The New Republic
When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted a picture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out on her bed: “ pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate .” One fan replied, “CONGRATULATIONS GIRL!
当《披萨》在 Tumblr 上的关注者达到 10 万时，她发布了一张披萨盒、外卖鸡翅和铺在床上的橙子苏打水的照片：“披萨和鸡翅 2 庆祝。”一位粉丝回复道：“恭喜女孩！
YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” An anonymous user was unimpressed: “you only have 100k because of ur url.” But Pizza shot that down: “uh no i had 93k before i got this url so excuse u.”
你值得拥有！”另一个：“上帝之母10万？！？！”一位匿名用户对此不以为意：“因为你的网址，你只有 10 万。”但 Pizza 否认了这一点：“呃，不，在我得到这个网址之前，我已经有 93k 了，所以请原谅。”
It had taken Pizza more than two years to reach this milestone.
披萨花了两年多的时间才达到这一里程碑。
In late 2010 she had signed up for Tumblr, the then-three-year-old social network, and secured the URL IWantMyFairyTaleEnding.tumblr.com.
2010 年底，她注册了当时成立三年的社交网络 Tumblr，并获得了 URL IWantMyFairyTaleEnding.tumblr.com。
At first, she mostly posted photos of party outfits—hipster photos, she thought.
起初，她发布的大多是派对服装的照片——她认为是时髦的照片。
They were the kind of images you might find under the “summery” Tumblr tag : poolside drinks, sunsets, sundresses, palm trees, tiny succulents; a shopping list of the things she wanted to buy, if only she had the money.
这些图片是你可能会在 Tumblr 标签下找到的“夏日”图片：池畔饮料、日落、背心裙、棕榈树、小型多肉植物；如果她有钱的话，她想买的东西的购物清单。
Pizza also wrote some funny one-liners, but otherwise she reblogged jokes, switching back and forth between fashion and comedy.
披萨还写了一些有趣的俏皮话，但除此之外，她还转发了一些笑话，在时尚和喜剧之间来回切换。
She tried out new names, new personas, changing her URL a few times; after a couple of years, she went all-joke.
她尝试了新的名字、新的角色，并多次更改了她的网址；几年后，她就变成了笑话。
By the end of 2012, she had amassed 90,000 followers, a respectable number for a Tumblr, a sign she’d earned a certain amount of fame in her circle—the teens who reblogged her jokes.
到 2012 年底，她已经积累了 90,000 名粉丝，这对于 Tumblr 来说是一个相当可观的数字，这表明她在她的圈子里赢得了一定的声誉——那些转发她笑话的青少年。
She then changed her domain to pizza.tumblr.com, her followers started to call her Pizza, and her numbers began to climb.
然后，她将域名更改为 Pizza.tumblr.com，她的粉丝开始称她为 Pizza，她的人数开始攀升。
That same year, she turned 15.
同年，她15岁了。
Pizza’s strategy was brilliant: When a random Tumblr would write about “pizza”—either the food or herself—she’d reblog the post to her huge audience.
Pizza 的策略非常出色：当某个 Tumblr 随机写下“披萨”（无论是食物还是她自己）时，她会将这篇文章转发给她的广大受众。
Once, when a user wrote “ so is tumblr user pizza god or beyonce ,” she dug up the post and reblogged it with the comment “I’d like to confirm that i am both.” Users marveled at how quickly she responded, how you could “summon Pizza.” It made her seem all-knowing, but not superior.
有一次，当一名用户写道“tumblr 用户披萨神或碧昂丝也是如此”时，她挖出了该帖子并转发了该帖子，并评论道“我想确认我两者都是”。用户惊叹于她的反应如此之快，如何“召唤披萨”。这让她看起来无所不知，但并不高人一等。
After Ellen DeGeneres ordered 20 large pies at the 2014 Academy Awards, Pizza dashed off the line “did u guys see me at the Oscars.” The post received almost 500,000 notes and was reblogged by John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars , with the comment “ You looked great, pizza .
2014 年奥斯卡颁奖典礼上，艾伦·德杰尼勒斯 (Ellen DeGeneres) 点了 20 个大馅饼后，披萨冲出了电话：“你们在奥斯卡颁奖典礼上看到我了吗？”这篇帖子收到了近 500,000 条评论，并被《星辰里的错》一书的作者约翰·格林转发，并评论道“你看起来棒极了，披萨。”
Congrats on everything.
祝贺一切。
I love you.”
我爱你。
One of Pizza’s most successful posts was “ josh hutcherson’s parents are probably called josh hutcherdad and josh hutchermom .” It received over 419,000 notes.
披萨最成功的帖子之一是“乔什·哈切森的父母可能被称为乔什·哈切达德和乔什·哈切莫姆”。它收到了超过 419,000 张纸条。
The joke was copied like crazy by humor accounts on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
这个笑话被 Facebook、Pinterest 和 Twitter 上的幽默账户疯狂复制。
@RelatableQuotes’s version gathered 2,958 retweets and 4,425 favorites.
@RelatableQuotes 的版本收集了 2,958 条转发和 4,425 条收藏。
@SoDamnTrue tweeted it for 1,630 retweets and 2,879 favorites.
@SoDamnTrue 在推特上发布了这条推文，获得 1,630 次转发和 2,879 次点赞。
In June 2014, Pizza had more than 1 million followers and was the biggest star of the Tumblr teen comedy world.
2014 年 6 月，Pizza 拥有超过 100 万粉丝，成为 Tumblr 青少年喜剧界最大的明星。
Two months later, her blog was gone.
两个月后，她的博客消失了。
Type in pizza.tumblr.com today and you’ll get a simple, haunting message: “There’s nothing here.” The 1 million left behind began to buzz: Where was Pizza?
今天输入 Pizza.tumblr.com，你会收到一条简单而令人难以忘怀的消息：“这里什么都没有。”剩下的 100 万人开始议论纷纷：披萨在哪里？
Why did Pizza go?
披萨为什么走了？
Who killed Pizza?
谁杀了披萨？
Tumblr users began to piece together the mystery of her disappearance.
Tumblr 用户开始拼凑她失踪的谜团。
They wrote mournful posts: “ i miss tumblr user pizza *insert titanic ‘come back’ gif*.” A fake conspiracy blog joked she quit after leaving the illuminati because of a fight with Beyoncé over “ how to wittily answer anonymous hate mail .” A rumor spread her blog was terminated for being racist .
他们写下了悲伤的帖子：“我想念 tumblr 用户披萨*插入泰坦尼克号‘回来’gif*。”一个虚假的阴谋博客开玩笑说，她离开光明会后就退出了，因为她与碧昂斯就“如何机智地回复匿名仇恨邮件”发生了争执。有传言称她的博客因种族主义而被终止。
A Reddit user called her blog’s death “ one of the biggest scandals to have ever happened on Tumblr .” Last fall, OfficialUnitedStates, another humor blog with a large following, wrote, “ i miss pizza.tumblr.com …
一位 Reddit 用户称她的博客之死是“Tumblr 上发生过的最大丑闻之一”。去年秋天，另一个拥有大量追随者的幽默博客OfficialUnitedStates写道：“我想念pizza.tumblr.com……
sometimes late at night i wonder what tumblr would be like if she hadnt disappeared into the night one year ago today.”
有时深夜我会想，如果她没有在一年前的今天消失在夜色中，tumblr 会是什么样子。”
Each social media network creates a particular kind of teenage star: Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine.
每个社交媒体网络都会创造出一种特殊类型的青少年明星：那些早年炙手可热的人会被 YouTube、Instagram 上时尚且看似富有的帖子所吸引，最具魅力的演员、舞者和喜剧演员则在 Vine 上茁壮成长。
On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity.
在 Facebook 上，您分享的每个链接和发布的照片都是您身份的声明。
Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool.
根据我的报告，Tumblr 是被青少年视为最不酷的社交网络。
A telling post from 2014: “ I picked joining Tumblr and staying active on here because: 1.
2014 年的一篇有说服力的帖子：“我选择加入 Tumblr 并在这里保持活跃是因为：1.
I’m not attractive enough to be a Youtuber 2.
我的吸引力不足以成为 Youtuber 2。
Not popular enough for twitter 3.
Twitter 3 的受欢迎度不够。
Facebook is dumb.” You don’t tell people your Tumblr URL, you aren’t logging the banalities of your day—you aren’t even you .
脸书就是愚蠢的。”你不会告诉别人你的 Tumblr URL，你不会记录你一天中的平庸之事——你甚至不是你自己。
On Tumblr, you can revel in anonymity, say whatever you want without fear of it going on your permanent record.
在 Tumblr 上，您可以享受匿名的乐趣，畅所欲言，而不必担心它会被永久记录。
You can start as many Tumblrs as you like, one for each slice of your personality, whether that’s gymnastics fandom (how I got into Tumblr) or Barack Obama-Harry Styles slashfic (it exists) or akoisexual identity (when your feelings of sexual attraction fade once they’re reciprocated).
你可以根据自己的喜好创建任意多个 Tumblr，每个 Tumblr 都代表你的个性，无论是体操迷（我是如何进入 Tumblr）还是巴拉克·奥巴马 (Barack Obama) 和哈里·斯泰尔斯 (Barack Obama-Harry Styles) 的斜线小说（它存在），还是恋人身份（当你的性吸引力一旦得到回报后就会消失）。
A Tumblr staffer pointed me to a blog called Dolph Lundgren & His Action Nips , which is just shirtless photos of the actor with his nipples turned into blinking GIFs.
一位 Tumblr 工作人员向我推荐了一个名为 Dolph Lundgren & His Action Nips 的博客，其中只是演员赤裸上身、乳头的照片变成了闪烁的 GIF。
When Tumblr launched in 2007, the simple layout—text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video—was its primary appeal: less bloggy than Blogger, less puzzling than WordPress.
当 Tumblr 于 2007 年推出时，简单的布局——文本、照片、引用、链接、聊天、音频、视频——是它的主要吸引力：不像 Blogger 那样博客化，不像 WordPress 那样令人费解。
Tumblr’s templates were more customizable than Facebook, making it a good place to put your portfolio, perhaps some journal entries.
Tumblr 的模板比 Facebook 更具可定制性，这使其成为放置您的作品集（也许是一些日记条目）的好地方。
But the defining feature of Tumblr culture is reblogging: Any user can repost content from any other Tumblr and add their own comments.
但 Tumblr 文化的定义特征是转发：任何用户都可以转发任何其他 Tumblr 的内容并添加自己的评论。
All of these likes, reblogs, and comments pile up in a log of “notes” appended to the original post as it travels through the network’s feed.
当原始帖子在网络的提要中传播时，所有这些点赞、转发和评论都会堆积在附加到原始帖子的“注释”日志中。
Celebrating someone else’s brilliance is part of the content you offer, giving exposure to both the creator and the reblogger.
庆祝他人的才华是您提供的内容的一部分，为创作者和转发者提供曝光机会。
To grow a following on Tumblr beyond people you know, you have to post more than updates on your personal life—you need stuff that will resonate with strangers.
要想在 Tumblr 上增加你认识的人之外的追随者，你必须发布的不仅仅是你个人生活的更新——你需要能引起陌生人共鸣的东西。
Viral fame on Tumblr in the early 2010s was an uncertain path to fortune.
2010 年代初期，Tumblr 上的病毒式名声是一条不确定的财富之路。
The most common was the Tumblr-to-book phenomenon: The creator of Hipster Puppies closed a five-figure book deal in 2010.
最常见的是 Tumblr 转书现象：Hipster Puppies 的创始人在 2010 年达成了一笔五位数的图书交易。
While other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn generated billions upon billions of dollars, Tumblr gradually evolved into a fast-moving conversation focused on jokes, art, and sex.
虽然 Facebook、Twitter 和 LinkedIn 等其他社交网络创造了数十亿美元的收入，但 Tumblr 逐渐演变成一个专注于笑话、艺术和性的快速对话平台。
The culture of Tumblr began to be dominated by teens—weird teens.
Tumblr 文化开始由青少年——奇怪的青少年——主导。
In a joke that explains the dynamic , a user posted a screenshot showing he had 264 followers, writing:
在一个解释这一动态的笑话中，一名用户发布了一张屏幕截图，显示他有 264 名关注者，并写道：
a darkened auditorium with 264 silent people in the seats.
一个漆黑的礼堂，座位上有 264 名沉默的人。
on the stage, me, sitting on a stool, lit by a spotlight, the only light in the theatre.
舞台上，我坐在凳子上，聚光灯照亮了剧场里唯一的灯光。
i hold up a photo of my cat, 10 people applaud, two or three hold up photocopies of the same photo, the rest do nothing, watching, waiting.
我举起我的猫的照片，十个人鼓掌，两三个人举起同一张照片的复印件，其余的人什么也不做，看着，等待。
When I began reporting on the world of Tumblr teens, I first wanted to explain the absurdist comedy of Pizza and dozens of other Tumblrs like hers.
