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[like-icarus]

sorry for the total radio silence everybody! i have fun chronic health things that make life Not Enjoyable and unfortunately i still have to work FT so i have some asks in my inbox (which thank YOU to everyone who has sent me asks!!!!) i have not yet answered!

[like-icarus]

actually, for any users who want to contribute to my quotev write-up, i would love to see lots of examples of quotev layouts if anyone has them! most embarrassing, the cutest, the coolest, the simplest, the wildest - it would be great if users submitted their own so that i could feature them in my writeup.

pouring one out for the quotev layout makers

[like-icarus]

hi again, not sure if anybody’s sent you an ask about this yet, but i wanted to ramble about the social hierarchy i briefly mentioned before. as weird as it sounds, it worked a lot like european feudalism.

carrots were at the bottom, generally looked down upon for the way they enjoyed and did cringey things. if there was an issue where a carrot was at the center of scrutiny, it more often than not ended in dog piling and peer pressuring them to deactivate their account or getting suspended (if not banned)

i don’t think there was ever really a name for the in betweens, but people who used tv show/movie icons or pictures of themselves were typically just above carrots. not cringe in the sense of a cluttered account but also not really held up to a super high standard

above that would be people who used art made by other people (frequently taken from pinterest or twitter and not given credit) or anime/manga icons. i think the only reason these people were considered “cooler” was because of the way their themes were often pretty unique in the sense of going out to find an icon made by someone rather than a commonly passed around image

at the very top you have westies. like i said before, westies were typically minimalistic accounts with little to nothing about themselves and an icon of a celebrity (typically a model like adriana lima) or someone’s picture that had been uploaded to pinterest. the only reason they were “top dawg” was because they could easily change their identity (a lot of them had hidden url’s) and, with little to nothing about themselves shared and an often cut-and-paste personality, it wasn’t hard for them to group together and promote themselves as cool.

i hope that made sense, and there’s definitely other people who could explain it better than me, but that’s kind of the basis (also, last ask i sent i accidentally called an anon, so i’m sorry for the confusion lol)

people who used art made by other people (frequently taken from pinterest or twitter and not given credit) or anime/manga icons.

this actually explains a TON to me. i have been scouring more quotevians to weigh in on my post, and i noticed strongly a consistency in that the icons were usually anime. i found this surprising, since being so openly weeby in my day was cringe, but tbh i know anime and manga have gotten a renaissance so it's not entirely unsurprising. still, i'm glad some light is shed on that!

that is all fascinating though and i appreciate you being so comprehensive. i had a feeling that such an insular site almost certainly bred its own hierarchy, so knowing that there was one is mostly confirmation of suspicions lol. was any of this related to general demeanor/interests/typing style? i'd asked another user if there were sort of 'quotev stereotypes' or rather types of users you could like, sum up (ex: westie icon, listens to X music, holds Y type of take, etc). i feel like there may be, but i'm still doing my digging.

this is a two-parter, part one came from over here!

[like-icarus]

hi! sending these as apart of your interest in the (now dying) quotev culture ^__^ 

the context behind the first photo is that the user, sniide, was pretending to be a boyfriends webtoon fan and ‘trolling’ around on activity and people’s posts with it. it’s not very significant but sniide was a relatively popular user between the 2022-23 scene (the time the screenshot was taken) and it archives the way the buttons had corners rather than curves like in the update that would follow soon after. it also points to the social hierarchy quotev had that was separated largely by “carrots” (someone with a cringe, cluttered, or generally unaesthetically pleasing account theme), “westies” (minimalistic and using a picture of a real person; more often than not being someone off of pinterest rather than a picture of themselves), and the in between (movie characters, fanart, celebrities, etc. as an icon). sniide, in this case, was pretending to be a carrot

the second photo isn’t a screenshot directly from quotev, but an image that tengenuzuis (another popular user) made as a campaign to be elected as “quotev prime minister”. it was pretty popular for users of all communities to advertise themselves and create polls for others to elect them as president or other government figures (despite the outcome ultimately leading to 0 political gain, lol). i have some that me and my friends made personally as well if you’re interested in seeing them!

i feel like i should also say i use the term “popular” very loosely, as there wasn’t and isn’t a way to really get famous on quotev. your community is entirely handmade and what someone else see’s is completely different to what you see, so most users that were well known in one corner of quotev were total strangers in another. sorry for the long anon o_<

thank you so much for providing examples! ive been giggling about the carrot profile for like 5 min bc that just honestly looks like your average twitter user profile to me LMFAO maybe thats why the q crew on twitter isnt adapting so well... but this is a great message. i also love how the term carrot makes absolutely no sense, can anybody illuminate me on why it's stuff like carrot/westies/etc instead of stuff that seems more on-the-nose or accurate?? im assuming it's likely a corruption of a different term but i would love to know the history.

i saw your second ask too, so part two is over here for anyone reading!

