Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask...
You might already know me. My name is C h r i s. Prior to being deleted on June 6th, 2006 I had 73,000 friends on MySpace.
BEFORE THERE WAS C H R I S, THERE WAS CHRIS.
It started off innocently enough. When I started MySpace in 2003 or 2004 it was for fun; a friend showed me the site, I signed up so I could comment his page, and I was off. I logged on once a day for a few minutes, hardly ever had new comments or messages, and pretty much thought it sucked. I never accepted requests from people I didn't know, and I thought band requests were a pain in the ass...
In early '05 I started adding new people. First was a kid named Alcatraz; he seemed cool, and had thousands of friends, so I figured why not. Right after I added him I saw why not; he did nothing but post bulletin after bulletin after bulletin saying add this person, add that person. Wtf?!? I deleted him, but it wasn't long before I found him on my list again...
I also found myself friends with Chris Chaos. He seemed pretty cool... he was part of Warped Tour and was always pushing bands in his bulletins. I added some, passed on others, and eventually added two other whores, Rock Da Mullet and Forbidden. My bulletins were now dominated by posts for alternative rock bands, something I wasn't all that interested in, but I kept them and started adding more and more people...
Whores back then were mostly music industry people in their late 20s and 30s who were really pushing bands on MySpace. Chris Chaos, Ed, Forbidden, and others. There were the younger people who botted their way to thousands of friends, but the ones everyone wanted to be like were the ones who seemed real, the ones who inspired fan clubs, and posses, and more...
...but even with my doing PR, and being interested in rap and rock music, I didn't want to be like them... yet.
THE ORIGINALS
In June of '05 I made the decision to leave my job. Up until then I'd worked sixty, seventy, eighty hour weeks. I was earning good money, but I hated it, and the decision to leave and look for something new was pretty sudden.
I spent a few weeks sailin' around on my boat, browsing the help wanted ads occasionally and living off of savings from thousands of dollars in overtime. It was fun, and I got one hell of a tan (and, probably, the beginnings of skin cancer), but after a few weeks it got a little boring and I decided to hit up the internet for a real job search... and some additional MySpacing.
My page had grown to about 2,000 friends - people just adding me at random, mostly - and I'd long since stopped seing my bulletins. I didn't care... MySpace was fun now, with glittery "showin' some love" comments almost every day and messages from people I'd never met.
One night in late June I saw a bulletin from someone named Brilliant. It said something like "W4W? I need 5,000 by the end of the night." I laughed, thinking who the fuck NEEDS MySpace friends? I mean, seriously... who sets goals for friends?
Hah!
I started posting a similar bulletin that same night. "W4W? Help me get to 3,000 friends!" I'd figured out that I could take Alcatraz's bulletin and mess around with the HTML code until it added me, so I did. I posted it once at first, whoring with as many people as I could. After a few hours the adds were just rolling in. 100... 200... 400... 600... I couldn't believe it. I'd been on MySpace for nearly a year and I'd gotten up to 2,000 friends, and now simply posting bulletins was bringing me hundreds of friends in a few hours.
I have to admit, it was an adrenaline rush. If you've never whored - or played Pokemon, or collected anything in real life - you won't be able to understand it. But when someone posts your add-me code, and your inbox notification goes crazy, it's a rush.
I was... addicted.
Once I hit 3,000 I was in the 'big leagues'. People like Brilliant, Nick from MySpace, and Mr. Cuntageous, with their thousands of friends, were suddenly willing to swap whore codes with me. We whored in mails for a few weeks, and our friend counts grew by thousands more... 5,000 to 10,000 to 15,000 in a matter of weeks. We'd left nearly everyone else behind, and suddenly I was receiving fan mail. If you've never received any, you're missing out.
I began developing alliances with whores with decent friend counts. xKylex, Ding Ding, Jon from MySpace... we all swapped with each other in mails, at first, eventually swapping out AIM screen names. It was then that I found out that there's a whole whore 'world' on AIM... nightly whore chats where people with the big friend counts meet and actually get to know each other. I'd since started a new job, but I found myself looking forward to leaving work to hit up the AIM chats, wondering what I was missing when I wasn't on.
I'd never been addicted to anything before - especially the internet - and never really saw it coming...
Flash trains hit whoring toward the end of summer '05. A whore named Joe - Flash Joe, as he became known - developed a flash file which would easily allow anyone who wanted to join and repost a whore train. This resulted in adds for everyone and is, without a doubt, what made whoring as popular on MySpace as it is today. Now all people needed was their friend ID, and they were whores. This is about the time I stopped responding to most of my mails; they were almost all requests for tutorials on how to find one's friend ID.