当我开始报道 Tumblr 青少年的世界时，我首先想解释 Pizza 和其他几十个像她一样的 Tumblr 的荒诞喜剧。
But I soon discovered a secret world hidden in plain sight, one in which teenagers, through wit and luck, had stumbled into a new kind of viral fame and fortune, by outsmarting internet ad networks and finding ways to earn thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars from their intentionally unambitious jokes.
但我很快就发现了一个隐藏在众目睽睽之下的秘密世界，在这个世界里，青少年凭借智慧和运气，偶然获得了一种新的病毒式名誉和财富，他们比互联网广告网络更聪明，并想方设法从他们故意开的不那么雄心勃勃的笑话中赚取数千甚至数十万美元。
Tumblr headquarters in New York is brightly lit and slightly too warm, outfitted with huge screens displaying viral teen content and yellow T-shirts commemorating the time Taylor Swift wore a Tumblr joke shirt .
位于纽约的 Tumblr 总部灯火通明，略显温暖，配备了巨大的屏幕，显示着病毒式的青少年内容，还有纪念泰勒·斯威夫特 (Taylor Swift) 穿着 Tumblr 笑话衬衫的黄色 T 恤。
I was there to meet Danielle Strle, Tumblr’s 34-year-old head of culture and trends, whose job it is to figure out what the teens are up to.
我在那里会见了 34 岁的 Tumblr 文化和趋势主管 Danielle Strle，她的工作就是弄清楚青少年在做什么。
At one point she opened her laptop to scan for some examples and got lost in the content.
有一次，她打开笔记本电脑扫描一些示例，结果迷失在内容中。
“These kids are so advanced—so, so advanced,” she said softly to her screen.
“这些孩子太先进了——太、太先进了，”她对着屏幕轻声说道。
Not just in their comedy, but in their business savvy.
不仅在于他们的喜剧，还在于他们的商业头脑。
“They are the most brilliant digital strategists,” she said.
“他们是最出色的数字战略家，”她说。
“These teens are better marketers than anyone in the game right now.”
“这些青少年比目前游戏中的任何人都更擅长营销。”
Tumblr teens have an advantage that makes them good at digital strategy: an advanced emotional intelligence.
Tumblr 青少年有一个擅长数字策略的优势：高级情商。
Strle put me in touch with Jason Wong, a college freshman who’s been on the site since he was 15.
Strle 让我联系上了 Jason Wong，他是一名大学新生，从 15 岁起就一直在这个网站上。
He became my Tumblr oracle, giving me in-depth analysis of the Tumblr economy and its emotional core.
他成了我的 Tumblr 神谕，让我深入分析了 Tumblr 经济及其情感核心。
Wong started asian.tumblr.com to deal with being bullied at his Florida high school.
Wong 创办 asian.tumblr.com 是为了应对佛罗里达州高中遭受的欺凌问题。
Wong explained that teens perform joy on Instagram but confess sadness on Tumblr.
Wong 解释说，青少年在 Instagram 上表现出快乐，但在 Tumblr 上承认悲伤。
The site, he said, is a “safe haven from their local friends.
他说，这个网站是“他们远离当地朋友的避风港。
…
……
On Tumblr they tell their most personal stories.
他们在 Tumblr 上讲述他们最私人的故事。
They share things that they normally wouldn’t share with their local friends because of the fear of judgment.
由于害怕受到评判，他们通常不会与当地朋友分享一些东西。
That has held true for every person that I’ve met.”
这对我遇到的每个人来说都是如此。”
In the dark ages—the 1980s, ’90s, or even the early 2000s—kids had to wait for nerd camp to be among their own kind.
在黑暗时代——20 世纪 80 年代、90 年代，甚至 2000 年代初——孩子们必须等待书呆子阵营才能成为自己的同类。
Wong told me if he’s up at 4 a.m.
黄告诉我他是否凌晨 4 点起床。
after a bad day, he can go online and talk to his Australian friends; Tumblr users know their audience is active in multiple time zones.
度过了糟糕的一天后，他可以上网和他的澳大利亚朋友聊天； Tumblr 用户知道他们的受众在多个时区都很活跃。
Powerful users send a joke ricocheting around the globe.
强大的用户发出的笑话在全球范围内引起轩然大波。
“Tumblr culture has developed over the past five years as the smart weird kid in school connected with all the other smart weird kids from all the other schools all over the world,” said Strle.
“Tumblr 文化在过去五年中得到了发展，学校里的聪明古怪的孩子与来自世界各地其他学校的所有其他聪明古怪的孩子联系在一起，”Strle 说。
This brand of Tumblr humor often focuses on what I think of as micro-humiliations, tiny moments of social awkwardness that can feel absolutely crushing for a teenager figuring out how to be a person in the world.
Tumblr 的这种幽默风格通常集中在我认为的微羞辱、社交尴尬的微小时刻，对于一个正在思考如何在这个世界上做人的青少年来说，这些时刻绝对会让人感到沮丧。
Anonymous kids with witty user names like Larsvontired or Baracknobama post incisive one-liners confessing their most vulnerable moments of social mortification.
拥有 Larsvontired 或 Baracknobama 等诙谐用户名的匿名孩子发布了尖锐的俏皮话，承认他们最脆弱的社交羞辱时刻。
Sometimes those one-liners spread across continents, tweaked by thousands of other teens who add their own jokes as they reblog the original.
有时，这些俏皮话会传播到各大洲，并被成千上万的其他青少年修改，他们在转发原始内容时添加了自己的笑话。
The very best tweaks spread further, reblogged again and again, reappearing periodically in the feed, disconnected from time.
最好的调整进一步传播，一次又一次地转发，定期重新出现在提要中，与时间脱节。
Some posts get more than a million notes—imagine a joke whispered in biology class getting a laugh from a city the size of San Francisco.
有些帖子获得了超过一百万条评论——想象一下，在生物课上低声讲的一个笑话，在旧金山这么大的城市里引起了笑声。
“Increasingly, the lingua franca is absurdist dada,” explained Strle, usually rendered in the uncapitalized and unpunctuated casualness of instant messages.
“越来越多的通用语言变成了荒诞的达达主义，”斯特尔解释道，他通常以不大写、不加标点的即时消息的随意方式呈现。
A decade of trend pieces has deemed millennials to be narcissists, but Tumblr humor for this generation is self-deprecating and anti-aspirational: “ how do fourteen year olds get pregnant , I can’t even get a high five from a guy,” “ how many eye contact until date ,” “ i just said hi to someone and they didn’t hear me i’m never trying that again.” There is more self-loathing than self-love (“ *looks in a mirror* you again ”) as well as pleas for clemency from social prison (“ you like attention?
十年来的潮流文章都认为千禧一代是自恋者，但这一代人的 Tumblr 幽默是自嘲和反抱负：“十四岁的孩子怎么会怀孕，我什至无法得到一个男人的高五”，“在约会之前有多少次目光接触”，“我只是向某人打了个招呼，他们没有听到我，我再也不会这样做了。”自我厌恶多于自爱（“*照镜子*你又来了”），以及请求社会监狱宽大处理（“你喜欢关注？
how dare you.
你怎么敢。
how dare anyone like being loved”).
怎么会有人喜欢被爱”）。
Being a social outcast can make you a better social observer of the gap between our real selves and our public image:
成为一个社会弃儿可以让你更好地观察我们的真实自我和公众形象之间的差距：
private chat : i don’t know anymore.
私聊：我不知道了。
im hoping that someday i’ll just know what to do.
我希望有一天我会知道该怎么做。
sorry for complaining and thanks for always listening to me
抱歉您的抱怨并感谢您一直倾听我的意见
When this post appeared in my feed, I sent it to several friends who use a group chat at work: “How do they know?” A friend in media with a Twitter following in the tens of thousands responded: “That teen observation is PENETRATING.” We spent several minutes analyzing the joke.
当这篇文章出现在我的动态中时，我将其发送给几个在工作中使用群聊的朋友：“他们怎么知道？”一位在 Twitter 上拥有数万粉丝的媒体朋友回应道：“青少年的观察力非常深刻。”我们花了几分钟分析这个笑话。
“People think other people are impressed by voicey cynicism in the public square,” he added.
“人们认为其他人会对公共广场上的愤世嫉俗印象深刻，”他补充道。
“But in private we’re all really nice and anxious”—the essential divide between Twitter users and Tumblr users.
“但私下里，我们都非常友善和焦虑”——这是 Twitter 用户和 Tumblr 用户之间的本质区别。
Heartbreak is a recurring theme on these Tumblrs, so is skewering the chipper but futile commands of self-help.
心碎是这些 Tumblr 上反复出现的主题，串烧那些爽快但徒劳的自助命令也是如此。
“ Fill your heart with bees.
“让蜜蜂充满你的心。
If someone breaks your heart, then they have to deal with the bees.” Or: “before blaming others, think: whats the 1 constant in all your failed relationships ?
如果有人伤了你的心，那么他们就必须对付蜜蜂。”或者：“在责怪别人之前，想一想：在你所有失败的关系中，第一个不变的是什么？
its that cursed egyptian amulet why do u even have that.” The best social commentary on American culture’s obsession with women’s pubic hair was written by some kid on Tumblr:
这是那个被诅咒的埃及护身符，你为什么有那个。”关于美国文化对女性阴毛的痴迷的最佳社会评论是由 Tumblr 上的某个孩子写的：
“Just so you know, the carpet matches the drapes,” Medusa said with a wink so sexual that it made me feel like I had to pee.
“你知道，地毯和窗帘很相配，”美杜莎眨了眨眼，性感得让我觉得我必须撒尿。
She leaned in really close to my sweating face and continued, “I am completely covered in little snakes down there.”
她靠得很近，靠近我出汗的脸，继续说道：“我下面完全被小蛇覆盖了。”
Teens are free to express their low self-esteem on Tumblr, but they have confidence in one thing: Everyone will steal their jokes.
青少年可以在 Tumblr 上自由地表达他们的自卑，但他们对一件事充满信心：每个人都会偷他们的笑话。
A study by Priceonomics found that Tumblr is the top source for BuzzFeed’s viral content .
Priceonomics 的一项研究发现，Tumblr 是 BuzzFeed 病毒式内容的首要来源。
The site’s biggest story in 2015—a photo of a dress that looked blue-and-black or white-and-gold—was found on Tumblr.
该网站 2015 年最大的新闻是在 Tumblr 上发现的一张看起来是蓝黑相间或白金色相间的裙子的照片。
The Washington Post has written, “ Tumblr might just be the new ground zero of the viral internet .” Recent commentary on this phenomenon from within Tumblr received 275,000 notes in a week:
《华盛顿邮报》写道：“Tumblr 可能只是病毒式互联网的新归零地。” Tumblr 内部最近对这一现象的评论一周内收到了 275,000 条评论：
My friends (don’t have tumblr) : have u seen this meme lol, it was on the ‘best of tumblr’ facebook page, tumblr is so funny
我的朋友（没有 tumblr）：你见过这个模因吗，哈哈，它在“best of tumblr”Facebook 页面上，tumblr 太有趣了
Me, a tumblr gremlin : haha yeah lol, think i’ve seen that one before lol
我，一个 tumblr gremlin ：哈哈，是的，哈哈，我想我以前见过那个，哈哈
Me (what I really mean) : you fools.
我（我真正的意思）：你们这些傻瓜。
I am plugged into the mainframe, wired to the primary source.
我已插入主机，连接到主电源。
Of course have seen that meme, and all 5000 of it’s variants, 3 and a half months ago.
当然，我在 3 个半月前就看过这个表情包，以及它的所有 5000 个变体。
I have seen the rise and fall of that meme, the boom and bust, the drama, the pain, the shitposting, oh god, the shitposting.
我见证了那个模因的兴衰、繁荣和萧条、戏剧性、痛苦、垃圾贴，天哪，垃圾贴。
I have seen this meme in it’s rawest, freshest, unpasturised, most primal state.
我看到了这个模因最原始、最新鲜、未经高温处理、最原始的状态。
Do not insult me with these rank, stale puddles, that sit at the very base of the meme trickle down economy.
不要用这些陈旧的水坑来侮辱我，它们是模因滴流经济的基础。
Tumblr teens call many of these jokes “relatable.” This is partially due to the success of Zach Lilley and Jeremy Greenfield, middle school friends who wanted to get into internet comedy when they were high school juniors.
Tumblr 青少年称其中许多笑话“让人产生共鸣”。这在一定程度上要归功于扎克·利利（Zach Lilley）和杰里米·格林菲尔德（Jeremy Greenfield）的成功，这对中学好友在高中时就想进入网络喜剧行业。
In 2011, they bought ROFLnow.com and created social media accounts, including a Tumblr, to promote the site.
2011 年，他们收购了 ROFLnow.com 并创建了社交媒体帐户（包括 Tumblr）来推广该网站。
They soon realized their Tumblr was performing better than the web site it was supposed to promote.
他们很快意识到他们的 Tumblr 的表现比它应该推广的网站要好。
Lilley and Greenfield grew up with the internet as a toy, competing with friends to make the most viral video, pranking adults at a strip mall within walking distance of their homes in Reading, Pennsylvania, when they weren’t old enough to drive.