[like-icarus]

oh man… lms. “like my status” probably stuck with quizazz users even after the site became independent from facebook, and eventually just became part of the site lingo (actually I’m putting together a glossary Quotev specific language right now. there is a decent amount.) lms posts were a popular kind of post: lms for p/r (profile rating), for a “tbh”, for what (item) your profile reminds me of, for a DM, for what my first impression of you was, etc etc. I once did a “lms for a yankee candle.”

another part of social media Quotev that was significant (-ly embarrassing) was the types of users. the main types were westies (minimalist profiles with instagram model icons), anime/cartoon profiles, kpoppies(basically..kpop fans), and carrots. each type considered themselves normal and the other types abnormal, but all the other types usually united against carrots. Carrots are vaguely defined as users whose profiles were “messy,” were probably younger teens or tweens, who may not have had the best grasp on the social etiquette that the other users were used to. It was all pretty stupid, but kind of fascinating. Some users did not like to categorize themselves and criticized the social hierarchy. 

i am loving all of the slang terminology, but i just noticed that you mentioned quizzazz was originally connected to facebook. i know there's a lot of mystery around who exactly runs quotev, so this seems like its own kind of lead. and if you do make a glossary i'll be more than happy to link it directly! language is a big part of culture and i'd love to have something that actual quotev users wrote up vs relying on my own interpretations here and there.

would you (or anyone else reading this) consider westies, carrots, etc to be cliques of their own, or was it really more just a descriptor for aesthetics and/or behavior? and were there some labels that users purposefully sought out or purposefully avoided? carrot is starting to shape up to seem like a low-grade insult of its own lmao

and since many of you are super kind to weigh in on linguistics i will be adding more tags to my posts to better sort things out for those who wish to read it.

part one of this two-parter!

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ok. lmao. buckle up, these are gonna be a few long ones. I profusely apologize in advance. it’s really funny how we’re all talking like quotev, the site, is dead. technically, it’s still up, and you can still even make posts, but they stay on your profile instead of going on a feed. But since the feed was central to a lot of users’ experiences…

the thing about Quotev is that it has layers like an onion. A lot of users will leave, but there are also many users who will see the activity tab gone, say, “oh, too bad!” And continue creating content. There were a lot of communities on Quotev, but you’d usually never find out about them unless you randomly stumbled across one.  however, since it’s the feed that’s gone now, I will talk about the community that lived there.  to any new user who wanted to make friends and,yes, get more likes on their posts, advice would probably be given them to follow spree. Users on follow sprees sometimes put “fs” in their display name. To do so, you would typically find an account with the most followers and go down the list. (people who were too lazy made posts like “LMS if your followers are open” - open meaning public.)

LMFAO i think quotev kind of is half-dead, in the sense that this major feature has caused a tremendous exodus (i've seen statistics that report that much of the site's traffic is down). i understand quotev has a sizable chinese userbase, so i doubt it will ever truly die, but this has been a major dinger to activity afaik.

the following spree is so crazy because on just about every other site that's considered bot behavior and would get you blocked readily. i certainly hope users don't end up getting reported on other platforms for this - it's not as if users are generally welcoming and open to explaining how their sites operate. i think plurk has to be one of the few sites i've seen where its old guard has been willing to explain how things work differently to the fresh blood.

part two of this ask!

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Hello! I'd like to talk about my personal experience on Quotev. There's so much about it to get into and I don't know if I can fit it all in one message so hopefully you don't mind me coming back every now and then to write more. Lol.

Some memories on Quotev were bitter and some were sweet. Quotev would have been/be nothing without the community it's built on there. Mostly everyone was polite and kind, there were some people who were rude but it was never too overwhelming there for me at least.

