Username has changed from @drannex to @macleod

There is a secret history on how and why that meme blew up, I was part of it.

Put it simply: It was a social experiment.

When I have time I'll write a proper article on that time, but to quickly gloss over the internals: There was a social cartel going on for tumblr and related social media from 2010-2016, namely all of the largest bloggers were part of a constrained set of online groups. We were buying and selling ad space on each others blogs, promoting each others content, reblog4reblog / sharer4share / like4like. We planned and took part in boosting hundreds of thousands of posts, memes, various things that we found interesting, paid for, and anything else. We would coordinate massive social attacks, where we would 'boost' posts to astronomical realms, where we would find content to share to millions of users, plan comments and replies, spark drama and play out entire four part story archs among some of the biggest bloggers on the internet.

The Dress was one of the first we really focused on, not for monetary gain, but for social influence. We decided to test our collective influence and network and just took a seemingly, small-at-the-time, divisive post (namely because when we found it we found it hilarious how much we disagreed on it), and just decided to start posting dozens of related memes, coordinated scheduling of posting it dozens of times a day throughout our many blogs both on tumblr and off, and more.

We were part of a groups called 'Wallflowers" and "Ryders" and a few smaller sets, each had selective group membership based on social influence. So Wallflowers had subgroups, which had 'intro' social capital requirements such as 10k active followers (and referral from existing members, signed off from founding members), but the top of the leagues had 100k+ in more elite groups, typically all groups with graduating structures meaning 10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, 250k active follower measures. It was a mark of passage to move up in the ranks in these groups. Some of us, myself included, had millions of followers without spending a single cent on marketing. This was before "influencing" was defined, before this was 'an accepted practice' as the web and social media at the time were seemingly 'organic'. so most of us kept (and most of these groups required) complete secrecy on any of these things happening.

We would additionally do things called "Queue 4 Queue" where we had specialized programs built to be able to post 250-500 times a day on our blogs, to farm engagement, and we would say "I will auto-queue a hundred of your posts, if you post one promotion for my blog ("Hey everyone! Check out my friends blog, shes great, and posts art and hipster things!") + 50 queue from your blog.

The Dress was one of many things we boosted to insane levels, I dropped out of that scene around 2014, as you can imagine the drama involved internally is crazy, especially since nearly all of us were either teenagers, or young adults, and made most of our livelihoods off this.

In fact, my first startup, Activity+ was built on the needs of that community at first, to apply algorithms, time-tracking, and other social analytics for that scene. We were one of the first social analytic companies in existence with real-time performance metrics (such as "We notice at 5pm that if you post a photo with a blue filter, your engagement rates increase by 32%" type of things). We ended up being acquired by another team that was developing tools in these groups.

The Dress was one of the first broad engineered post systems, we just picked it up, and decided to force load it into the social stratosphere, but we weren't really intending it to become as big as it did.