莉莉和格林菲尔德从小就将互联网当作玩具长大，他们与朋友竞争制作最火爆的视频，在宾夕法尼亚州雷丁家步行即可到达的一家购物中心里对成年人进行恶作剧，当时他们还没有到开车的年龄。
Lilley’s first YouTube hit was posting the audio of President Obama calling Kanye West a jackass for interrupting Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards.
Lilley 在 YouTube 上的第一个热门视频是发布了奥巴马总统的音频，奥巴马总统称 Kanye West 是个混蛋，因为他在 2009 年音乐录影带颁奖典礼上打断了 Taylor Swift 的表演。
Lilley read me the video’s YouTube description out loud—“ Obama Calls Kanye West a Jackass [ACTUAL AUDIO] .
Lilley 大声给我读了该视频的 YouTube 描述——“奥巴马称 Kanye West 为蠢货 [实际音频]。
Obama: Kanye West Is a Jackass!
奥巴马：坎耶·韦斯特是个混蛋！
A JACKASS!
一个蠢货！
Obama: Kanye West is a JACKASS!”—and muttered, “Wow, I was already so meta.” I thought he meant “meta” as in self-referential, but he meant meta like metadata, as in search engine optimization.
奥巴马：坎耶·韦斯特是个混蛋！”——并嘟哝道，“哇，我已经这么元了。”我认为他的意思是“元”，就像自我指涉一样，但他的意思是像元数据一样的元，就像搜索引擎优化一样。
When he posted the video he was 15, and it currently has more than 177,000 views.
当他发布该视频时，他只有 15 岁，目前该视频的观看次数已超过 177,000 次。
Some kids found out about the YouTube channel at school and not everyone was nice about it, so they kept their Tumblr project secret.
有些孩子在学校发现了 YouTube 频道，但并不是每个人都喜欢它，因此他们对 Tumblr 项目保密。
But the first time it made more than $50 in a day with a banner ad from Google AdSense, they realized Tumblr could be a thing.
但当他们第一次通过 Google AdSense 的横幅广告在一天内赚取超过 50 美元时，他们意识到 Tumblr 可能会成为一种趋势。
ROFLnow.com never made more than $20 in a day; Lilley made about $80 a week working at a diner.
ROFLnow.com 一天的收入从未超过 20 美元； Lilley 在一家小餐馆工作，每周收入约 80 美元。
Lilley and Greenfield launched So-Relatable on Tumblr in late February 2012.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 于 2012 年 2 月下旬在 Tumblr 上推出了 So-Relatable。
“Relatable” has a slightly different meaning on the teen internet than in the adult world, and even its purveyors struggle to describe it.
“相关”在青少年互联网上的含义与成人世界中的含义略有不同，甚至连它的提供者也很难描述它。
Lilley called it “a thought, feeling or idea that resonates with others.” Based on my years of immersion, I’d say it’s more about revealing vulnerabilities.
莉莉称其为“与他人产生共鸣的想法、感觉或想法”。根据我多年的经验，我认为这更多的是揭示漏洞。
“Tumblr is a really safe space to make these observations out in the public where everyone can see but no one knows it’s you,” Strle told me when I visited Tumblr.
“Tumblr 是一个非常安全的空间，可以在公众面前发表这些观察结果，每个人都可以看到，但没有人知道是你，”Strle 在我访问 Tumblr 时告诉我。
I saw this in the quiet rage at how your social status can be determined by patently stupid actions, like the grave consequences for the tiniest infractions in high school :
我在平静的愤怒中看到了这一点，因为你的社会地位可以通过明显愚蠢的行为来决定，比如高中时最微小的违规行为的严重后果：
my parents disown me and sell me to a shady, moustached man for three goats
我的父母与我断绝关系，并为了三只山羊将我卖给了一个阴暗的、留着小胡子的男人
Lilley and Greenfield didn’t coin the term “relatable,” but they made it popular, helping to solidify its internet meaning.
利利和格林菲尔德并没有创造“相关”这个词，但他们让这个词流行起来，帮助巩固了它的互联网含义。
A Google Images search of “relatable” turns up hundreds of their posts, plus many by imitators, even though the blog So-Relatable has disappeared, like Pizza, from the internet.
尽管“So-Relatable”博客已经像“披萨”一样从互联网上消失了，但在谷歌图片中搜索“相关”会发现数百个他们的帖子，还有许多模仿者的帖子。
After launching, they landed 20,000 followers in their first month with a simple formula: a relatable one-liner—“ When the internet stops working for 5 seconds , so does my heart”—framed by a pastel or white rectangle.
推出后，他们在第一个月就凭借一个简单的公式吸引了 20,000 名粉丝：一句引人入胜的台词——“当互联网停止工作 5 秒，我的心也停止工作”——用柔和的或白色的矩形框起来。
Convert into an image and post.
转换为图像并发布。
After a few weeks, Greenfield suggested adding GIFs (“ That moment every Sunday when you realize there’s school tomorrow ” above Kanye West’s face changing from a broad smile to melancholy) and the posts started blowing up, “20,000 or 30,000 notes, and back then that was a lot.” Lilley and Greenfield graduated high school in the summer of 2012; by the fall So-Relatable had more than 200,000 followers and was making a couple thousand dollars a month.
几周后，格林菲尔德建议添加 GIF（“每周日，当你意识到明天还要上学的那一刻”，坎耶·维斯特的脸从灿烂的笑容变成忧郁的表情），帖子开始火爆，“20,000 或 30,000 条笔记，在当时已经很多了。” Lilley 和 Greenfield 于 2012 年夏天高中毕业；到了秋天，So-Relatable 已经拥有超过 20 万粉丝，每月收入几千美元。
In October, they filed as an S-corporation, So Relatable Inc., and split the shares 50-50.
10 月，他们以 S 法人名义申请成立 So Relatable Inc.，并将股份按 50 比 50 分割。
Soon, Lilley and Greenfield told me, they were getting 15 million page views a month.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 告诉我，很快他们每个月的页面浏览量就达到了 1500 万次。
They had more than 450,000 followers on So-Relatable and were growing several other blogs.
他们在 So-Relatable 上拥有超过 450,000 名关注者，并且还在发展其他几个博客。
It was an enormous reach for two teenagers from a Rust Belt town of 88,000 people, and they did it by tapping into the essence of what makes content shareable: Here Is A Feeling You Thought Only You Felt But Is Actually Universal.
对于来自拥有 88,000 人口的铁锈地带小镇的两名青少年来说，这是一个巨大的影响力，他们通过挖掘内容共享的本质来做到这一点：这是一种你以为只有你能感觉到但实际上是普遍存在的感觉。
I spent the day with them in Greenfield’s parents’ basement this fall.
今年秋天，我和他们一起在格林菲尔德父母的地下室度过了一天。
The walls were bright red, and we lounged on an overstuffed wraparound couch.
墙壁是鲜红色的，我们懒洋洋地躺在一张加满软垫的环绕式沙发上。
I’d expected to watch them work, but they had enough posts queued up to last the day, so instead we just hung out, which, just like so many hangouts when I was their age, eventually devolved into watching videos online.
我本想看他们工作，但他们有足够的帖子排队等待最后一天，所以我们只是闲逛，就像我在他们这个年纪时的许多闲逛一样，最终变成了在线观看视频。
Except these videos were ones they made as kids.
但这些视频是他们小时候制作的。
I set up my phone to record our conversation, resting it on top of a can of dog food belonging to Greenfield’s fluffy Pomeranian, Pebbles.
我把手机放在格林菲尔德毛茸茸的博美犬卵石的一罐狗粮上，记录下我们的谈话。
“Give me all the gossip,” I commanded.
“把所有的八卦都告诉我，”我命令道。
Instead, they gave me the secrets to virality.
相反，他们给了我病毒式传播的秘密。
Lilley is tall and lanky, with dark brown curly hair.
莉莉身材高大，瘦长，有一头深棕色的卷发。
Greenfield is shorter, with glasses and honey-brown hair.
格林菲尔德身材矮小，戴着眼镜，头发呈蜜棕色。
They both wore plain polo shirts.
他们都穿着朴素的马球衫。
Summer had just ended, and there was a pool in the backyard, but they were quite pale.
夏天刚刚结束，后院有一个水池，但它们却相当苍白。
After studying their mannerisms and hearing Lilley’s repeated allusions to Greenfield’s math skills and superior memory—he was briefly a mechatronics engineering major—I determined they were nerds.
在研究了他们的举止并听到莉利反复提到格林菲尔德的数学技能和卓越的记忆力（他曾短暂学习机电工程专业）后，我确定他们是书呆子。
They were witty and warm and very smart, and I liked them immediately, but they were total nerds.
他们诙谐、热情、非常聪明，我立刻就喜欢上了他们，但他们完全是书呆子。
It surprised me, because nerds are often defined by an inability to read social interactions and respond in a way that makes them cool, confident— relatable .
这让我感到惊讶，因为书呆子通常被定义为无法理解社交互动，也无法以一种让他们冷静、自信、有亲和力的方式做出回应。
So I gently asked Greenfield how he was able to make these minute social observations that hinge on complex emotions being expressed in subtle facial expressions when, perhaps, this was not his strong suit in real life.
所以我轻轻地问格林菲尔德，他是如何能够进行这些微小的社会观察的，这些观察取决于微妙的面部表情所表达的复杂情感，而这也许不是他在现实生活中的强项。
His answer: internet research.
他的答案是：互联网研究。
“I didn’t relate to a lot of the things I was posting about, but like, you read online that a lot of people were going through that, so I was like ‘Oh I guess that’s a relatable thing,’ ” Greenfield said.
格林菲尔德说：“我发布的很多事情都与我无关，但就像你在网上读到很多人都在经历这件事一样，所以我就想‘哦，我想这是一件相关的事情’。”
He didn’t understand why someone might be nervous in front of the police for no reason.
他不明白为什么有人在警察面前会无缘无故地紧张。
He didn’t understand complaints about substitute teachers—those were “jokes that I blatantly wouldn’t get.” But if an unfamiliar feeling was mentioned often enough online, Greenfield would write about it.
他不理解对代课老师的抱怨——那些是“我根本听不懂的笑话”。但如果一种不熟悉的感觉在网上经常被提及，格林菲尔德就会写下来。
Researching their way to relatable played out most interestingly in one demographic: girls.
研究她们如何建立联系的方式在一个人群中表现得最有趣：女孩。
As of last fall, only 10 percent of internet users use Tumblr, according to the Pew Research Center, but 23 percent of teen girls do, compared with 5 percent of teen boys.
根据皮尤研究中心的数据，截至去年秋天，只有 10% 的互联网用户使用 Tumblr，但有 23% 的女孩使用 Tumblr，而男孩的这一比例为 5%。
At one point, Lilley and Greenfield noticed, 65 percent of the So-Relatable readership was female.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 注意到，So-Relatable 读者中有 65% 是女性。
Greenfield confessed he’d written many posts from a girl’s point of view, posts he didn’t relate to, and, when he got flustered as I repeatedly demanded specifics, Lilley interrupted: “We’ve never had a period.” Period posts do really well.
格林菲尔德承认，他从女孩的角度写了很多帖子，但这些帖子与他无关，当我一再要求具体细节时，他感到慌乱，莉莉打断道：“我们从来没有来过月经。”时期帖子做得非常好。
Lilley showed me a post about a girl asking a friend to check her pants in the bathroom.
莉莉给我看了一篇关于一个女孩要求朋友在浴室检查她的裤子的帖子。
“That’s obviously something we’ve never said to each other.”
“这显然是我们从未对彼此说过的话。”
Lilley and Greenfield had figured out an array of tricks both obvious and not, some technical, some thematic.
利利和格林菲尔德想出了一系列明显或不明显的技巧，有些是技术性的，有些是主题性的。
They found text converted into an image performed better when the second sentence was the longest; a post with a high ratio of notes to comments was a sign a community cared deeply about a subject; typos weren’t always bad, because you have to share a Facebook post to comment on it, and people shared typo-marred posts to make fun of the mistake.
他们发现当第二句话最长时，文本转换为图像的效果更好；注释与评论比例较高的帖子表明社区非常关心某个主题；拼写错误并不总是坏事，因为你必须分享 Facebook 帖子才能对其进行评论，而且人们会分享有拼写错误的帖子来取笑这个错误。
Lilley and Greenfield interacted with followers as well.
莉莉和格林菲尔德也与追随者进行了互动。
When they posted a recipe for a snack on another of their blogs, Lifehackable, readers would comment with photos of their version, and Lifehackable would reblog them.
当他们在另一个博客 Lifehackable 上发布小吃食谱时，读者会用他们的版本的照片进行评论，Lifehackable 会转发它们。
I’d seen a few Lifehackable posts years ago and assumed they were satire.
几年前我看过一些 Lifehackable 的帖子，并认为它们是讽刺作品。
“Life hacks” are simple tips to make your life a bit better in the tiniest ways, the kind of tricks that are so obvious you can’t believe you weren’t already doing them—finding the best deals on eBay by searching for misspelled listings, keeping power cords neat with hair clips, making “time bomb soda” by freezing Mentos in ice cubes.