Feed/activity is what made Quotev what it was. New comers aren't really aware of the secret society built in Quotev and our own slangs we made up and stuff. It was also the easiest way to have a community to keep you sane if you have very strict parents that won't even let you look out a window without permission (such as myself). On Internet history it only looks like you were visiting a site to read books and take quizzes. Which made it easy to hide but it was so much more to the members of the community. I made 5 very close friends on there. I met this one girl, my first friend I ever made in my 18 years of life, she was absolutely amazing and fun to be around, she's like the little sister I always wished i had. I care for her so much.

Cancel culture. The bitter parts of Quotev would have to be how sensitive it was. Everyone could get blocked for the tiniest thing or get banned and mass reported or IP banned. It was kinda scary, so cancel culture was a big thing there. My best friend (Lulu) almost got banned for trying to make a point about something but everyone took what he said the wrong way. I almost lost him and that would have been devastating.

There were a lot of accounts that would randomly dm you and ask you to like their post while providing you the link to their posts and there was even this thing going around where someone who had a lot of info on their bio/about would be called a "carrot" i don't even know why that was a thing, lol. (Personally i never agreed with it because i don't think bullying is right and people were borderline bullying these "carrots".)

Edits, making edits was a big thing for Quotev. It was how we showed love and appreciation for our friends. Basically (I'm sure you already know what it is but still) it's where you use a photo that best captures or describes your friendship with that friend and we'd put screenshots of our favorite conversations with that person in it. It was really sentimental.

The cute little dates everyone would set up. Like, there was Q prom and other events (which I never got the privilege of attending but it was sweet for everyone else)

Lms'. Lms (Like my status) was a big thing on Quotev and for the people in it. We'd basically post saying "Like my status for a tbh or for a yes or no." Or "like my status for a compliment or a hug." It was a verity of things, mainly to get likes but also as a way to get noticed by more of the community to make friends and such. There was also things like, "I'll do this if this post gets to X amount of likes".

There's more but I don't want to bore you with how long this already is, lol. I have quite a few screenshots of my favorite posts and conversations with my friends though. Those I'm glad I took because it's the only thing left of Quotev I can take with me...

Also it's totally okay to post this!

'secret society' is right; this thing is practically like a digital atlantis. i also think you're right on the money about strict parents, as something i observed as a pattern was that many users reported being from strict (or even abusive) homes, often without having much for friends in real life.

but it would be a double-edged sword: as you mentioned, one wrong step and you lose everything. one of the benefits of being spread out on multiple websites is decreasing the risk of losing touch with important people, but when you're a vulnerable kid who is watched closely, you don't have that luxury.

which like, things like "carrots" (i've had other users explain the idea behind carrots to me, i'll post that ask soon) and other kind of in-group terminology always runs the risk of creating hierarchies and building tension. for lonely youngsters, that's devastating. i've already noticed a kind of 'personality type' that has come with quotev users as i've spotted them across platforms - i wonder how well they'll adapt to other sites (as many quotev users seemed not to use other sites very much)?

also, tumblr used to have tumblr prom! when i heard about q prom the first thing i thought was none of us are so different after all, lol. we also used to dress up for tumblr prom (this was back in like, 2010-2012ish) and have tumblr prom dates, so that was really cute and nostalgic to read about.

and please, i welcome all edits and screenshots and whatever else you might have to share. quotev had its own culture, and part of culture is art, and it'd definitely spruce up my write up if i had screenshots to show as examples. (of course, usernames would be censored upon request and i would only post things based on people's consent. you may show me things and request that it would specifically not be included - i would only mention it in passing.)

[like-icarus]

hey, what's up! i've been wanting to make some kind of essay or video talking about Quotev for a while, but never really knew how to talk about it. i've been using the site since I was 9, and i'm 18 now, so i feel like it's part of me almost

for a long time I had really bad anxiety and didn't really talk or socialize with anyone irl, so i basically had my entire social life on the site. "the feed" was usually full of people just posting all their thoughts kinda like a diary almost, but out there for other users to see and interact with

the hidden nature of the site (and the option to hide posts from accounts you weren't following) made it feel more private than the rest of social media. i think this aspect made it kind of a negative coping thing for me, spending my whole life glued to the site instead of interacting with the outside world, as i was compelled to post my every thought for people to read and comment on. i had several thousand followers at one point, more friends than i could ever have offline, which i think fucked up my brain a bit. i felt that it was bad for my mental health and left several times but always ended up returning eventually.

i think MANY other people had a similar relationship with the feed, which was why it was so much of a shock to everyone when it was removed. i had always wondered about what it would be like when this finally happened, and it's been super interesting to see, as well as people talking about Quotev outside the site itself, resulting in a bunch of new people learning about it.

