A post-mortem of quotev is a tall order, but I think it would be something nice to get off our chest as a sort of final goodbye and retrospective of the site, so I’m here and very glad to do it (to the best of our ability, and within the confines of our own experience!!)
sorry if this gets a bit long D: I’ll put it under a read more (hopefully) to spare everyone.
okay to start off please put up with me as I try to explain some terms that might be confusing, but this was our home site for more than four years so we are really used to using terms that make sense onsite and not off- any questions are welcomed! (I’m also so sorry about the constant switch between I/my and we/us. I mean just me, but ah.!! plurality)
When you made a quotev account, you’d see the normal stories and quizzes the site still has today. this is what most people know the website by, but if you looked long enough you could also find your activity feed and messages, etc. quotev had heavy social aspects along with pretty extensive customization of the profile you’d use to interact with all of this content.
Quotev had a main set of three privacy settings. Only you, following, and public. These were customized on a base by base case, so you could turn your messages off (only you mode) and still have your about public, or you could turn your activities off and have your messages on. etc etc. I should note that just by following someone, it didn’t automatically mean you could see what they had private- they had to follow you back. It was a one way street, in which the person being followed could see the ‘following only’ things of the person following them; and that’s it. You could simply block or soft block (blocking, and unblocking) a user to clear them from your follower list if you didn’t want to follow back and allow them to see your private things! :D you often called your followers who also followed you your mutuals, which is pretty basic for most social media i think.
This led to a big privacy culture of sorts on quotev and people took it pretty seriously, at least in our circle. There was no real way to prevent someone from following you but people used terms such as otf (okay to follow) / atf (ask to follow) / dnf (do not follow) to indicate such. sometimes these also extended into things such as “ask to follow through mutual”, etc.
there was also a big byf (before you follow) / curate your space culture going on there, but that crosses into a lot of the discourse that happened on the site (which was a lot. quotev for all its love and nostalgia and how much it was home to me was a bit of a mess, such as any social media really) and that is like, a can of worms that would take days to sort out. it’s also not a thing isolated to quotev itself, just was very common there.
I’ve mentioned the activities and activity feed a bit and that is the biggest thing that i’ve seen people upset about losing, so i think i should elaborate more on that!! ^^;
There were various different ways of communicating on quotev. From the activity feed, to messages, to journals- even groups, which we weren’t ever a user of. you could use quotev for a single feature and have a completely different experience to different user. I’d argue the activity feature was the most popular, though.
The acitvity feed was essentially a page that collected all of the activity the people you followed. Notably, you could set it as your home page as well- making it to where you never even need to look at the stories and quizzes of the website to be able to use the social aspects.
There were a few different things you could see on this tab, like when a story / quiz / journal had been published, but the biggest part was the activities. An activity on quotev is essentially a short form post, though they could be longer. they were typically less than a paragraph but there were a handful of times you’d find yourself reading entire essays on your feed.
most people used these very akin to tweets, though I hate to bring up other social media because they were pretty unique. little side tangent of speculation, but is why i think you’ve seen such a large diversity in places that people have scattered- most places have one or two of these features, but not all of them.
The feed was a way to share about your day and read about your mutuals thoughts in a very easy to digest manner. Everyone’s feed was usually different- though friend groups were close circles, not everyone followed each other, and so it was almost like a large conversation between a large number of people who didn’t all know each other at all hours of the day.
Activities had a few interaction options, you could like and comment on them. pretty self explanatory! these things were all public, though the post themselves weren’t. essentially, commenting on or liking a activity post was visible to all people who followed the person who made the post. this led to a lot of fun interacts you could have with mutual-in-laws that a lot of other social medias don’t really provide when you have a private account.
it was pretty common to see activities with 50+ comments in long conversations between multiple people who didn’t necessarily know each other but had a mutual friend. i have a lot of fond memories of stuff like that. those weren’t the only way of interacting with activities though, at least not in a quotev culture sense- a lot of the time if you were a private account and wanted to remain very private, you could “feed respond”, which is essentially a comment but posted on your feed to everyone to see. these conversations could go on for hours, and it was always pretty funny to just see one half of them, which was common. it was really similar to like, overhearing someone on the phone.