“生活窍门”是一些简单的技巧，可以通过最微小的方式让你的生活变得更好，这种技巧如此明显，你简直不敢相信你没有做过——通过搜索拼写错误的商品在 eBay 上找到最优惠的价格，用发夹保持电源线整齐，通过将曼妥思冷冻在冰块中来制作“定时炸弹苏打水”。
(Applicability of the life hack often depends on one’s lifestyle.) Lilley and Greenfield had partnered with a guy they’d known for years, Tom, to run Lifehackable.
（生活黑客的适用性通常取决于一个人的生活方式。）莉莉和格林菲尔德与他们认识多年的汤姆合作经营 Lifehackable。
Tom was not good at it.
汤姆不擅长这个。
His life hacks were less hacks than poor life choices.
他的生活小窍门与其说是小窍门，不如说是糟糕的生活选择。
In one notorious post, he suggested that you could make a “personal ice cream bowl” by cutting a pint container in half vertically.
在一篇臭名昭著的帖子中，他建议你可以通过将一品脱容器垂直切成两半来制作“个人冰淇淋碗”。
The post went viral when another user commented “ OR YOU COULD JUST TAKE OFF THE FUCKING LID YOU INBRED .”
当另一位用户评论“或者你可以把你近亲繁殖的那该死的盖子拿掉”时，这篇文章迅速走红。
The outrage clicks were so powerful, Lilley and Greenfield decided to experiment with “negative attention.” Haters are more loyal than fans, so they promoted the bad hacks.
愤怒的点击是如此强大，利利和格林菲尔德决定尝试“负面关注”。仇恨者比粉丝更忠诚，因此他们宣传了糟糕的黑客行为。
The worst hacks brought in thousands of followers, and that’s how Lifehackable built the bulk of its audience.
最糟糕的黑客行为吸引了数千名追随者，这就是 Lifehackable 建立大部分受众的方式。
“Tom knew what was happening, and so then he was more incentivized to actually not do his job right,” Lilley said.
“汤姆知道发生了什么，所以他更有动力实际上没有做好他的工作，”利利说。
“And in sucking, he succeeded.”
“而在吸吮方面，他成功了。”
At Tumblr headquarters, I found myself in a contest of name-dropping teenagers’ URLs, much the same way people dropped indie rock bands in college.
在 Tumblr 总部，我发现自己陷入了一场青少年 URL 竞赛，就像人们在大学里抛弃独立摇滚乐队一样。
Danielle Strle told me about Cornputer ; I had to tell her that Heckacute had gone password-protected.
Danielle Strle 向我介绍了计算机；我不得不告诉她 Heckacute 已经受到密码保护。
“Oh my God, you know Pizza?” Strle said.
“天哪，你知道披萨吗？”斯特尔说。
“Yes.
是的。
Oh my God, I love Pizza,” I said, “Tell me about Pizza.” Strle leaned in: “She’s kind of controversial.”
天哪，我喜欢披萨，”我说，“给我讲讲披萨吧。”斯特尔靠过来：“她有点争议。”
I had been trying to interview Pizza for a year before her blog disappeared in August 2014.
在她的博客于 2014 年 8 月消失之前，我已经尝试采访 Pizza 一年了。
It took almost two years to get her to talk to me.
我花了将近两年的时间才让她跟我说话。
Based on a few posts about blogger meet-ups, I knew she was Australian, but nothing had been written about her in the Australian media.
根据一些关于博客聚会的帖子，我知道她是澳大利亚人，但澳大利亚媒体上没有任何关于她的报道。
I sent her “fan mail” on Tumblr, the only option at the time, but popular blogs got tons of such messages, and I got no response.
我在 Tumblr 上向她发送了“粉丝邮件”，这是当时唯一的选择，但热门博客收到了大量此类消息，但我没有得到任何回复。
I sent her a direct message on Twitter, to which she responded with interest, giving me her email, but after an exchange, she went silent.
我在 Twitter 上直接给她发了一条消息，她很感兴趣地回复了我，并给了我她的电子邮件，但在交流之后，她就沉默了。
I asked Tumblr to try contacting Pizza for me.
我让 Tumblr 尝试帮我联系 Pizza。
No response.
没有回应。
I tried contacting other kids on Tumblr instead, but they didn’t respond to me either.
我尝试联系 Tumblr 上的其他孩子，但他们也没有回复我。
Tumblr’s public relations team reached out to them for me, too, but no response.
Tumblr 的公关团队也为我联系了他们，但没有回复。
I started to lose hope.
我开始失去希望。
And then, in August 2015, Jason Wong gave me a new email for Pizza.
然后，2015 年 8 月，Jason Wong 给了我一封关于 Pizza 的新电子邮件。
(“She was like a god in people’s eyes,” he said.) She replied, “Thank you so much for contacting me and for being interested with my blog!” and agreed to talk.
（“她在人们眼中就像神一样，”他说。）她回答说：“非常感谢您与我联系并对我的博客感兴趣！”并同意谈话。
Jess Miller is a 18-year-old recent high school graduate who lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Jess Miller 是一名 18 岁的高中毕业生，住在澳大利亚墨尔本。
Her colleagues and admirers call her Jess, but I can’t help but think of her as Pizza.
她的同事和崇拜者称她为杰西，但我情不自禁地把她想象成披萨。
Almost her entire teenage life has been lived on Tumblr, and over the past five years, her fame spread offline.
她的整个青少年生活几乎都在 Tumblr 上度过，在过去的五年里，她的名声在线下传播开来。
“I didn’t really think I was ‘popular’ because the number of followers was there but it didn’t really hit me how big the audience I had was until people recognized me in public,” she said.
“我并不认为自己很‘受欢迎’，因为追随者的数量是存在的，但直到人们在公共场合认出我之前，我并没有真正意识到我的观众有多大，”她说。
“One day I was in the library and some girls walked into the room I was in, yelled out ‘Hey Pizza,’ and then ran away.”
“有一天，我在图书馆，一些女孩走进我所在的房间，大喊‘嘿披萨’，然后就跑掉了。”
Miller’s mom, Jodie Arrowsmith, didn’t know she was on Tumblr for the first few years.
米勒的妈妈朱迪·阿罗史密斯 (Jodie Arrowsmith) 最初几年并不知道她在 Tumblr 上。
“She actually didn’t tell any of her friends at school,” Arrowsmith said.
“她实际上没有告诉她在学校的任何朋友，”阿罗史密斯说。
“It was her own special thing.
“这是她自己的特别之处。
Her Tumblr was her little secret place where she could go and blog and say what she wanted.” But people started finding out.
她的 Tumblr 是她的小秘密地方，她可以在那里写博客并表达自己的想法。”但人们开始发现这一点。
Arrowsmith is a realtor, and once, while showing a family a house, she mentioned her kids sat at home on the internet all day.
阿罗史密斯是一名房地产经纪人，有一次，在给一家人看房子时，她提到她的孩子们整天坐在家里上网。
The clients’ daughter was about 13, and said she had a Tumblr.
客户的女儿大约 13 岁，说她有一个 Tumblr。
“I told her my daughter was Pizza,” Arrowsmith said, “and the girl almost started crying.”
“我告诉她我的女儿是披萨，”阿罗史密斯说，“那个女孩几乎开始哭了。”
In early 2014, when she was 16, some Tumblr users dug up posts Miller had written when she was 13 in which she used the word “nigga.” Screenshots of the old posts went viral.
2014 年初，当时她 16 岁，一些 Tumblr 用户挖出了米勒 13 岁时写的帖子，其中她使用了“黑鬼”这个词。旧帖子的屏幕截图疯传。
At one point, according to Miller, she had 9,500 concurrent visitors on her blog and she received over 2,000 angry messages, some of them telling her to kill herself.
据米勒称，她的博客一度有 9,500 名并发访问者，她收到了 2,000 多条愤怒的消息，其中一些消息要求她自杀。
When I asked Miller about the posts, she sent me a long apologetic message:
当我向米勒询问这些帖子的情况时，她给我发了一条很长的道歉信息：
i now completely understand how horrible and ignorant they were and take full responsibility for them.
我现在完全理解他们是多么可怕和无知，并为他们承担全部责任。
theres obviously no excuse for me using that word, and despite the fact that it would be difficult for a 13 year old australian to understand american racial politics, everyone, including me, knows that it is not appropriate and i’m so frustrated and disgusted at my 13 year old self for thinking that it was acceptable, especially now after I have taken history and we had a whole semester on civil rights and slavery in america and to have a better understanding of the racial issues which were and are still present in america make me even more ashamed of my actions
显然我没有理由使用这个词，尽管事实上，一个 13 岁的澳大利亚人很难理解美国的种族政治，但包括我在内的每个人都知道这是不合适的，我对 13 岁的自己认为这是可以接受的感到非常沮丧和厌恶，尤其是现在，在我学习了历史，我们花了整整一个学期的时间来学习美国的民权和奴隶制，并对美国过去和现在仍然存在的种族问题有了更好的理解让我对自己的行为更加羞愧
There are still (false) rumors floating around that Pizza was terminated by Tumblr for being racist .
仍然有（错误的）谣言流传，称 Pizza 因种族主义而被 Tumblr 终止。
It’s clear the episode affected Miller deeply.
显然，这一事件对米勒影响深远。
An anonymous user left a message on her new blog, Jess Cats.
一位匿名用户在她的新博客 Jess Cats 上留言。
“Are you former tumblr user pizza?” She replied, “Yep formerly tumblr user pizza and currently a piece of trash xx.”
“你是前 tumblr 用户披萨吗？”她回答说：“是的，以前是 tumblr 用户披萨，现在是垃圾 xx。”
In November 2012, Lilley and Greenfield were contacted by Dennis Hegstad.
2012 年 11 月，丹尼斯·赫格斯塔德联系了 Lilley 和 Greenfield。
Then 23, Hegstad had built an audience on MySpace by posting selfies; thin and sleek and handsome, with long, straight, light-brown ombré hair, he resembles a human Afghan hound .
当时 23 岁的赫格斯塔通过发布自拍照在 MySpace 上吸引了一批观众。他瘦削、圆滑、英俊，有一头又长又直的浅棕色渐变色头发，很像一条人类阿富汗猎犬。
He had built his online brand though his looks and taste, later producing a popular T-shirt that said, “Blow kisses not coke.” He had connections in the music industry, and in October 2013 he would create Songsly, a platform where musicians could pay viral video creators to use their songs.
他通过自己的外表和品味建立了自己的在线品牌，后来制作了一款流行的 T 恤，上面写着“飞吻不是可乐”。他在音乐行业拥有人脉，并于 2013 年 10 月创建了 Songsly，这是一个音乐家可以向病毒视频创作者付费以使用他们的歌曲的平台。
When he reached out to So-Relatable, Hegstad had a big Twitter audience, millions of followers across a dozen accounts.
当他联系 So-Relatable 时，Hegstad 拥有大量 Twitter 受众，十几个账户拥有数百万粉丝。
He had figured out how to monetize it, but he wanted to get into Tumblr.
他已经想出了如何将其货币化，但他想进入 Tumblr。
So-Relatable was trying to build its Twitter presence, so they agreed to exchange promotional posts with Hegstad.
So-Relatable 试图建立自己的 Twitter 影响力，因此他们同意与 Hegstad 交换促销帖子。
Tumblr teens need to be sophisticated about making money, and they have clever tactics to increase traffic and followers and revenue, often helping each other to game Google AdSense.
Tumblr 青少年在赚钱方面需要老练，他们有巧妙的策略来增加流量、关注者和收入，经常互相帮助来博弈 Google AdSense。
Why game AdSense?
为什么要玩 AdSense？
Tumblr users are allowed to put banner ads on their sites, but most users access Tumblr through the dashboard feed, where only Tumblr’s sponsored posts can go.
Tumblr 用户可以在其网站上放置横幅广告，但大多数用户通过仪表板源访问 Tumblr，其中只有 Tumblr 的赞助帖子可以访问。
So that means most eyes, and the most dedicated fans, rarely if ever see those banner ads.
因此，这意味着大多数眼睛和最忠实的粉丝很少会看到这些横幅广告。
Tumblr has always had a complicated relationship with money.
Tumblr 与金钱的关系一直很复杂。
In 2010, its founder, David Karp, said, “ We’re pretty opposed to advertising.
2010 年，其创始人 David Karp 表示：“我们非常反对广告。
It really turns our stomachs.
它确实让我们反胃。
” Then in 2011: “ Making money off of Tumblr would be incredibly easy ”—he’d throw up an AdSense ad on every user’s dashboard and make the site “wildly profitable.” In April 2012 sponsored content began appearing in users’ streams.
”然后到了 2011 年：“从 Tumblr 上赚钱会非常容易”——他会在每个用户的仪表板上投放 AdSense 广告，使该网站“利润丰厚”。 2012 年 4 月，赞助内容开始出现在用户的信息流中。
Tumblr was, at that time, still a unicorn; the possibility of making money was just as powerful an asset as the actual making of it.