An interesting thing is that nobody knows who created or runs the site, or who enforces the rules - there's no admin accounts that you can talk to, and no information about any founders or admins on the internet. after some research i learned of Quizilla, which was an older site that was super popular in its day and shared many of Quotev's features, which makes it seem like it started off as a Quizilla clone that gained a larger community after that site shut down in 2014 (a year before I joined Quotev).

The original founder of Quizilla (Matthew Nielsen) seems to still have an online presence and I've been meaning to ask him if he knows anything on the subject, but I kinda forgot until now. would definitely be a cool person to talk to i think regardless

thank you for sending this in! what i find most interesting about the quotev stories i've gotten is that quotev's true privacy wasn't just in its features, but in its relative obscurity; i've heard of quizilla and i enjoy quiz sites as a whole (RIP old buzzfeed) but quotev never once popped up on my radar.

i do appreciate hearing the bad parts as well; i've seen hearsay here and there in my research that quotev, as all sites do, had its own dark underbelly that had negative impacts on its users. having been on relatively small, insular sites, i'm surprised i haven't caught wind of more cases of bullying, but if quotev was able to rise above that stuff more often than it i can only think it to be a good thing.

it'd be cool to know if matthew nielsen knew anything of quotev's creators. might be a thing to dig through - i've been pretty good at digging up a lot of stuff in the past. if i found out anything conclusive it'd 100% go into the writeup for sure.

[like-icarus]

Hello! Saw you were looking for quotev stories :) I've been on quotev since 2016, spent most of my formative years and seen a lot of stuff, both good and bad. I think my favorite memory of something crazy happening was when someone (or several someone's) decided to impersonate about half the cast of Harry Potter; very easily fact-checked as fake, but not backing down even a step when called out. Some of their most blatant lies:

a running narrative of the cast being together for filming. This was in 2016-2017, shortly after The Cursed Child came out, so the fandom were hoping for a Cursed Child movie that obviously was never even conceived lmao.

Tom Felton (draco malfoy) and Daniel Radcliffe (harry potter) were dating/engaged to be married. This narrative was mostly kept up by the "Tom Felton" account (also the most active of accounts).

Tom Felton was undergoing surgery to gain mild clairvoyance and superhuman strength (this was by far the weirdest lie, and cropped up toward the end of the whole affair).

Rupert Grint (ron weasley) and Emma Watson (hermione granger) were also engaged and even got married at one point (a quiet, private ceremony of course).

In all I think there were seven accounts; Tom Felton, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Evanna Lynch, possibly Bonnie Wright, and...emily something? Supposedly an extra from one of the scenes in the final movie. I followed all of them to keep up with the drama, though was only mutuals with two or three.

It was a very obvious and thin ruse. Quotev was very niche in 2017, still used more by writers than for social media, so no way would any celebrity spend their time there. Every 'new selfie' posted was taken off the first page of google, every rumor was easily verified as false, and yet so many people believed it. I'll admit it even took me a minute to catch on (it was the dating rumors that tipped me off, then the selfies only confirmed it).

Eventually the accounts just kind of faded off one by one, either nuked or self-deactivated, though the Tom account made a comeback later and stuck around, though inactive, for a while. It's one of those mini-dramas that I think you only really get on isolated corners of the Internet like Quotev was in 2017. I feel oddly privileged to have witnessed it firsthand.

knowing that there have been rumors about quotev taking down its social features due to impersonation made this message even funnier honestly. who among us hasn't had a wee giggle over a bit of LARP? LMFAO this definitely sounds like a story of 'older quotev' - im beginning to sense that there may have been a cultural shift at some point, but i cant pinpoint precisely where.

anyway thank you so much for sharing because this made me snort. why the cast of harry potter of all things

