Departing from SuicideGirls

posted by Jeff | Monday, September 22, 2003, 12:57 PM | comments: 2
Steph and I decided we're probably going to allow our subscription to SuicideGirls.com expire. The place has really gone down hill in terms of community, really ever since they relocated to LA. They're just too fucking LA.

If you didn't know, SG is, I guess technically, a porn site. I hesitate to call it that because it's only about one step beyond a Victoria's Secret catalog. More "pin-up" stuff than anything. The angle they have is that the girls are all alt-goth-emo-punk or something along those lines. They have tattoos and piercings, and are generally much more like real women than what you might ordinarily find on nudie sites.

Now, the thing is that they also have journals and forums and such, so there's a serious community aspect to it. Think CampusFish, only they post nudies every day. The site was started in Portland, Oregon about two years ago, where if you don't have a visible tattoo or piercing they assume you're from Ohio. It's really a neat town, and on a short list of places I would love to live.

A little less than a year ago they packed up and moved to LA. Hell if I know why, except that they said it made more sense from a business perspective. This is the site, mind you, that dropped their prices in a period of insane growth, so I question if they really know what a business is.

Since then, we've watched a lot of the staff be jerks to people in the forums, and a clique of the girls basically be the same way toward people. Their heads just keep getting bigger and bigger, and they're now getting to a point to where they're too good for the people who keep them out of a normal day job. If you start to question what they do, they take it personally.

Now, I can sort of relate, because I take crap and dish it out too at CoasterBuzz.com all of the time. The key difference there is that 99.99% of my visitors didn't pay to get there, so naturally I pretty much say what's on my mind. This is in stark contrast to the developers I deal with that purchase software from me, some of which shouldn't even have computers. No matter how stupid they get, I smile, thank them for their business and help them out in whatever way I can. When people give you money, that's how you treat them, no matter how successful you get. (Maybe my software needs to be more successful? ;))

So I guess we've reached the end of an era with SG. It's a shame that they took something that was really special in an otherwise crappy area of the Web and turned it into something that has lost all focus.


Comments

Stephanie

September 22, 2003, 7:25 PM # Yeah, it makes me sad in a way, but then I remember why we're leaving the site. I don't want to keep supporting those morons who treat their paying customers like shit. And so, what? We're only one paid membership out of thousands. I guess they'll survive without us, and that's too bad. At this point, I'd really like to see that site go under and make way for all the other sites out that that currently do the same thing.

Jeff

September 22, 2003, 7:36 PM # Yep... lots of new sites with similar ideas. Some of them suck, but some of them are pretty cool.

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