Oh No They Didn't Founded

2003

Date: January 2003 · Place: community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt · Figures: Trent Vanegas, founder · the moderator collective · the LiveJournal celebrity-gossip readership · Tags: Gossip, Community 01. A LiveJournal Community for Tabloid Posts Trent Vanegas founds the LiveJournal community ohnotheydidnt (ONTD) in January 2003 as a place for fans to repost tabloid headlines and gossip with snark. Posts require an image, a source, and the user's own commentary tag. The post-and-comment LiveJournal architecture works perfectly for the format. By 2006 ONTD is one of LiveJournal's largest communities, with millions of pageviews a day. The community develops a distinct dialect (bb, flawless, mess, faves, no shade) that filters out into broader pop-culture vocabulary. 02. The Female-Coded Gossip Forum Where /b/ is masculine, hostile, and image-board, ONTD is feminine, communal, and journal-style. The two forms run in parallel through the 2000s and barely cross over. ONTD writes about Britney, Lindsay, Paris, the Hilton sisters, the early Kardashians; /b/ ignores all of it. ONTD's voice is the direct ancestor of Stan Twitter (post-2014), of TikTok's pop-culture community, of every later platform's women-driven celebrity-discourse layer. The dialect survives the dying platform; it now lives elsewhere. Sources • Trent Vanegas interview, NYMag's Vulture (2010) • KnowYourMeme, Oh No They Didn't • LiveJournal, ohnotheydidnt community archive