那时，Tumblr 还是独角兽；赚钱的可能性与实际赚钱一样强大。
In 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1 billion and began a new ad rollout, but after a year, Karp’s wild profitability still hadn’t materialized.
2013年，雅虎以10亿美元收购了Tumblr，并开始推出新的广告，但一年后，卡普的疯狂盈利仍未实现。
A former Tumblr executive told The New York Times that Tumblr’s anonymity was a hurdle: “Real-world identities are valuable to advertisers.
一位前 Tumblr 高管告诉《纽约时报》，Tumblr 的匿名性是一个障碍：“现实世界的身份对广告商来说很有价值。
Tumblr doesn’t have that .”
Tumblr 没有这个。”
In a sense, Yahoo faces the same problem as Tumblr users: There isn’t a lot of money in banner ads.
从某种意义上说，雅虎面临着与 Tumblr 用户相同的问题：横幅广告赚的钱并不多。
Yahoo is experiencing declining revenue in display ads and the company is trying to make up for it with native advertising—ads that look like human-created content but were actually made for brands.
雅虎的展示广告收入正在下降，该公司正试图通过原生广告来弥补这一损失——原生广告看起来像是人类创建的内容，但实际上是为品牌制作的。
Likewise, some Tumblr users have tried their own kind of native ads—posts endorsing products that link to the stores where you can buy them.
同样，一些 Tumblr 用户也尝试过他们自己的原生广告——发布认可产品的帖子，链接到可以购买这些产品的商店。
Tumblr does not like this.
Tumblr 不喜欢这样。
It considers these posts “spam,” and will terminate an account for posting too many affiliate advertising links, or anything the company deems “non-genuine social gestures.”
它认为这些帖子是“垃圾邮件”，并将终止发布过多附属广告链接或任何该公司认为“非真实社交姿态”的帐户。
With AdSense banners, users get paid when a reader clicks or views an ad.
借助 AdSense 横幅，当读者点击或查看广告时，用户即可获得报酬。
However, Google forbids “click fraud”—you can’t just click on an ad on your own blog all day and watch the money come in.
然而，谷歌禁止“点击欺诈”——你不能整天点击自己博客上的广告，然后看着钱进来。
Google has bots looking for that.
谷歌有机器人在寻找这个。
So teens have schemes to evade the bots.
因此青少年有躲避机器人的计划。
There are a handful of secret Facebook groups and multi-member chats for Tumblr users with high follower counts—between 10,000 and 100,000 or even more—with names like Wallflowers 2.0 and GOATS.
有一些秘密的 Facebook 群组和多成员聊天室，供 Tumblr 用户使用，粉丝数量很高（在 10,000 到 100,000 之间，甚至更多），名称包括 Wallflowers 2.0 和 GOATS。
There they organize to trade favors, like agreeing to promote each other’s posts.
他们在那里组织起来交换利益，比如同意宣传彼此的帖子。
An “r4r” in the Facebook group is offering an exchange of reblogs, so each blog is exposed to a wider set of followers.
Facebook 群组中的“r4r”提供转发交换，因此每个博客都会接触到更广泛的关注者。
An “r4c” means a user will reblog a post for someone who promises to visit their blog, refresh it several times, click on the ad, and then refresh it several times—but only if you’re from a “premium country,” because Google pays more for clicks from Ireland, for example, than from the Philippines.
“r4c”意味着用户会为承诺访问其博客的人转发帖子，刷新几次，点击广告，然后刷新几次，但前提是您来自“优质国家”，因为谷歌为来自爱尔兰的点击支付的费用高于来自菲律宾的点击费用。
An ad might specify “please no car/dating/clothing web sites!” because those ads pay less per click.
广告可能会指定“请勿使用汽车/约会/服装网站！”因为这些广告的每次点击费用较低。
The blog must be refreshed until a better-paying ad shows up, like one from a bank.
必须刷新博客，直到出现报酬更高的广告，例如来自银行的广告。
Lilley and Greenfield felt the sting of a bad exchange a few times, but the biggest lesson came with Lifehackable.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 有几次因糟糕的交流而感到痛苦，但最大的教训来自 Lifehackable。
Though they’d exploited Tom’s failures, he got the better of them in the end.
尽管他们利用了汤姆的失败，但他最终还是战胜了他们。
Lilley and Greenfield had agreed to split ad revenue 50-50 with Tom, but a few months later, they noticed the ads on the site had been replaced with images promoting Tom’s YouTube channel JusstTom .
Lilley 和 Greenfield 同意与 Tom 按照 50-50 的比例分配广告收入，但几个月后，他们注意到网站上的广告已被宣传 Tom 的 YouTube 频道 JuststTom 的图片所取代。
“As if we’d never notice that all the ads changed to be about Tom and put his face on them,” Greenfield said.
格林菲尔德说：“好像我们从来没有注意到所有的广告都变成了关于汤姆的，并把他的脸放在了上面。”
Now Lifehackable.com—which once made $1,963 in a single day—redirects to the YouTube channel.
现在，Lifehackable.com（曾经单日收入 1,963 美元）重定向到 YouTube 频道。
Though Tom is handsome, he lacks an easy charisma and JusstTom is not very popular.
汤姆虽然英俊，但缺乏随和的魅力，贾斯特汤姆也不太受欢迎。
His videos are about dating advice, and together we watched him explain what to do when a guy won’t text you back.
他的视频是关于约会建议的，我们一起观看了他解释当一个男人不回短信时该怎么做。
“He would have been so much better off if he didn’t screw us over,” Lilley said.
“如果他没有把我们搞砸的话，他的处境会好得多，”莉利说。
Greenfield added, “He had a great revenue source and just threw it in the trash.” Lilley was disgusted by the thought of “trying to build a personal brand by sacrificing your content.” The two had chosen to build their empire by not focusing on their own personalities.
格林菲尔德补充道，“他有很好的收入来源，但他却把它扔进了垃圾桶。”莉莉对“试图通过牺牲内容来建立个人品牌”的想法感到厌恶。两人选择不关注自己的个性来建立自己的帝国。
“Tumblr’s different because no one really cares what you look like, they only care about what you post,” Jess Miller told me.
“Tumblr 与众不同，因为没有人真正关心你长什么样，他们只关心你发布的内容，”杰西·米勒告诉我。
Its stars often have as far to climb, at least socioeconomically, as their fans.
它的明星往往和他们的粉丝一样需要不断攀登，至少在社会经济方面如此。
Wong’s mom couldn’t pay his college tuition, so he’s using Tumblr to pay for it himself.
Wong 的妈妈无力支付他的大学学费，因此他使用 Tumblr 自己支付学费。
He also pays some of his mom’s bills.
他还支付他妈妈的一些账单。
When I asked him if his mom approved of his Tumblr career, Wong said he tells her, “‘Why is our bank account not in the negative anymore?
当我问他妈妈是否同意他在 Tumblr 上的职业生涯时，黄说他告诉她，“为什么我们的银行账户不再是负数了？
Why do I have money to go to college?’ It’s better not to argue but to just show results.”
为什么我有钱上大学？’最好不要争论，而只是展示结果。”
That fall, Hegstad gave Lilley and Greenfield some valuable tips: The end of the year is the most profitable time for banner ads, and he taught them how to tweak the layout of their site and the display of their banner ads.
那年秋天，赫格斯塔德给了莉利和格林菲尔德一些宝贵的建议：年底是横幅广告最赚钱的时间，他教他们如何调整网站的布局和横幅广告的展示。
Fairly subtle stuff, but they made thousands more dollars the next month.
相当微妙的事情，但他们下个月又赚了数千美元。
“He did a lot of things that helped us, and he was never getting a piece of it,” Lilley said.
“他做了很多帮助我们的事情，但他却从未从中分得一杯羹，”莉利说。
At first, Lilley and Greenfield just wanted to make enough money to pay their way to the annual YouTube-sponsored conference, VidCon, in Los Angeles, but their vision expanded as So Relatable Inc. took off.
起初，Lilley 和 Greenfield 只是想赚到足够的钱来支付 YouTube 赞助的洛杉矶年度会议 VidCon 的费用，但随着 So Relatable Inc. 的腾飞，他们的视野不断扩大。
In January 2013, they quit college.
2013年1月，他们从大学退学。
According to their bank records, in March 2013, Google paid them $25,350.45.
根据他们的银行记录，2013 年 3 月，Google 向他们支付了 25,350.45 美元。
It was lot of money for internet jokes, a lot of money for two 18-year-olds from Reading, Pennsylvania.
对于网络笑话来说，这是一笔巨款，对于宾夕法尼亚州雷丁市的两个 18 岁年轻人来说，这是一笔巨款。
Lilley had wanted to get out of his hometown for years and proposed moving in with Hegstad in L.A.
莉莉多年来一直想离开家乡，并提议搬到洛杉矶与赫格斯塔德同住。
I was skeptical about these numbers, so I asked Lilley and Greenfield to drive me to their bank and print out their records.
我对这些数字表示怀疑，所以我让 Lilley 和 Greenfield 开车送我去他们的银行并打印他们的记录。
The teller knew them, and asked if they missed Los Angeles.
柜员认识他们，就问他们是否想念洛杉矶。
They said it never rained.
他们说从来没有下过雨。
They later told me she always asks them that, even though they’d been home for months.
他们后来告诉我，她总是这样问他们，尽管他们已经在家好几个月了。
I also asked them to show me three years of tax returns.
我还要求他们给我看三年的纳税申报表。
They did that too.
他们也这么做了。
The unpredictable waves of virality made the Google payments go up and down based on how many people visited their site—$9,113.04 in May 2013, $18,805.09 in June.
不可预测的病毒式传播使得谷歌支付的费用根据访问其网站的人数而上下波动——2013 年 5 月为 9,113.04 美元，6 月为 18,805.09 美元。
It took a few months, but Lilley and Greenfield decided to move to the West Coast.
花了几个月的时间，莉莉和格林菲尔德决定搬到西海岸。
Lilley made of all of the arrangements with Hegstad, who agreed to be their roommate.
莉莉与赫格斯塔德做了所有的安排，赫格斯塔德同意成为他们的室友。
Greenfield later admitted, “I actually didn’t meet him or ever have a single conversation with him online until the day before we signed the lease.”
格林菲尔德后来承认，“实际上，直到我们签署租约的前一天，我才见过他，也没有在网上与他进行过一次交谈。”
In the summer of 2013, Lilley and Greenfield moved into a historic bank building converted into lofts with original art deco details in downtown Los Angeles; scenes from The Dark Knight Rises and Spiderman 2 had been filmed in the lobby.
2013 年夏天，Lilley 和 Greenfield 搬进了洛杉矶市中心一座历史悠久的银行大楼，该大楼改建为阁楼，具有原始的装饰艺术细节； 《黑暗骑士崛起》和《蜘蛛侠 2》的场景就是在大厅拍摄的。
When he first saw the apartment, Lilley thought he’d finally made it.
当利利第一次看到这套公寓时，他以为自己终于到了。
“It felt like something we could call ours, something we could show for everything we do, which is just on a screen.”
“感觉就像我们可以称之为我们自己的东西，我们可以在屏幕上展示我们所做的一切。”
The loft was multilevel, with stairs next to the living room going up to the bedrooms above.
阁楼是多层的，客厅旁边有楼梯通往上面的卧室。
Hegstad had the room at the top of the stairs, “like he was king of the jungle.” Lilley decorated his room with a wall decal of Notorious B.I.G.’s head and a Tupac Shakur lyric: “You know my momma used to tell me / if you can’t find something to live for / then you best find something to die for .” Lilley and Hegstad both loved rap, and they played it all day long, so loud it echoed through the walls.
赫格斯塔德的房间位于楼梯顶部，“就像他是丛林之王一样。” Lilley 在他的房间里贴了一张 Notorious B.I.G. 头像的墙贴花和 Tupac Shakur 的歌词：“你知道我妈妈曾经告诉我/如果你找不到为之而活的东西/那么你最好找到为之而死的东西……”莉莉和赫格斯塔德都喜欢说唱，他们整天都演奏说唱，声音大到在墙壁里回响。
“They were like my little brother’s age,” Hegstad later told me.
“他们就像我弟弟的年龄，”赫格斯塔德后来告诉我。
“They were cool.
“他们很酷。
Semi-introverted, but fun.”
半内向，但很有趣。”
At 19, neither Lilley nor Greenfield were old enough to drink; they couldn’t enjoy the free beer on tap at the WeWork office they rented, much less get into clubs.
19 岁时，莉莉和格林菲尔德都还没有到可以喝酒的年龄。他们无法在租用的 WeWork 办公室享用免费桶装啤酒，更不用说进入俱乐部了。
Instead they spent their off-hours playing video games and ordering Chinese food.
相反，他们在下班时间玩电子游戏和点中餐。
There were parties at the loft, on the rooftop, but the guest list was selective—either people they worked with or could possibly work with, because Hegstad, Greenfield recalled, didn’t “associate with the plebes.” Lilley discovered Hegstad had a talent for networking, a lot of people did in L.A.
