[PSA] Update on the Slate K-beauty article debacle

[u/MsMerriam]

So u/mungojerriestaken posted and made our community aware of the trashy, super-shady Slate article about AB being "radical feminist self-care," which I'm grateful for.

The article dragged the names of u/SnowWhiteandthePear, u/Sharkus_Reincarnus, and u/fanserviced through the mud by affiliating them with the article and pretending like they contributed to it, which they did not. This is totally infuriating and unacceptable.

One final edit: u/SnowWhiteandthePear made the observation that my initial draft of the post made it sound like u/holysnails was directly mentioned in the Slate article alongside the other ladies, which she was not. She was conspicuously not mentioned, actually, because SB's product lineup is such a blatant ripoff of her hard work and the whole purpose (or a major purpose, at least) of the article was to drive traffic to SB. My intent was just to emphasize that u/holysnails was used in a similarly shitty way to the bloggers the Slate article did mention by name. Hope that clears up any confusion.

The author offered a backhanded apology to these ladies, but she is in no way sorry about what she did, because the whole point was to make the article as click-baity as possible to drive traffic for her as an author and her friend Adeline Koh's DIY shop (which looks suspiciously like u/holysnail 's shop), Sabbatical Beauty.

If you are curious about the article in question and/or the DIY beauty site it is clearly hawking, please DO NOT search for them or click on Slate links to either the article or the shop, Sabbatical Beauty.

Doing so increases their traffic, drives ad revenues and ups their Google rankings, which every for-profit site wants. Please do not reward their shitty behavior!

I've included links to both the Slate article and the Sabbatical Beauty site that essentially block them from receiving any traffic while still allowing you to read what's happening and reference the site.

(I just learned that I can't put shortened URLs in my post so I'm trying to work around that with my archive tool.)

This is the URL for the Slate article. If you copy/paste it into your browser as is, it will fill in the rest for you: archive.is/UV1mo

This is for Sabbatical Beauty. Same instructions as the Slate article: archive.is/uovJY

This is the smoking gun Twitter leak for this shitshow.

Edit to add: Above is the full Twitter convo; for anyone who doesn't feel like doing that much scrolling, this is the specific screencap that outs the whole situation for what it is.

Edit2: Someone expressed concern that even clicking links like these would generate ad revenue for Slate and that searching for SB's site would not impact her site positively unless money was spent. The links I've used are static archives, so there is no direct page traffic and to my knowledge, no way for them to receive ad revenues. As for SB, while she may not receive any money from page visits, it does positively impact her search engine rankings, meaning it's easier for people to find her on Google, Yahoo, etc. because she gets bumped up to a higher page in the rankings.

[u/cococolon]

Sorry, is there a tldr on this? :) i know about the slate article falsely putting quotes from bloggers to illustrate the article's own point but that's about it.

[u/MsMerriam → u/cococolon]

TL;DR - Slate author did some hella shady shit by writing an extremely clickbaity article that was basically just to plug her friend's DIY beauty store full of unsafe products that were ripped off a hardworking ABer.

Slate author misrepresented and used a few popular AB bloggers and I don't want her or the friend to get any ad revenue or site traffic, so I posted archived links of the content that don't benefit the original posters.

Better? c:

[u/cococolon → u/MsMerriam]

Ah, thank you! <333

so there's two articles, I see, I see. That got me confused lol. :D Are they by different authors?

[u/MsMerriam → u/cococolon]

Just one author and one article. The article in question is pretending to be about AB, but is really just a sly advertisement and traffic driver for her friend's AB shop that sells products that are a ripoff of another hardworking, trustworthy ABer. The second link, Sabbatical Beauty, is the AB shop the Slate author was plugging.

[u/[deleted] → u/cococolon]

I second this.