Fandoms, Fraud, and Failure: How the World’s Worst Social Media Convention Forever Changed the Internet

Words by Tom Vincent (he/him)  

The year is 2014 and the internet is like a foreign country. 

One Direction fanfiction is booming on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own, Twitter and  Tumblr are gold mines for Sherlock cosplays, and on YouTube, the ice bucket challenge is inescapable. Everywhere you look, social media is brimming with fandom culture and quirkiness. Weirdness is encouraged and cringe culture as we know it does not exist. 

Fast forward nine years and the internet is a bitter, jaded place. We are meant to be our real, day-to-day selves (BeReal, anyone?), we conform to stricter standards of presentability, and strange interests are ostracised as “cringe”. Go watch an old Vine compilation and then open up TikTok—you’ll see a difference. When did we start sanitising our behaviour on social media? 

In a word: DashCon. 

Originally titled ‘Tumbl-Con’ but renamed for copyright reasons, DashCon was the first—and last—Tumblr convention. Made “for Tumblr fans, by Tumblr fans”, the 2014 convention was intended to be a wholesome celebration of the website, welcoming those with niche interests and bringing the community together. Instead, it was destined to go down in history as one of the worst internet disasters of all time, with far-reaching consequences for what it meant to be a social media user.

DashCon was devised in 2013 by a handful of young and inexperienced internet devotees, none of whom were actually affiliated with the Tumblr brand. Still, the organisers claimed to be partnered with the charity ‘Random Acts’ (later revealed to be a lie), which at the time gave them some degree of credibility. 

Over the next year, they raised money for the event through an Indiegogo campaign, a raffle, and by selling general admission tickets. Robotic pantomime band Steam Powered Giraffe and the cast from horror podcast Welcome to Night Vale were scheduled to perform, both of which were pretty high-profile at the time. In true 2013 quirkiness, the organisers even promised a massive ball pit for the guests, and people were unironically hyped.

The venue was booked. The date was set. What could possibly go wrong?

Day One.

The Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Centre in Chicago, USA opened its  doors on Friday, 11 June 2014 to flocks of excited fans. DashCon’s official schedule promised panels such as ‘Hay There Brony!’, ‘Westeros Is Where It’s At’ and ‘British Men With…  Cheekbones’, but the majority of these would end up not taking place. 

Things were off to a bad start when the guests couldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi. Minors were allegedly getting into 18+ NSFW panels. The ‘gaming room’ had a single gaming console and TV intended for 3000 guests. It surfaced that Steam Powered Giraffe weren’t even planning on attending. 

The legendary ball pit turned out to be a literal kiddie pool filled with plastic balls that could fit maybe four people at once. Photos circulated across Twitter of the half-deflated pool  sagging and wobbling like a pathetic, washed-up jellyfish.

“I went to a Taco Bell. I got some chips and nacho cheese. I came back and I found the ball pit,” said 17-year-old DashCon employee Lochlan O’Neil. “You know how sometimes you feel like you’re in a dream? It was this, but it was horrifying. A nightmare. And I just kind of sat in it and ate my cheese.”

Over the course of the weekend, the ball pit would reach internet fame with at least one person pissing in it. There were also rumours that someone gave birth in the ball pit (obviously untrue but fun), and every June since, Tumblr users send birthday greetings to the ‘ball pit baby’. 

Behind the scenes, things were worse. 

Of the three main organisers of DashCon—Roxanne Schwieterman, Megg Eli, and Cain  Hopkins—the latter two would put in minimal effort over the weekend, forcing Schwieterman to basically run the convention singlehandedly. Eli and Hopkins were grown adults in their 30s. Schwieterman was 19 years old. 

While Schwieterman desperately worked damage control, Eli and Hopkins would get drunk  in their hotel room and sleep in until noon every day of the convention. According to multiple accounts, they ignored Schwieterman’s calls and emails, and repeatedly made catty remarks about her (again, a literal teenager). Security didn’t even recognise the pair because of how rarely they were actually there. 

This was all petty drama compared to the real organisational dilemma. The DashCon organisers had anticipated a minimum of 3000 guests to turn up. On Day One, they got… 350. 

Oops. 