阁楼上、屋顶上都有聚会，但宾客名单是有选择性的——要么是与他们共事的人，要么是可能共事的人，因为格林菲尔德回忆说，赫格斯塔德“不与平民交往”。莉莉发现赫格斯塔德有社交天赋，洛杉矶很多人都有这种天赋。
There were friendly people in the city, for sure, but when Lilley met other people in his business, like the people at the roof parties, they always seemed to want something.
当然，城里有友好的人，但当李利遇到他的生意中的其他人时，比如屋顶派对上的人，他们似乎总是想要一些东西。
One guest was a British YouTube star who Lilley and Greenfield found repellent.
其中一位客人是一位英国 YouTube 明星，莉莉和格林菲尔德对他感到厌恶。
Greenfield : He was like, “Wow, this is such a great view.
格林菲尔德：他当时想，“哇，这景色真美。
I want to come and fuck a girl up here.
我想来这里操一个女孩。
I want to set up a screen.”
我想设置一个屏幕。”
Greenfield : And then someone was like, “But all those neighbors can see you.” Because if you’re on our roof, there’s at any given time hundreds of people that can see you.
格林菲尔德：然后有人说，“但是所有这些邻居都能看到你。”因为如果您在我们的屋顶上，任何时候都有数百人可以看到您。
And he’s like, “I don’t care.
他说：“我不在乎。
I’d set up a screen and broadcast it.”
我会搭建一个屏幕并进行广播。”
Lilley : And not to mention the police in their helicopters.
Lilley：更不用说乘坐直升机的警察了。
That’s a crime.
这是犯罪行为。
Exposure.
接触。
So-Relatable and its associated blogs had a good summer, and in September they made $24,296.26 with Google AdSense.
So-Relatable 及其相关博客度过了一个愉快的夏天，9 月份他们通过 Google AdSense 赚了 24,296.26 美元。
With traffic on the rise, Hegstad suggested they move to DoubleClick, Google’s premium ad network, and the move made October their biggest monthly payout to date: $54,269.33.
随着流量的增加，Hegstad 建议他们转向 Google 的优质广告网络 DoubleClick，此举使 10 月份成为迄今为止最大的月度支出：54,269.33 美元。
Lilley and Greenfield’s tax returns showed they made $249,000 that year.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 的纳税申报表显示，他们当年的收入为 249,000 美元。
The three of them started to think about building a company that would connect brands to Tumblr blogs and cut out the middleman—or better yet, become the middleman and take a cut.
他们三人开始考虑建立一家公司，将品牌与 Tumblr 博客连接起来，并省去中间商——或者更好的是，成为中间商并从中分一杯羹。
(“Everyone who’s been a publisher has had that thought,” said Lilley.) It would be a platform on which social media accounts could find advertising campaigns to post on their site, and they would charge a portion of the revenue for the convenience.
（“每个出版商都有过这样的想法，”利利说。）这将是一个社交媒体帐户可以在其网站上找到广告活动并在其网站上发布的平台，并且为了方便起见，他们会收取一部分收入。
They’d call the company Exposely.
他们称这家公司为“Exposely”。
But at the end of 2013, disaster: AdSense banned Lilley and Greenfield just as they were due a large check—Greenfield estimated it was $50,000.
但在 2013 年底，灾难发生了：AdSense 禁止了 Lilley 和 Greenfield，因为他们应该得到一大笔支票（Greenfield 估计为 50,000 美元）。
Months later, an anonymous person claiming to be a Google employee would post a supposed tell-all on Pastebin, a text-sharing site used primarily by coders, claiming that AdSense intentionally bans people just before big checks are due.
几个月后，一名自称 Google 员工的匿名人士在 Pastebin（一个主要由程序员使用的文本共享网站）上发布了一条所谓的“揭秘”，声称 AdSense 故意在大额支票到期之前禁止人们使用。
(Many tech blogs suspect the confession is a fake.) A class action lawsuit was filed against Google in 2014, and Business Insider noted, “ Google often behaves so mysteriously that many advertisers and publishers will actually welcome the suit: It may finally shed some light on exactly how and why Google kicks web sites out of its vast, $60 billion-a-year advertising system.” The class action case was dismissed in early 2015, as was a similar suit, in which Google canceled a site’s account when it allegedly owed $535,000 , then later reinstated it, but didn’t pay the money.
（许多科技博客怀疑这一供词是假的。） 2014 年，有人对谷歌提起了集体诉讼，《商业内幕》指出，“谷歌经常表现得如此神秘，以至于许多广告商和出版商实际上会欢迎这起诉讼：它最终可能会揭示谷歌到底是如何以及为何将网站踢出其每年价值 600 亿美元的庞大广告系统的。”该集体诉讼案于 2015 年初被驳回，还有一起类似的诉讼，谷歌在据称欠下 535,000 美元的情况下取消了一个网站的账户，后来又恢复了该账户，但没有支付这笔钱。
“It was a huge wake-up call,” Lilley said.
“这是一个巨大的警钟，”利利说。
“It felt like working somewhere, putting in a lot of work, and you show up one day and they throw all your shit in a box and they’re like ‘get the fuck out’ and they won’t even say why you were fired.”
“感觉就像在某个地方工作，投入了大量的工作，有一天你出现了，他们把你所有的东西都扔进了一个盒子里，他们就像‘滚出去’，他们甚至不会说你为什么被解雇。”
Still, they continued with Exposely, sometimes working 60 hours a week.
尽管如此，他们仍继续使用 Exposely，有时每周工作 60 小时。
The pair hardly ventured outside the loft.
两人几乎不敢走出阁楼。
Hegstad hired a developer, Greenfield worked on support, while Lilley recruited bloggers from Tumblr, focusing on users with the biggest accounts.
Hegstad 聘请了一名开发人员，Greenfield 负责支持工作，而 Lilley 从 Tumblr 招募了博主，重点关注拥有最大帐户的用户。
Through So-Relatable they’d met many users with high follower counts—the same kids who were trading promotional links in the Facebook groups.
通过 So-Relatable，他们结识了许多拥有大量关注者的用户，也就是那些在 Facebook 群组中交换促销链接的孩子。
Lilley would eventually recruit a few hundred kids, mostly teen humor blogs, whose combined Tumblrs would total an estimated 35 million followers.
Lilley 最终招募了几百名孩子，其中大部分是青少年幽默博客，这些博客的 Tumblr 粉丝总数预计将达到 3500 万。
His recruits included the biggest teen comedy blog of all: Pizza.
他的新成员包括最大的青少年喜剧博客：Pizza。
Jess Miller was 16 in the spring of 2014.
2014 年春天，杰西·米勒 (Jess Miller) 16 岁。
She had just weathered the racism controversy and now had more than half a million followers.
她刚刚经历了种族主义争议，现在拥有超过 50 万粉丝。
David Karp had been following her for a year.
大卫·卡普已经跟踪她一年了。
Her boyfriend started a Tumblr with the user name Moistbottom, and while they didn’t really write about their relationship, they were the subject of intense fan interest.
她的男朋友用用户名 Moistbottom 创建了一个 Tumblr，虽然他们并没有真正写下他们的关系，但他们却成为了粉丝强烈兴趣的对象。
(When an anonymous user asked Moistbottom, “how far have you and Jess gone?” he responded, “ TO THE BEACH .”)
（当一位匿名用户问 Moistbottom，“你和 Jess 走了多远？”他回答说，“去海滩。”）
Lilley and Greenfield were unabashed fans of Miller; they respected her social strategy and were quick to recall her best posts.
莉莉和格林菲尔德都是米勒毫不掩饰的粉丝。他们尊重她的社交策略，并很快回忆起她最好的帖子。
Lilley sent her a Facebook message the day he arrived on the West Coast : “i’m in LA!” Even before Exposely, they’d had a business relationship: Lilley and Greenfield paid her $10 to reblog three posts to her huge audience.
Lilley 在抵达西海岸的那天给她发了一条 Facebook 消息：“我在洛杉矶！”甚至在 Exposely 之前，他们就已经建立了业务关系：Lilley 和 Greenfield 付给她 10 美元，让她向她的庞大受众转发 3 个帖子。
Miller was “very fair with her prices,” Lilley said.
利利说，米勒“的价格非常公平”。
“It was like buying popularity, but it was real.” When Miller had started making money off of her Tumblr, her mother had to create the PayPal account for her because she was under 18, but the bank account was solely Miller’s.
“这就像购买人气一样，但这是真实的。”当米勒开始通过她的 Tumblr 赚钱时，她的母亲不得不为她创建 PayPal 帐户，因为她还不到 18 岁，但银行帐户完全属于米勒。
Her mother told me at her peak her daughter was making $2,800 to $8,400 a week in U.S. dollars—more than she herself earned as a Melbourne-area real estate agent.
她的母亲告诉我，在她女儿的巅峰时期，她每周的收入为 2,800 至 8,400 美元，比她自己在墨尔本地区做房地产经纪人的收入还要高。
In Facebook messages, Lilley congratulated Miller on reaching new milestones.
在 Facebook 消息中，莉莉祝贺米勒达到了新的里程碑。
When she hit 800,000 followers, he wrote, “i’m just waiting for you to hit a million, not if but when.
当她的粉丝达到 80 万时，他写道：“我只是在等你达到 100 万，不是是否，而是何时。
just keep doing your thing you obvi don’t need me to say that to you I just am sometimes blown away like woah so yeah.” Miller was always gracious: “thank you!!
继续做你的事情吧，你显然不需要我对你说这些，我只是有时会被震撼，哇，所以是的。”米勒总是和蔼可亲：“谢谢！！
hahaha i rly hope i get 1 mill cos that’d be crazy wow.” In April 2014, Lilley messaged Miller about a new way to make money: “I’m signing up people, would love for you to be one of our first publishers on exposely!”
哈哈哈，我真希望我能得到 1 个工厂，因为那太疯狂了哇。” 2014 年 4 月，Lilley 向 Miller 传达了一种新的赚钱方式：“我正在招募人员，希望你能成为我们的第一位发行人之一！”
Exposely had a major selling point for kids in a similar position to So-Relatable: Its Google AdSense account would be a way for teens who’d been banned to still make money from ads.
对于儿童来说，Exposely 的一个主要卖点与 So-Relatable 类似：它的 Google AdSense 帐户将成为那些被禁止通过广告赚钱的青少年的一种方式。
Exposely offered its publishers both pay per click and pay per conversion.
Exposely 向其发布商提供按点击付费和按转化付费的服务。
The pay-per-click scheme worked like this: Exposely set up three garbage content sites with mindless slide shows— 14 Celebrities That Look Like Mattresse s—called Trending.ly, Styles.ly, and Eats.ly.
按点击付费的计划是这样运作的：Exposely 建立了三个垃圾内容网站，用无意识的幻灯片放映——14 个看起来像床垫的名人——称为 Trending.ly、Styles.ly 和 Eats.ly。
There were ads on each page of the slide show, and the kids would post a couple slides from the site on their Tumblrs, with the right headline and text along the lines of omg this is so funny .
幻灯片放映的每一页上都有广告，孩子们会在他们的 Tumblrs 上发布该网站上的几张幻灯片，标题和文字都是正确的，天哪，这太有趣了。
The ads tracked which Tumblr sent the traffic, and the teens were paid 75 percent of the ad revenue for each click.
这些广告会跟踪哪些 Tumblr 发送了流量，青少年每次点击都会获得 75% 的广告收入。
The pay-per-conversion program could make more money, but it cost its users something else entirely.
按转化次数付费的计划可以赚更多的钱，但它却让用户付出了完全不同的代价。
Hegstad got an account at a health affiliate network—a snake-oil sales depot.
赫格斯塔德在一个健康联盟网络——一个万金油销售站——获得了一个账户。
The idea was to create an advertisement mimicking a Tumblr post, and the ad would include a link to a diet pill site.
这个想法是制作一个模仿 Tumblr 帖子的广告，并且该广告将包含一个减肥药网站的链接。
If a person clicked on the ad, went to the site, and bought a bottle of pills containing synthetic raspberry ketone, the Tumblr user who reblogged the ad would get $18—after Exposely took a $20 cut.
如果一个人点击该广告，访问该网站，并购买了一瓶含有合成覆盆子酮的药丸，转发该广告的 Tumblr 用户将获得 18 美元——而 Exposely 则扣除了 20 美元。
Raspberry ketone is a compound that gives raspberries their distinctive smell and taste.
覆盆子酮是一种赋予覆盆子独特气味和味道的化合物。
In its natural form it is very expensive, and is often used by the perfume industry.
其天然形式非常昂贵，并且经常被香水工业使用。
Synthetic raspberry ketone, however, is cheaper to produce, and when Dr. Oz hailed the substance as a miracle fat-burner in 2012, he began a raspberry ketone media frenzy.
然而，合成覆盆子酮的生产成本较低，当奥兹博士在 2012 年称赞这种物质是一种神奇的脂肪燃烧剂时，他开始了覆盆子酮媒体的狂热。
One study indicated mice fed a super high dosage while on a high-fat diet did not gain as much fat in the liver, but there’s no evidence it makes humans thin.
