First
there was Stuff White
People Like (water bottles! New Balance tennis shoes, book deals!). Then came
Stuff Educated Black People Like, Stuff Christians Like, and
a plethora of copy-cat incarnations. How to follow these class
acts, yet bring the whole of humanity together? Enter Stuff
Nobody Likes. Scanner
agreed: who has love for Anal leakage, ex-girlfriends
with book deals, windowless rooms, other people's farts, the G train,
or herpes?
We snuck behind the scenes
and interviewed on of the founder of Stuff
Nobody Likes, who will go by the code name “Afroblanco”...
So, Afroblanco, who are the evil
geniuses behind Stuff Nobody Likes, and how did you come up with the idea?
I have this group of friends that loves to communicate through long, weird
gmail threads. [We were discussing] StuffWhitePeopleLike.com, and started joking
about possible parody sites. Galenblade suggested
"stuffpeoplewholikestuffpeoplelikelike.com," but I thought meta was
the wrong way to go with this, that we should instead go contrarian and make a
site called "stuff nobody likes." At this point, it was really
just a joke. But then Navelgazer responded with, "YES! WE
TOTALLY NEED TO DO THIS!" Yuri acted quickly (curses!) and bought the
domain. And then Alia set up Wordpress and created our distinctive header
graphic...and within 24 hours of inception, we had a blog up and running.
A few days later, we got linked to from Metafilter, which drove a ton of
traffic to the site. And then the people at NPR got wind of this and interviewed
us. We're still a bit amazed that people are so fond of our weird little
joke, but I'd be lying if I said we weren't having fun with it.
What are brainstorming sessions like?
(Or do y'all just post as you see fit?)
We pretty much just come up with ideas on our own. It's easy to do,
because there's a lot of stuff that nobody likes.
Have there been any ideas that were
revoked, because maybe one person liked the subject matter?
Yeah, that's happened a few times. I wrote a post about Tootsie Rolls that
got nixed, because apparently some people like to eat the disturbingly turdlike
candy. And we try to avoid stuff that's politically controversial, because
we just don't want to go there.
Have people submitted any good ideas?
Or, do you get angry "I like Necco wafer" emails?
Hah! We get both. A few people have sent in suggestions, and we've
had a couple of guest columnists. We don't get many angry emails, but we do
get lots of angry comments. I wrote an entry about Douchebags With Bluetooth
Earpieces that got some angry responses. In the end, though, I think
it was pretty obvious that nobody likes them.
Where do you go from here?
We're gonna ride this badboy out until heavens come crashing down and the
angels sing Hallelujah from the heads of a thousand pins. Or until we get
bored with it. Whatever.