The Elites, who had prime spots in every bulletin reposted, saw the benefits: thousands and thousands of new friends. I was getting so many requests that I couldn't accept them all. I remember driving over to Cornell University after work, because their computer lab, with its T5 connections, allowed me to access two super-fast computers at the same time. I'd be accepting and accepting and accepting from midnight until 2 a.m., and would still leave with hundreds of pending requests...
THE FIRST TIME I STOPPED...
The first time I stopped whoring was in December '05. Some stuff came up in my personal life and it sort of interfered, so I basically quit. You know what I experienced?
1. I lost hundreds of friends, as people got deleted, deleted their accounts, or just took me off their lists because I wasn't on much anymore. I dropped from 56,000 friends to 49,000 in less than two months.
2. My former whore friends who were still whoring were offended by the fact that I denied them "w4w" - and some stopped talking to me. Wtf?
You'd think quitting would be easy, right? If you don't understand whoring, it would seem as simple as turning off the computer. When you're a whore with 56,000 friends, though, it's not. You find yourself missing some of your friends. You keep thinking of all of the people still adding new friends every day, while your own count is dropping. You catch yourself out on a Sunday thinking about how Sundays is the best day of the week for whoring, and how you're missing it...
It's a psychological addiction. Walking away from it is not easy. And I found that out in January, nearly two months after I'd stopped, the same way many other whores who've come out of "retirement" have: a little nooby whore said something that pissed me off, and I was back.
TRYNA GET OUT BUT I CAN'T...
You probly kno Nick. Nick was one of the many people who got into whoring after he made me a Keep It Gangsta, C H R I S sign in exhchange for a promise of some friends. When he had the first comment he had 300 friends. I ignored it; I was getting dozens of comments a day back then - another effect of being one of a small number of people with many friends - and I didn't have time to answer them all. He left a few more comments, and I noticed that he was from Portland, OR - where I have family. I asked him about Portland, he gave me some info, and we started talking. His sign was taken with a camera phone that resulted in a picture so small I couldn't even use it on my page. Still, a promise was a promise, and I whored him a few times. He got hundreds of friends, and you could tell the bug had bitten him.
Nick started a whore group called MySpace M.O.B.s, which I somehow became a part of. It was horrible: him, a friend of his, and me. I had 50,000 friends or more, and they each had a few thousand. Every day there would be angry comments from Nick, sayin' things like I don't think you've been whoren MOBs. Grr! It was annoying, and after a while MOBs disbanded. Thank God.
I'd gotten to know Nick pretty well so we continued to keep in contact even after I'd quit whoring. Then, in January, he left the second comment you see, pointing out that I'd been losing a lot of friends. I went to his page to say "ha ha still got 50,000" and was amazed that Nick had somehow whored himself to 35,000 friends. o-0 !!
That's where the competitive nature of the addiction kicks in. This was a teen, a little newbie who'd had 300 friends when I first met him... and he's gonna pass me?
Couldn't happen. Couldn't let it. So even though I'd successfully managed to stop whoring for nearly two months, in mid-January I found myself sucked back in. And I'd spend the next few months whoring with Nickolas; we each gave the other a spot in our whore codes, plus access to each other's accounts. I quickly came back to where I'd been, Nick continued to gain friends, and we soon found ourselves with 68,000 and 73,000 friends.
And I found myself addicted, again. As long as there was the chance of this kid passing me, I felt compelled to whore. I'd watched other people pass me, but this was someone who'd been impressed with me when he had 300 friends. It's hard to explain, but... if you're addicted... something as little as that is all it takes to bring you back to it.
I know a dozen or more whores who will say the same thing.
THE ADDICTION
If you've never whored before you're probably laughing at me right now. You're thinking OMFG, this guy is insane! He was addicted to getting MySpace friends?
Friends, I was one of many, many addicted whores.
In my year as a whore I talked to people who were not just depressed, but suicidal when MySpace deleted their accounts.
I got to know people who based their self-worth on their friend count.
I watched a real-life friendship break up when one of the two people was asked to join a whore group and the other one wasn't.
It was crazy.
Why is whoring so addictive?
On the surface it's hard to tell. All kinds of different people whore for all kinds of different reasons, and if you don't get to know them you never really see the reasons behind it.