一项研究表明，在高脂肪饮食的情况下喂食超高剂量的小鼠肝脏中的脂肪并没有增加那么多，但没有证据表明它会使人类变瘦。
In 2013, a 24-year-old woman fatally overdosed on a version made by Forza —the pills also have a ton of caffeine.
2013 年，一名 24 岁的女性因服用 Forza 生产的药物过量而死亡——该药片还含有大量咖啡因。
Hegstad figured out a way to make a landing page for the diet pills by looking at what his competitors did.
赫格斯塔通过观察竞争对手的做法，找到了一种为减肥药制作登陆页面的方法。
(“I would hate to say clone and modify,” he said, “but that’s kind of a good place to start.”) It resulted in a huge conversion rate—as high as 10 percent—by featuring before-and-after photos claiming people had lost weight with the pills, and a video of Dr. Oz claiming they burn fat.
（“我不想说克隆和修改，”他说，“但这是一个很好的起点。”）它带来了巨大的转化率——高达 10%——通过展示声称人们服用药物减肥的前后照片，以及奥兹博士声称他们燃烧脂肪的视频。
(The celebrity doctor was berated at a 2014 Senate hearing for misleading his audience about the efficacy of “miracle” weight-loss supplements.)
（这位名人医生在 2014 年参议院听证会上因误导观众关于“神奇”减肥补充剂的功效而受到严厉斥责。）
“The whole point of the video was to reinforce that this is a real thing, this has been on television even,” Lilley said.
“视频的全部目的是强调这是真实的事情，甚至在电视上也出现过，”利利说。
“It was just crazy how much it worked,” he said, not of the pills, but of the landing page.
“它的功效真是太疯狂了，”他说的不是药丸，而是着陆页。
So in between Tumblr posts about life’s daily tragedies, like someone stepping on the back of your shoe, there appeared these diet pill posts.
因此，在 Tumblr 发布的关于生活中日常悲剧的帖子之间，比如有人踩到你的鞋后部，就会出现这些减肥药帖子。
A Tumblr user explained to me that So-Relatable had an advantage by posting these ads, because their blog had a theme of relatable quotes and life hacks.
一位 Tumblr 用户向我解释说，So-Relatable 发布这些广告有一个优势，因为他们的博客的主题是相关的引言和生活窍门。
The fit was natural.
合身很自然。
“Life Hack: You can lose 20 pounds per month with this magic pill.”
“生活窍门：使用这种神奇药丸，您每月可以减掉 20 磅。”
Lilley wrote the diet pill ads, and as with all his work on Tumblr, he did it very well.
Lilley 撰写了减肥药广告，就像他在 Tumblr 上的所有工作一样，他做得非常好。
He began by reading up on David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising ,” and he learned the best ad is often the one that doesn’t seem like an ad.
他首先阅读了“广告之父”大卫·奥格威的著作，他了解到最好的广告往往是看起来不像广告的广告。
“The idea was to make an ad that looks like word of mouth from a fellow user,” he said.
“我们的想法是制作一则看起来像是其他用户口口相传的广告，”他说。
It’s easy to ignore a TV spot by a stranger, “but if it’s presented to you in a way that she’s your peer, she’s a similar person to you, you don’t even know her in the same way, but it feels different.
人们很容易忽视陌生人的电视广告，“但如果以她是你的同龄人、与你相似的人的方式呈现给你，你甚至不以同样的方式认识她，但感觉不同。
It’s like it seems more genuine.” You know, more relatable.
看起来好像更真实了。”你知道，更相关。
“Hi I’m Brittany and this is my weight loss story!” Lilley crafted his testimonials from a girl’s perspective, honing the copy, making sure the line breaks were just right.
“嗨，我是布列塔尼，这是我的减肥故事！”利利从女孩的角度撰写了他的感言，打磨了文案，确保换行恰到好处。
The posts showed the familiar diptych of a woman looking self-conscious and curvy on the left and happy and thin on the right, and underneath, a testimony about pounds melting off without pain and suffering.
这些帖子展示了熟悉的双联画，左边是一位女性，她看起来不自然，曲线优美，右边看起来快乐而瘦弱，而在下面，则是关于体重在没有痛苦和折磨的情况下融化的见证。
“‘My best friend recommended it’ was one of my more major contributions,” Lilley said.
“‘我最好的朋友推荐了它’是我最重要的贡献之一，”利利说。
He read from the post: “‘I lost 24 pounds in four weeks with minor exercise and no change in diet.
他在帖子中读到：“‘我在四个星期内通过少量运动且没有改变饮食，减掉了 24 磅。
Here’s how I did it: with this organic supplement’—that doesn’t sound good.” But “ ‘Here’s how I did it: with this organic supplement my best friend recommended ’—just seemed to me more real-sounding and …
我是这样做的：用这种有机补充剂’——听起来不太好。”但是“‘我是这样做的：使用我最好的朋友推荐的这种有机补充剂’——在我看来听起来更真实……
just makes it seem like in the back of someone’s mind they could think, well, my best friend could have recommended this to me.”
只是让人觉得在某人的内心深处他们可能会想，好吧，我最好的朋友可以向我推荐这个。”
Exposely’s diet pill scheme got going in April 2014, and it worked—it worked like crazy.
Exposely 的减肥药计划于 2014 年 4 月开始实施，并且非常有效。
Trending.ly got almost 7 million views that month, and with the diet pill ads, they sometimes achieved a conversion rate near 10 percent.
Trending.ly 当月获得了近 700 万次浏览，通过减肥药广告，他们有时实现了接近 10% 的转化率。
Once, across all their blogs, Exposely made $24,000 in a single day.
有一次，Exposely 在他们所有的博客上一天赚了 24,000 美元。
The Tumblr teens loved it.
Tumblr 青少年很喜欢它。
Lilley showed me messages asking when they’d get their money—pay-for-click was monthly, pay-for-conversion was weekly—often doing the math to make sure they were paid for all conversions.
Lilley 向我展示了询问他们什么时候能收到钱的消息——按点击付费是每月，按转化付费是每周——通常会进行计算以确保他们为所有转化付费。
One kid messaged Lilley, “i’m so proud of you and all your hard work.” Lilley had to explain to Miller she had to fill out a tax form—“we need to have everyone fill one out like to run our business legitimately and stuff.” But he had good news: “check your balance tho :)” She replied, “YOURE THE BEST PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD TJANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU :))))))”
一名孩子给莉莉发信息说：“我为你和你的辛勤工作感到骄傲。”莉莉不得不向米勒解释，她必须填写一份纳税表——“我们需要让每个人都填写一份，比如合法经营我们的业务之类的。”但他有好消息：“检查一下你的余额:)”她回答说，“你是全世界最好的人，谢谢你，谢谢你:))))))”
Then in June 2014, Pizza reached an unheard of milestone for a Tumblr teen: “pizza hit 1 million followers today.
然后在 2014 年 6 月，Pizza 达到了 Tumblr 青少年闻所未闻的里程碑：“今天，Pizza 的粉丝数量达到了 100 万。
I am small and weak,” one Tumblr user wrote.
我又小又弱，”一位 Tumblr 用户写道。
“everyone buy pizza today to celebrate jess pizza hitting 1 million followers!” another said.
“今天大家都买披萨来庆祝杰西披萨粉丝突破100万！”另一个说。
“HEY BIG CONGRATS!!
“嘿，恭喜！！
I KNEW YOU’D DO IT J OMG A MILLION HOW’S IT FEEL,” Lilley told her.
我知道你会做这件事，天哪，感觉怎么样，”莉莉告诉她。
Miller replied: “THANKS!!
米勒回复：“谢谢！！
AND IT FEELS SO GOOD LIKE WOW 1 MILLION PEOPLE?!?!
感觉就像一百万人一样好哇？！？！
J” Lilley wrote back, “YEAH THATS AMAZING …
J”莉莉回复道，“是的，太棒了……
HERES TO THE NEXT MILLION …
献给下一个百万……
YOU DESERVE IT ALL …
您值得拥有这一切……
Btw wanna get another reblog deal going?”
顺便说一句，想再进行一次转发交易吗？”
That same month, Lilley wrote another Tumblr user, “in a few months I bet we’ll be doing milli’s.
同月，Lilley 给另一位 Tumblr 用户写信说：“我打赌，几个月后我们就会做 milli’s。
We got our biggest check ever from Adsense coming for Exposely, 160k coming.
我们从 Adsense 收到了有史以来最大的一笔支票，来自 Exposely，16 万美元。
That’s for everyone that posted rev-share including us but still.” For Lilley, the “milli’s” didn’t come.
这适用于所有发布收益分成的人，包括我们，但仍然如此。”对于莉莉来说，“米利”并没有到来。
In July 2014, Exposely was banned from AdSense too.
2014 年 7 月，Exposely 也被 AdSense 禁止。
It was the next month that it happened.
事情发生在下个月。
On August 19, just days before his twentieth birthday, Lilley tried to log in to So-Relatable but couldn’t.
8 月 19 日，就在他 20 岁生日的前几天，Lilley 尝试登录 So-Relatable 但无法登录。
Greenfield checked the site, which redirected to an error page: “There’s nothing here.
格林菲尔德检查了该网站，该网站重定向到一个错误页面：“这里什么都没有。
Whatever you were looking for doesn’t currently exist at this address.” They’d been terminated, their blogs revoked by Tumblr for violating its terms of service.
无论你要找什么，这个地址目前都不存在。”他们因违反服务条款而被 Tumblr 终止，他们的博客也被撤销。
Tumblr had just dissolved the sites of some of its most popular teenage users, an estimated 30 million follows gone .
Tumblr 刚刚解散了一些最受欢迎的青少年用户的网站，估计有 3000 万粉丝消失了。
Including Pizza.
包括披萨。
Blogs that had brought relief from unremitting high school agony and then miraculously made their teen creators more money than they could have ever imagined, were erased from the internet, except for fragments reblogged on other sites.
一些博客让他们从高中的持续痛苦中解脱出来，然后奇迹般地让他们的青少年创作者赚到了超出他们想象的钱，但这些博客都从互联网上被删除了，除了在其他网站上转发的片段之外。
The day before, if they’d had a funny thought, they could share it with half a million people.
前一天，如果他们有一个有趣的想法，他们可以与五十万人分享。
And now, nothing.
而现在，什么也没有了。
For three days, Jess Miller stayed in bed, shocked.
杰西·米勒震惊地躺在床上三天。
My blog is gone.
我的博客不见了。
Over the next week, the terminated teens created a huge Facebook group chat; its thousands of messages are filled with anguish and denial and regret: “They took away our lives,” and “The worst part is that everything was just ripped out from under us.” One user heard of another user who got her blog back by claiming she had cancer; another said they were related to a lawyer; and slowly the messages revealed the cruel social dynamics of high school:
接下来的一周，被终止婚姻的青少年创建了一个巨大的 Facebook 群聊；它的数千条信息充满了痛苦、否认和遗憾：“他们夺走了我们的生命”，“最糟糕的是，我们身下的一切都被夺走了。”一位用户听说另一位用户声称自己患有癌症，从而恢复了她的博客；另一个人说他们与一位律师有关系；这些信息慢慢地揭示了高中残酷的社会动态：
yeah i feel that …
是的，我觉得……
but most of my real tumblr friends have left now
但我大部分真正的 tumblr 朋友现在都离开了
and the fact that like half our friends wrote us off like we literally got kicked out of the high fc humor blog club lmao
事实上，我们一半的朋友都注销了我们，就像我们真的被踢出了高级足球俱乐部幽默博客俱乐部一样 lmao
i just don’t understand how the hell people could be so two faced
我只是不明白人们怎么会这样面对两个人
Especially the new people that think they’re top shit theres always like waves of new people on tumblr that rise up and make it shittier
尤其是那些认为自己很糟糕的新人，总是像 Tumblr 上的一波又一波的新人崛起，让事情变得更糟糕
i remember hitting 25k on my blog at the end of 2k12 and being so happy
我记得在 2k12 结束时我的博客达到了 25k，我很高兴
Miller was invited to the chat, but as was often the case, she was talked about far more than she actually talked.
米勒被邀请参加聊天，但正如通常的情况一样，人们谈论她的次数远远多于她实际谈论的内容。
Other banned kids pasted Tumblr posts from Miller’s haters—when one user wrote “how did pizza get deleted?” another replied “don’t question blessings.” In the group chat, kids were puzzled by the intensity of the emotion Miller inspired.
其他被禁止的孩子粘贴了米勒仇恨者的 Tumblr 帖子，其中一名用户写道“披萨是怎么被删除的？”另一个人回答说：“不要质疑祝福。”在群聊中，孩子们对米勒所激发的强烈情感感到困惑。
“I don’t understand why so many people followed her if they hated her…” Another replied, “lmfao her blogs gone and ppl r still talking about her so famous.” Impersonators grabbed URLs like iwaspizza.tumblr.com; hundreds of people tweeted at her, asking where she’d gone.
