "slut" and then dubiously linked her to the 25-year-old lead singer of an electropop band. Her personal information was circulated by users of 4chan, Tumblr and other sites, sparking online and real-life harassment. This ended in the now-infamous breakdown of the "You Dun Goofed' viral video and a still-ongoing criminal investigation into nude pictures possibly passed around by her tormenters.
StickyDrama: Where Anyone can Make Fun of Fat Teenagers
Anyone can click the "Submit Drama" button on StickyDrama and start making fun of overweight teenagers on the site. The website has "several thousand" registered users, and Stone approves 5-10 posts a day. "So I don't have much to say about SIFS, other than the fact that they are pathetic," writes StickyDrama user by_monroebitch. (SIF stands for Secret Internet Fat Girls.) "But one fatty struck my attention when I saw various answers to some of her formspring questions." (formspring.me, the social networking service we once called "the sociopathic crack cocaine of oversharing".) Kiki Kannibal's mom calls the site "one of the biggest bullies" on the Internet.
Naturally, Stone gets many complaints from parents, but will rarely take down a post, no matter how mean it is, or how young the subject. "I wouldn't remove an unflattering post of someone just because of the subject's age," he said. " If it's just juvenile name-calling, no: Sorry, that's life. But if it links to underage nudity or lawful but potentially dangerous contact information, yes."
Christopher Stone approves every post, sometimes posting users' stories to StickyDrama's Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Writing as "Sticky," he is often the loudest voice mocking high schoolers less than half his age. In one particularly vile post, Stone posts video recorded live from Stickam.com featuring a girl who looks no older than 15. (She claims on her stickam profile she's 17.) In the video, she has just finished masturbating on camera. After thanking her audience, she explains:
I need somebody telling me I'm sexy. Otherwise I don't come. Don't think I'm a slut or anything. I have needs. I'm new in town and I don't know anybody. I can't do it without somebody telling me.
Stone sneers that this girl "has a thing or two to learn about stickam."
One, as a rule you shouldn't masturbate for strangers on a webcam: They're recording you.
Two, if you stupidly do masturbate on webcam, don't confide to those strangers embarrassingly personal details about yourself, like the fact that you need someone to tell you how sexy you are in order to cum.
Sticky-n00dz: Your Home for Jailbait Amateur Porn
But this isn't the sleaziest part of StickyDrama. StickyDrama is complemented by a crowd-sourced amateur porn site called Sticky-n00dz, also owned by Stone. On the front page of Sticky-n00dz is the following tagline:
Where social networks get naked! Sticky n00dz is a repository of nude photos of users from networking sites like Myspace, Stickam, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more.
Sticky-n00dz features dozens of user-submitted pictures—mostly self-portraits that would be at home on a MySpace profile if their subjects weren't naked. Many of these feature E-celebs covered on StickyDrama. Some of the pictures appear to be of questionable legality, and a number of StickyDrama users complain about child porn being posted on Sticky-n00dz. But since the site is user-generated, Stone claims he's not responsible.
"I don't verify anything submitted to n00dz," he told us. "That burden falls on third-party users per the Communications Decency Act. However I very promptly remove most n00dz content if I receive a complaint about it." Very decent of him.
(Sticky-N00dz.com is currently dormant in "Maintenance mode." Stone told us he suspended the site because "'I'm in negotiations with a production studio here in Los Angeles who is aware of n00dz, but I'm not sure whether they'll ultimately want it gone or not." Please, God, do not give this man a reality show.)
Sticky-n00dz and StickyDrama are intimately related. StickyDrama users will stir up drama on that site, then one or another aggrieved party will get revenge by posting a nude shot of the other on Sticky-n00dz. One sticky-n00dz post declares: "@jabberjawjoseph has pissed to many people off to not have his nudes uploaded. He is a fag that thiks he's sooo cool… and is a MySpace fame monster." The post includes a headshot and a bunch of pictures of JabberJawJoseph's penis. This launches a whole new wave of drama and the cycle begins a new.
Moms, Don't Let Your Kids Grow Up to be E-Famous
Where do these nude pictures come from? Many seem to have been taken and sent as an act of flirtation, then posted on the site later once the budding online romance went sour (i.e. "sexting"). But they can come from anywhere. "When Stickydrama was just getting started, I think a lot [of StickyDrama's nude pictures] came from screen caps of chat rooms, or private chats on Stickam," said Sam Proof, a popular Stickam user. But since Stickam began more tightly regulating its service, Proof says Sticky-N00dz "probably gets a lot from 'user generated content,' whether that's hackers breaking in to people's accounts, trolls baiting girls (or guys) for pictures, or just people who want to grab a minute of fame."
As disgusting and exploitative as Stickydrama and Sticky-n00dz are, none of it could exist without the excessive fame-seeking behavior of these young E-celebs. They perform sexual acts on Stickam to boost their viewers, pimp jewelry lines and start social-networking drama with the not-so-hidden aim of ending up on StickyDrama. (A few days before her video went viral, Jessi Slaughter tweeted "i love drama." And Christopher Stone, thirtysomething pornographer and connoisseur of underage teen gossip is there to help!
"I don't see anything contradictory or hypocritical in operating StickyDrama and n00dz," Stone said when asked if he thought there was anything unseemly about his Sticky empire. "I think you're confusing unlawful behavior with what you're trying to spin as immoral behavior."
Maybe bullying sexually confused teenagers while giving them the venues and motivation to slander each other is not technically illegal. But, goddamn, it's pretty much the worst thing you could do on the Internet that isn't.