I got to know a lot of them. And I came to realize that, for a lot of the whores, the addiction stems from a lack of something in real-life that thousands of friends helps make up for.
One whore, for example, felt horribly disrespected by his father. He was trapped in a life he didn't want to be a part of, and had even resorted to cutting to lessen the pain. On his MySpace page, legions of fans expressed devotion to him daily. I bet it makes being told you're a fuckup at the dinner table a little easier to take...
Another whore, despite being drop-dead gorgeous and receiving dozens of comments from girls on his MySpace every day, had difficulty talking to girls in real-life. Talking to them on MySpace was easier - and the fact that he had thousands of friends was sort of an ice breaker for the girls.
Another whore, a minority, noticed that 99f the whores tended to be white. He wanted to represent, and he did, becoming the first person of his race to reach 100,000 friends before he was deleted. It was a source of pride for him; he probably could have become the first person of his race to do something different that didn't involved MySpace, but the challenge was there and he took it...
If you know Addison aka Cash, you know about his dreams to be a real-life concert promoter in the future. Addison's a religious little dude, and he got into whoring because nobody was whoring the Christian rock bands. I started whoring Addison when I found out that another whore had offered to whore him for money. I was the deal-breaker on that one; Addison got more friends, paid nothing, and became a good friend to me, putting me second on every whore train he ever made, whether I was online or not. I got him a few hundred friends to start out, and he got me thousands over time... and he got his name out in the circles he wanted to. Where other 'promoters' quietly stopped posting for bands and resorted to a quest to become the number one whore, Addison continues to post for Christian rockers. No doubt he'll make it in the music business someday... which, if I remember, was the goal of a lot of whores when they started the 'promotion' process.
Countless people I became friends with whored, and still whore, because of low self-esteem. They're too fat, or too ugly, or not cool enough - in their minds. This was a little harder to figure out, but I saw it a lot: people who might've been picked on in school but, on MySpace, were Gods and Goddesses. When your self-image is low and your ego is boosted every day by fans - something I'm not sure you'd ever be able to experience anywhere outside of MySpace - whoring seems like a good alternative to anything real life has to offer.
Some situtations are more complicated than that. One whore I became friends with was on house arrest for a felony. He began whoring soon after I did. He'd lost most of his friends in real-life, and he wasn't allowed to leave his house for six months - an ankle bracelet made sure he didn't - but his bulletins talked of exciting things he'd been a part of, and his thousands and thousand of MySpace friends believed him. He was living the life his probation officer wouldn't allow him to through MySpace. Note: don't ask who he was, because I'm not telling. He no longer whores, but we're still close. Thanks for understanding...
The list goes on from there.
For me, it was leaving a job in which I'd worked eighty hour weeks on a regular basis and, suddenly, having little to do. Instead of being a work-a-holic I became a whore-a-holic. Healthy? Hell no. But it filled a void for me, just like it did for a lot of other people. I'm not complaining...
WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN...
Whoring is funny. One minute someone is at the top of the whore world, and the next minute they're nothing, deleted or, sometimes, just moving on. Do you remember...
Brilliant?
Garrett - The 'Baby' of the Whores?
The Italian Stallion?
Gbaby?
xxShaynexx?
Cassidy Ladrogue
Alyssa, aka CrazyBiitch?
WTFMario?
Randy aka the KKK Kid?
Chris Couture?
Denis?
Skankish/Clumsy You?
Tania xCore?
Roque?
Chris aka JusALilPimp?
Shawn Caution?
Sup Sammie?
[M]
Mx? lol
Rel?
Gocky?
Kay Money?
Blah Vadim?
Mr. Roboto?
Intense?
Kay.Dee.Bee?
Colton Whitmore?
The Notorious JesseBurns?
Etch-a-Sketch?
Nature's Fuck-Up?
Ryano?
Lorelei Carson?
Josie [Barbie Corpse]?
Shayna?
Blair?
Chris from Coil?
Zakk The Promoter?
Zakky Badass?
Zachy Chaos?
Zak/Eminem?
Damn how many Zachs were there???
Chris/Jusalilpimp?
EddyXDuh?
DannyxChaos?
Jason/LaChance?
SupaDave?
Roque?
KevRCrunk?
Harrison?
Gaige and Peaco?
I wasn't as angry as you would expect. In fact, at first, I wasn't angry at all. I'd found 73,000 new friends but, in truth, only a few dozen really cared enough to leave me messages or comments on a regular basis. Thousands had probably added me and never even looked at my page. I'd miss being able to post bulletins for the rappers I'd been promoting on a regular basis, but I still had other accounts I could push them from. And most of the people who meant something to me knew how to find me...