“我不明白为什么这么多人讨厌她而关注她……”另一个人回答说，“我的博客消失了，人们仍然在谈论她如此出名。”冒充者抓取了 iwaspizza.tumblr.com 等 URL；数百人向她发推文，询问她去了哪里。
Lilley and Greenfield had unwittingly spread the poison that would kill a huge section of the teen Tumblr world.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 无意中传播了毒药，这种毒药会杀死 Tumblr 青少年世界的很大一部分人。
Lilley had told his friends they were safe (“I fucked up telling you guys that”), but he lost his accounts, too, and wouldn’t have used the ads if he knew it’d get them banned.
利利告诉他的朋友们他们是安全的（“我告诉你们这些是他妈的”），但他也失去了自己的帐户，如果他知道这些广告会被禁止，他就不会使用这些广告。
After all, Tumblr ran ads for diet pills too, Lilley sent me a screenshot of one—among several bottles was one containing raspberry ketones.
毕竟，Tumblr 上也有减肥药的广告，Lilley 给我发了一张截图——在几瓶中有一瓶含有覆盆子酮。
(A Tumblr spokesperson acknowledged the ad “appears to be a violation of our ad policies,” and was possibly part of an ad network that is “no longer in effect on Tumblr.”)
（Tumblr 发言人承认该广告“似乎违反了我们的广告政策”，并且可能是“在 Tumblr 上不再有效”的广告网络的一部分。）
This has not changed Tumblr’s mind about the banned users.
这并没有改变 Tumblr 对被禁止用户的看法。
“Even the most savvy online teens can sometimes fall victim to the modern spammer,” Danielle Strle said when I asked about the Great Termination.
“即使是最精明的网络青少年有时也会成为现代垃圾邮件发送者的受害者，”当我问及大终结时，丹妮尔·斯特尔 (Danielle Strle) 说道。
She acknowledged this is partly because it’s harder to monetize fame on Tumblr than on other social networks.
她承认，部分原因是在 Tumblr 上利用名气比在其他社交网络上更难赚钱。
“It’s easier to be tempted by stuff that promises you the most money or the most return for your reach.
“那些承诺为你带来最多金钱或最大回报的东西更容易受到诱惑。
I think they were perhaps underwhelmed by maybe more professional options that promise less payment.” (In January 2015, Tumblr launched Creatrs Network , where the company pays Tumblr artists to create ads for brands like Converse and Tresemmé.) Users can still put whatever banner ads they want on their page, she said.
我认为他们可能对承诺更少报酬的更专业的选择感到失望。” （2015 年 1 月，Tumblr 推出了 Creatrs Network，该公司向 Tumblr 艺术家付费，让他们为 Converse 和 Tresemmé 等品牌制作广告。）她说，用户仍然可以在自己的页面上放置他们想要的任何横幅广告。
“Where it crosses the line is if they’re abusing the viral mechanisms of Tumblr.”
“如果他们滥用 Tumblr 的病毒机制，那就越界了。”
In addition to “non-genuine social gestures,” Tumblr terminates blogs for “spam or affiliate marketing” and “deceptive means to generate traffic/revenue.” Lilley argued that Twitter never bans people for tweeting diet pill ads, but his many, many emails to Tumblr have led nowhere.
除了“不真实的社交行为”之外，Tumblr 还因“垃圾邮件或联属营销”和“以欺骗性手段产生流量/收入”而终止博客。 Lilley 辩称，Twitter 从未禁止人们在 Twitter 上发布减肥药广告，但他向 Tumblr 发送的许多电子邮件却毫无结果。
“They never thought it was a violation in the first place,” one blogger told me.
“他们从一开始就没有想到这是一种违规行为，”一位博主告诉我。
“No one tried to be sneaky.
“没有人试图偷偷摸摸。
All they saw was money, not the safety of their blog, which was potentially worth more than whatever they made.”
他们看到的只是金钱，而不是博客的安全，而博客的安全可能比他们赚的钱更有价值。”
Two months after the termination of the Tumblr teens, Fast Company ran a puff piece on Dennis Hegstad and his empire .
Tumblr 青少年被终止两个月后，Fast Company 发表了一篇关于丹尼斯·赫格斯塔德和他的帝国的吹捧文章。
“He’s not just tweeting for fun; he’s tweeting for big money—and he’s winning,” the magazine wrote.
“他发推文不仅仅是为了好玩；他在推特上赚了大钱——而且他赢了，”该杂志写道。
“In Hegstad’s model, clients are charged a fee for services that include affiliate marketing, lead generation, and content distribution.
“在赫格斯塔的模式中，客户需要支付联属营销、潜在客户开发和内容分发等服务费用。
In other words, getting the goods in front of the right kind of eyeballs.
换句话说，就是让商品出现在合适的眼球面前。
Campaigns run as high as six figures.” By then, many of Exposely’s sources of revenue had disappeared.
活动金额高达六位数。”到那时，Exposely 的许多收入来源已经消失。
A remaining campaign peddled sunglasses whose lenses supposedly worked like an Instagram filter .
剩下的一场活动兜售太阳镜，据称其镜片的作用类似于 Instagram 滤镜。
Lilley and Greenfield said Hegstad had promised them equity in Exposely, and Hegstad confirmed they’d discussed both equity and becoming partners, but the company’s future was uncertain.
Lilley 和 Greenfield 表示，Hegstad 已向他们承诺获得 Exposely 的股权，Hegstad 证实他们已经讨论了股权和成为合作伙伴的问题，但该公司的未来尚不确定。
Exposely still exists, and Hegstad is listed as the founder on its web site, but the day I talked to him the site was down—its security certificate had expired.
Exposely 仍然存在，Hegstad 在其网站上被列为创始人，但在我与他交谈的那天，该网站已关闭——其安全证书已过期。
Hegstad agreed Exposely was the apparent reason several blogs were terminated and that users associated with the site were still at risk.
Hegstad 同意 Exposely 是多个博客被终止的明显原因，并且与该网站相关的用户仍然面临风险。
“A lot of the Tumblr bloggers who were using Exposely a year ago that haven’t used it in almost a year have lost their blogs.”
“许多一年前使用 Exposely 的 Tumblr 博主已经快一年没有使用它了，他们的博客都丢失了。”
In February 2015, Lilley and Greenfield left the loft in downtown L.A.
2015 年 2 月，莉莉和格林菲尔德离开了洛杉矶市中心的阁楼。
and returned to Reading.
并返回雷丁。
According to their tax returns, the pair made only $72,000 in 2014, a third of the previous year’s revenue.
根据他们的纳税申报表，两人 2014 年的收入仅为 72,000 美元，仅为上一年收入的三分之一。
With neither AdSense nor Exposely to turn clicks into cash, there wasn’t enough money to afford life in L.A.
由于 AdSense 和 Exposely 都无法将点击转化为现金，因此没有足够的钱来维持在洛杉矶的生活。
Back in Pennsylvania, Lilley and Greenfield worked to rebuild but kept hitting more walls.
回到宾夕法尼亚州，莉利和格林菲尔德努力重建，但不断碰壁。
They joined an affiliate marketing program with ChaCha, which offers a service in which users can submit a question and a ChaCha human will answer in real time.
他们加入了 ChaCha 的联盟营销计划，该计划提供了一项服务，用户可以提交问题，ChaCha 人员将实时回答。
In June, ChaCha canceled So-Relatable’s accounts while a large payment was due.
6 月，ChaCha 取消了 So-Relatable 的账户，同时需要支付一大笔款项。
Lilley showed me emails he exchanged with ChaCha’s financial controller.
Lilley 给我看了他与 ChaCha 财务总监交换的电子邮件。
“Unfortunately, the program has not been profitable for us, so now we must make some difficult changes.
“不幸的是，该计划尚未为我们带来利润，所以现在我们必须做出一些艰难的改变。
This means we will be deferring indefinitely the payment scheduled for June 7,” he wrote on June 5.
这意味着我们将无限期推迟原定于 6 月 7 日支付的款项，”他在 6 月 5 日写道。
Greenfield grumbled, “How can it not be profitable if they didn’t pay anyone?” Lilley isn’t sure what to do now.
格林菲尔德抱怨道：“如果他们不付钱给任何人，怎么可能不盈利呢？”莉莉不知道现在该怎么办。
Facebook’s algorithms make it hard to get their content in front of much more than 10 percent of the people who like their pages.
Facebook 的算法使得其内容很难呈现给超过 10% 的喜欢其页面的人。
He’s thinking about Instagram—everybody said to get into Instagram, but he doesn’t know how to do it—and he’s been holding on to a commercial YouTube URL that he might start working on.
他正在考虑 Instagram——每个人都说要进入 Instagram，但他不知道如何去做——而且他一直持有一个商业 YouTube URL，他可能会开始研究这个 URL。
When I visited Lilley and Greenfield last September, they were earning around $8,000 a month posting ads for surveys on their remaining blogs, which was OK, but they wanted more.
去年 9 月我访问 Lilley 和 Greenfield 时，他们通过在剩余博客上发布调查广告每月赚取约 8,000 美元，这还好，但他们想要更多。
Hours after I drove away from the Greenfield family home, Tumblr terminated another one of their sites, NowYouKno, so they turned their focus to Movie, which had 185,000 followers—it was soon terminated, too.
在我开车离开格林菲尔德家几小时后，Tumblr 终止了他们的另一个网站 NowYouKno，因此他们将注意力转向了 Movie，该网站拥有 185,000 名粉丝 - 它很快也被终止了。
So were VinesNow, So-True, and ListHacks.
VinesNow、So-True 和 ListHacks 也是如此。
Now they’re building WordPress sites instead of Tumblrs: MightyFacts.com and RelatableCards.com.
现在，他们正在构建 WordPress 网站，而不是 Tumblrs：MightyFacts.com 和 RelatableCards.com。
(Tagline: “Cards that make you nod.”) WordPress gives them more freedom, but the sites haven’t gotten much traction.
（口号：“让你点头的卡片。”）WordPress 给了他们更多的自由，但这些网站并没有得到太多的关注。
Lilley is done with diet pills.
莉莉已经吃完减肥药了。
He never planned to do them in the first place.
他一开始就没有打算这么做。
He still feels responsible for the end of Pizza, and he still can’t believe she’s gone.
他仍然觉得对披萨的结束负有责任，他仍然不敢相信她已经走了。
“Jess.
“杰斯。
I still can’t wrap my head around it, ever,” he said.
我仍然无法理解它，永远，”他说。
“She liked something of mine on Instagram the other day, and I was just like, Damn.
“前几天她在 Instagram 上点了我的一些东西，我当时就想，该死的。
She lost all of it.”
她失去了一切。”
In a way, Miller is better off; she’s younger, after all, a Tumblr tween turned Tumblr teen.
从某种意义上说，米勒的处境更好。毕竟，她更年轻，从 Tumblr 少年变成了 Tumblr 青少年。
She graduated high school last November and was accepted to a college program to study commerce and arts.
她去年 11 月高中毕业，并被大学录取，学习商业和艺术。
Greenfield and Lilley quit college as freshmen to make a career out of their Tumblrs—it’s the only way they know how to make money.
格林菲尔德和莉莉在大学一年级时就退学了，开始通过自己的 Tumblrs 谋生——这是他们知道如何赚钱的唯一途径。
While reporting this story, I went to a dinner party with a group of people who make their living writing on the internet.
在报道这个故事的同时，我和一群以互联网写作为生的人参加了一个晚宴。
The conversation turned to teens; the consensus was that modern kids are dumb and boring.
话题转向了青少年。人们的共识是，现代的孩子既愚蠢又无聊。
“Girls these days don’t keep diaries,” one woman said.
“现在的女孩不写日记了，”一位女士说。
“I think that means they don’t have inner lives.” That we would soon depart for a thirtieth birthday party was no coincidence—you don’t have to fear the teens if you can live in denial about your own looming obsolescence.
“我认为这意味着他们没有内心生活。”我们很快就要出发去参加一个三十岁生日聚会，这并非巧合——如果你能否认自己即将过时，你就不必担心十几岁的孩子。
Having spent several years among teens who have freely laid bare their inside jokes, their Facebook messages, and their deepest thoughts, I think there are three phases of understanding the teens.
与那些自由地吐露内心笑话、Facebook 消息和最深层想法的青少年相处了几年，我认为了解青少年可以分为三个阶段。
At first you loathe the teens, because you know nothing about them and think they’re idiots, beneath you.
起初你讨厌这些青少年，因为你对他们一无所知，并认为他们是白痴，比你低等。
Then you love the teens because you figure out they are smarter than you, and you make peace with the death of your cultural relevance, because you know you’ll be in good hands.
然后你爱这些青少年，因为你发现他们比你更聪明，你会接受文化相关性的消失，因为你知道你会得到很好的照顾。
Finally, you recognize the shape of the adults they’ll become, corrupted by money and vanity and hubris just like everyone else.
最后，你会认识到他们长大后的样子，就像其他人一样，被金钱、虚荣和傲慢所腐蚀。
And you’ll see yourself in them because they’re relatable: That moment you realize the teens are just like you.
你会在他们身上看到自己，因为他们具有相关性：那一刻你意识到这些青少年就像你一样。