I think for a long time, until very recently, quotev was one of the biggest pieces of “old web” social media still around. Down to the chatbox and online user feature (which was even separate from the messaging system!!), it was a pretty complex website and honestly pretty diverse in its userbase.
The way we experienced was very closed knit- we had a profile for our very close friends, and that’s what we liked. it was private but still a social space. It was a hub to talk and check in our friends and share facts about or day or what we were up to. This a big reason of why we loved it but it’s also not the only way people used it. A lot of people loved to use those social features in opposite- to be extremely public and gain thousands of followers. I personally was never super close with this community of people but there were a lot of them, and usually they did own secondary accounts to have their own closed circle of friends.
quotev housed a very lively roleplay community too, the most similar i’ve seen is twitters roleplay scene but even then the quotev journal system allowed for custom coding and detailed layouts (word for very detailed journals or abouts). It could be entirely self contained to the site itself, without needing a google doc or something for your character details etc.
that kind of leads me into explaining another big part of quotev that i loved- the layouts and journal feature.
Journals were like activities in a way, but they allowed for a lot more markdown and a really botched version of html/css that people still found a way to get creative with. they also tended to be used for longer pieces of writing, such as roleplay related work or short stories that people didn’t want to publish to the public and instead share with friends. Honestly if it was something you wanted to create and keep on your quotev account, but not get lost in the mess of your feed, you put it in your journals. I had countless of silly things there.
Journals were also the catalyst to my personal favorite silly community work, layouts.
layouts were essentially miniature code pieces, specified to a certain purpose while still being decorated and pretty. This is entirely my own speculation but I would assume these originated with roleplay forms and character profiles, but they quickly grew to be for just about anything. You could often find them in abouts, or journals linked in someone’s account tagline- there were even entire journals dedicated to hosting links to other journals in a pretty layout. Byfs, about pages, comfort characters- there were so many options. It was an incredibly cool community effort to create and share layouts, with entire accounts dedicated to posting them for the userbase to use.
I’m running out of tangent steam here but some other misc things I can really note about quotev are the way accounts were used, and edits. I’ll start with accounts.
Having more than three accounts on quotev was honestly pretty normally. People liked to hoard urls, but there were also many practical reasons for this- you’d have accounts dedicated to loveposting, liveblogging, vent accounts- places to organize and contain your thoughts about something, while giving your mutuals an option to opt out of seeing it by following you or not. quotev also had a HUGE system userbase who often used accounts for different alters to have separate spaces that were within the same friend group. this reason is why we personally chose to migrate to cohost, the pages feature emulates this really well and we can have our own page to feel comfortable in and theme how we want, with the purpose we want.
lastly I just wanted to mention edits. honestly they’re not even anything really big, but they were a piece of quotev I loved so much and I want to share with others because I think the concept is really cute. I’m not sure where it comes from or where it even started, but a lot of people did them. Typically they were a gif or image of two (or more) characters or animals, who you’d caption and overlay with your usernames (or just names). They were like this strange online version of an selfie and I value them SO much. they could be as complex or simple as you’d like, and people took them to absolute graphic design levels of cute. I’m hopeful that maybe with quotev users scattering so many places it’ll catch on as a thing with other social media platforms.
sorry for this incredibly long winded rant about quotev, it kind of turned more into an explanation of what the site was about more than a post mortem or summary of what it was like to be on.. i’m honestly not sure if rebugging this is the best way to get this out there, still incredibly new to cohost and the culture here but I hope it answered any questions you had or provided any insight into the little mess that was quotev . com. ^__^ I’m free to any further questions or inquiries!! 🌸🐇