Other DashCon Fiasco

[Magikarp]

I'm not sure of any of you heard but recently there has been a con called Dashcon and boy did it flunk. A con that was supposed to be for Tumblr fans, the slogan is actually 'For Tumblr Users, By Tumblr Users.' And than a 'We are not in any way affiliated with or endorsed by Tumblr.' Red flag much? Anyways the entire con was a huge disaster. They could not pay Welcome to Nightvale, forcing them to walk out last minute because of money problems that the con started and disappointing fans who waited hours for WTNV. Not only that but the con pinned this whole thing on WTNV too. Here's a link to an article explaining a bit more The whole thing was basically a scam as not only that but Steam Powered Giraffe and a few other panels were canceled because the con refused to pay them but the real kicker is the infamous ball pit deal. The cons other basic slogan was that there was going to be an huge ballpit and that was basically half of their selling point. However the ball pit turned out to be a deflated kiddie pool.

Also the 17k is a doozy as well where basically the owners of the con scammed people out of 17k saying the hotel wouldn't let them continue the convention because of money problems which is a lie because and I quote


"First there were accusations of scamming, as the convention owners crowd-sourced $17,000 to secure the venue (which should’ve been done MONTHS in advance). All attempts to contact the hotel have resulted in the hotel saying there was no need to raise that money and that they never received any of it."


Here'a a link that has someone telling their experience with the whole ordeal as well Which is basically a horror story telling of biased planning, unprofessional mods, money problems, and godawful planning. I actually contacted the author about the whole money thing and here's what I got.

So ya, reason why I wanted to post this here was because I wanted to discuss this with you guys and join the bandwagon because right now it's flooding tumblr and twitter. So what do you guys think? Any comments or insight?

 

[Bagel]

Hooo boy, has Dashcon really gotten a lot of attention online!


My favorite part is when the Con Staff told the people who bought reserved seats for the cancelled WTNV panel they could have an extra hour in the ball pit to compensate.

 

[Magikarp]

tell me about it, and that one hour in the ball pit thing has basically turned into a meme xD

 

[Gabe]

It was bad planned, simply. An event of that magnitude should at least have more than "Tumblr fans" around it. Not keeping tracks of where the money went, the Night Vale Fiasco, the ball pit, oh god the ball pit, everything, was all bad planned. And i'm not sorry to tell them it's their fault.


And some people still talk about "How Tumblr should have its own country". We gave them a weekend alone and look what happened.

 

[Magikarp]

Agreed, the planning and everything was just a train wreck, to add to that was that they had over 50 committees that represented each 'fandom' and each had to have their own paypal and I think that's why the money situation was just terrible because again it was just all over the place and to add to that paypal has transaction taxes which racks up quickly, they should have had just one main paypal to make life easier, it was definitely their fault, they could have made this ordeal a lot easier for them but they chose to be unprofessional and set up things at the last minutes, over skype no less.


If tumblr had it's own country it would crash and burn within 3 days, I would be willing to bet money on that, and being a tumblr user myself that's saying something

 

[Gabe]

I didn't know that. 50-ish fandoms, each with its own money handling process? When in the world someone thought this was a good idea? The best thing is to make a single account and give each...fandom(I hate this word) funding. It would handle the money well, reduce transaction taxes and rank down paperwork.


Also, it was quite unprofessional of the dude to take up some of the money for personal reasons. It was really bad administration.

 

[Magikarp]

Exactly, that would have been a lot easier. The thing they were doing with each committee is that if the committee didn't come up with a certain quota of funds they would have been dissolved...which happened often. The problem there is that 'fandoms' can either be really popular or only have a few followers, so it's unfair that they would do that as the Doctor Who committee would probably have raked in thousands but a small fandom like (can't think of an example) wouldn't get as much as their not as popular and are smaller.


Ya, but than again half the blame also goes to the administers for making the person link up their paypal to their committee paypal

 

[Arisa Takera]

I've been watching the whole dashcon thing on tumblr since I first started seeing the ballpit deal... It's all pretty hilarious. Except for the part where a bunch of people got scammed to the tune of 17k

 

[The Ruckus]

The worst part of it all is that they're already in the process of planning a second one. I really want to believe they'll learn from their mistakes this time around, but considering that they're already looking at some substantially larger venues and a big portion of the Tumblr crowd don't seem too geared towards introspection, I probably shouldn't get my hopes up.