I was irritated, though, that I'd been deleted and that other MySpace users had apparently been tipped off. I contacted MySpace and let them know what had happened, and almost immediately received a reply from a top executive asking for more information. I told him everything I knew, and we spoke on the phone at length; MySpace, it appears, had not authorized anyone to delete mass numbers of users that night; in fact, according to their records, my account hadn't been deleted by a MySpace employee at all, but by myself. When I pointed out that I hadn't received an email confirmation their executive asked for more time to investigate, and I agreed, thinking I'd never hear from him again...
Instead, a little while later, I receive a voicemail: my account had been restored! Their technicians had worked to recover it, and had determined that it had not been deleted by anyone at MySpace. I was "good to go", he told me, and I was already on the computer trying to login before I'd even saved the voicemail.
In actuality, I was not "good to go". The account had somehow been deleted again, in the two hours since he left his voicemail. We spoke one more time, and then I received an email which stated that they'd tried, and failed, to restore the account.
Rumors had begun to circulate that a hacker who'd spent a lot of time befriending whores - including a number who I'd considered friends - had been using privileges granted to him by MySpace.com to access and delete accounts of whores he wasn't friends with. I was one of those who didn't believe this, at first. I knew things get dirty in the world of whores, but I'd whored with the people in question, and didn't think it could be true. In late-June, however, the hacker's account was deleted, and people told me that his MySpace moderator privileges were revoked.
I, personally, don't care.
When I'd started, whores were mainly music biz insiders or people who dreamed of being promoters in real life.
1. Posting someone else's whore code will never, ever get you thousands of friends. Or any friends. Not even one.
2. In fact, thanks to the feature that allows people to delete you right from your bulletin, it will almost certainly result in your losing them.
3. Pushing a button will never get you adds. You were fooled. Sorry.
6. That person you see with 100,000 friends isn't famous. Chances are he or she just sit at home day and night posting bulletins on MySpace. Famous people get out of the house sometimes.
7. The 'most famous' people on MySpace tend to be the people with the best autorequest programs. I know: I've gotten friend requests from all of them.
8. If you whore long enough it begins to seem like real-life, and MySpace World and the real world become intermingled. You find yourself planning vacations around visiting other whores, and little happens in your life that doesn't involve MySpace.com.
9. Some people have actually dropped out of school for MySpace. Skip school sometime and watch who's posting bulletins all day long... you'll see. Don't be one of them. A million friends isn't worth one-eighth what a high school diploma is.
12. In real-life you probably aren't going to have a fan club. You won't walk into the cafeteria at school, or into the boardroom at work, and have dozens of people excited to see you, clamoring to see what you have to say next. But in MySpace World, you do. Does having fans become addictive? You bet your ass it does...
MORE TO COME?
In my year of whoring I saw dozens and dozens of people, some as young as fourteen, trying to emulate Tila, Forbidden, and Jeffree Star. The truth is, if this is what passes for 'famous' on MySpace, I'll pass. I've heard the music, and I've read the lyrics: the rappers I was posting bulletins for have ten times the talent, and they don't put up slutty pictures for their legions of underage fans. TO EVERYONE WHO ADDED ME, OR POSTED A BULLETIN FOR ME, DURING MY YEAR AS A WHORE: THANK YOU. SORRY IT COUDLN'T LAST... maybe if I'd worn more makeup? Lawl'z...
Gregory Justin Frederick
aka Justin The Only Medicine
Over 100,000 Friends on MySpace
Deleted 2005
Died June 6, 2006
Jason LaChance - http://myspace.com/jlachance
17,000+ Friends on MySpace
Rochester, NY
Died October 20, 2006
4 comments:
Oooh, I don't want to MySpace whore. =/ Everyone says I should....but I know better; its not worth it. ^_^; Thanks for the story!!
<3Kristen
yeah i do remember most of those people
in fact i am listed on there.
i am the one who was called and formerly know as Etch-A-Sketch.
myspace whoring was like a drug back then it just took over peoples worlds and lifes. all the whore "clicks"
and now that i look back i think it was a waste of time cause i dont even talk to any of those people anymore cause i quit whoring.. they just stopped talking to me. what they were friends!!
but it was pretty fun while it lasted.
but reading this brought back some old memories
thanks for posting this even though it was a long time ago.
2016 pinecone still here and kicking. Just found this and brought back so many memories.
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