The convention’s team claimed to have negotiated a verbal agreement with the hotel,  planning to pay them gradually throughout the three-day convention via ticket sales instead of giving an upfront payment. Given the piss-poor attendance, the Renaissance clearly realised that they weren’t going to get their money. Late in the day, a staff member of the hotel told the DashCon team that they needed to cough up US$17,000 or the Renaissance would shut the event down. Immediately. 

In case you were wondering, $17k is enough to get yourself a BSc at VUW and still have enough money left to buy 968 cans of V from the Kelburn vending machines (which you’d probably need to get yourself through the BSc). 

DashCon was fucked. At 9 p.m, the organisers gathered all the guests in a room and broke the news: they needed to crowdfund $17k. They had one hour. 

Horror spread across the internet like wildfire. Allegations of extortion and scamming were hurled at the organisers. A suspicious-looking donation bag was passed around the room,  along with bizarre footage of the DashCon team giving the Hunger Games salute to the crowd. 

Lochlan O’Neil, who had finished her cheese by now, was forced to hold the donation bag  because she was “crying the most”. Ah, to be 17 again. 

Some iconic quotes from the crowd (documented by @chiathingy) include “I hate the staff,  hoW COULD THEY DO THIS TO US” and “I’m not crying, I was JUST IN THE POOL.” My  personal favourite is “tweet mark ruffalo.” 

Mark Ruffalo unfortunately did not intervene, but the rest of the internet did, banding together via PayPal donations and raising the $17k. Miraculously, the con (in every sense of  the word) was allowed to continue. 

Day Two.

DashCon organisers ditched all the panellists whose hotel rooms they’d promised to pay for (no money, remember?), and it was revealed that the official DashCon artwork was stolen copyrighted material. Many vendors left because their potential customers had just given away all their disposable income, and stressed teenage volunteers who were promised free meals went hungry. Pacific Rim was played illegally to a tiny audience. Free hotel mints were given as prizes (again, no money!). 

The cherry on the cake of incompetence was the main event pulling out. Understandably, Welcome to Night Vale refused to perform without being paid in advance. When DashCon said no, they walked. 

While fans sat in the room waiting for WTNV to perform, the DashCon team edited their website to a ‘no refunds’ policy, before telling the guests the great news one hour after the performance was meant to start.

Those who paid extra to see WTNV were “reimbursed” with raffle tickets and allowed to have “an extra hour in the ball pit”.

Playing in the ball pit was not timed, so “an extra hour” was meaningless and utterly nonsensical. As a result, “an extra hour in the ball pit” quickly became a meme, and was delightfully mocked by everyone who wasn’t at the convention.

After the WTNV flop, panellists dropped out like they were evacuating a nuclear accident. ND Stevenson, non-binary icon and creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, had to sleep on a couch offered to him by the WTNV cast because no one would let him into his actual hotel room. 

Schwieterman tweeted a picture of herself crying on the official DashCon Twitter, and thus  ended Day Two. 

On Sunday, 13 June, the DashCon team held an official apology panel, promising there would be another convention in 2015 which would be “even better”. 

Looking back on DashCon 2014, multiple commentators have noticed that the convention’s finances don’t add up, to say nothing of Hopkins’ extensive history of lying and scamming (fun fact, he claimed his birth name was Loki). 

Was the whole convention a scam? No. Was there at least some dubious financial activity? Well… maybe. 

Regardless of the ratio of wilful incompetence to questionable fiscal decisions, the outcome  was the same. Social media had been forever tainted.

In the wake of the con, Tumblr was hit the hardest. For many users, DashCon deflated their image of the website. The label “hellsite” was slapped all over the platform, including by Tumblr staff, and the relevance of the site plummeted. It didn’t feel like an idyllic haven for fan culture and misfits anymore. It felt like a pissy ball pit. 

Similar sentiments spread across Twitter and Reddit: disillusionment with fan-oriented social media and embarrassment at being part of such a community. Bit by bit, the post-DashCon internet became increasingly more cynical, and quirky online interests started to be seen as cringe. Although DashCon wasn’t the only factor that shifted our social media habits in the mid-to-late 2010s, it was one of the most important. The age of ‘lol so random xD’ was dead, and the internet transformed into just another extension of our mundane everyday lives. 

So, next time that you’re navigating social media in 2023, trying to avoid the middle school  nepo babies on TikTok or the neo-Nazis sucking off Musk on Twitter, remember that it could  be worse. You could have been given an extra hour in the ball pit.