[like-icarus]

a call to quotevians/quotev users:

for those unaware of my ask sent into quotevarchive: i am a bit of an amateur essayist, and digital history/internet culture is a big interest of mine. i've been following the quotev situation since the end of may and i've been wanting to make a writeup of it.

my problem? i never even heard of quotev until it removed its activity feed may 31st, 2024. so... can't write what you don't know.

but YOU all know what quotev was like. and i want to know what quotev was like.

websites die all the time, but this website meant something to a lot of people. i've lost sites that contained time capsules of my youth and feel quotev, for all of its issues it might've had, is worth telling the story of.

so please, send in whatever you like to me for my quotev post-mortem: the craziest things you ever saw, the funniest screenshots you have, what you loved about it, what you might've hated, etc.! tell me about beef, tell me about the q users you loved and lost, tell me about how quotev influenced you (in interests, in politics, in whatever), tell me what it was like to code your themes - anything!

tell me what made quotev, quotev!

my anon is on - think of it as a form of witness protection (coz i've done my research and there was definitely some names that kept popping up and i am NOT in the business of propagating drama, lmao). you can also message me through tumblr messaging i believe!

and btw, if you send me an ask, please feel free to request that i do NOT publish it. i will always honor these requests and will take your privacy very seriously.

also, this isn't an official journalistic thing where i'm publishing it in the NYT or something LMFAO i'm just into writing essays and articles and thought this seemed like one that merited more investigation, that's all.

even if you don't wanna talk, if you know anyone who does, feel free - my askbox is open and so are my ears!

[like-icarus]

some of my fav memories of q was trying to find who the owner was. from public records we know they were based in Wyoming and have a guy named Bill Havre sign smth of theirs and that guy is infamously not actually real. Rumours were also spread that it was made in cahoots with Facebook. Tbh finding random things about quotev was rlly fun like there are different places you can send complaints to the admins.

that is so funny! i've gone to similar lengths to find out who runs certain websites and the idea of quotev being operated by a beleaguered man in a cornfield is freaking hilarious. he probably sat at his computer every day like

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hi!! I was .rainbowbrite on quotev and while I wasn't a big user I was friends with some decently popular users which kind of, in my experience, adds to why I and maybe some others miss quotev so much since these popular users were seen as entertaining

not only did people use the site's actual purpose to express their creativity with stories, art books, fun little quizzes, and interact in groups centered towards interests, we also used feed as a source of entertainment and self expression like how you would use those other things I mentioned

feed was like our little diary on the "side" of quotev I was on, quotev feed was different than any other website I've tried to navigate, it was just a constant flow of people sharing opinions or silly things they've done or ranting about their day, and even if no one interacted with your post you knew it was seen because everyone was all in one place and most people saw most of the posts people made

and what made the quotev community so special in my opinion is just how everyone was in one place and it was so easy to find other users and honestly pretty easy to make friends and a lot of people shared similar interests and it was just a fun place to hang out

and I while the website had its toxic moments, it was also a safe space for myself and many others, people expressed themselves there, they found help thst they needed and confided in the people they made friends with there and had fun making new friends, it was a very tightly knit community that a lot of people enjoyed being apart of

I wasn't a veteran user by any means, I'd only been there since late 2021, but it was my intro to websites like that and I made so many great friends that I'm still in contact with even after the site imploded, and I'm extremely sad to see it go after almost 3 years of memories from that stupid website

(sorry that this is so long, I saw your ask on the quotev archive account and just wanted to share a little something)

thank you so much for sharing with me! tight-knit is right - while i've been doing research, i've seen names repeatedly pop up here and there that are becoming familiar, so it definitely gave me 'small town highschool' vibes at least in the retrospective haha.

i find it fascinating conceptually and almost hard to wrap my head around. so there was like a whole global feed for the site? that IS incredibly unique; cohost has usermade attempts at a similar function (#The Cohost Global Feed is the tag that was created, i believe as a joke, but users saw such purpose in it that it became a function of the site. the site mods are not happy about this lol).

it seems like the secrecy was a very appealing part of quotev's charm. it makes me wonder where q users will go, given that it was quite unique in being so underground.

i appreciate you weighing in and in a way i feel sad i missed out, but i've also noticed i'm older than a lot of users by at least 5+ years lol so if anything, its nice to see that younger users had a place like this available even for a brief moment in time.