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How The Fast Times Of The Paparazzi Came to a Halt
- oxide 11y agoGood riddance.
- lukev 11y agoNot that I disagree, but of all the problems in our society, those suffered by our poor celebrities are somehow the least of my concerns.
- bpodgursky 11y agoHow dare they successfully make music for a living, and expect their family to live normal lives! The arrogance.
- sliverstorm 11y agoMore like, they make lots of money so we have a right to make their lives a living hell and drive them to substance abuse & suicide!
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThey make lots of money by deliberately signing themselves up for privacy violations. The relation between celebrities and paparazzi is symbiotic, not parasitic, despite what the former sometimes say (or some even think). It's how popularity manifests and grows, and popularity is what celebrities make money on.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoSo are you saying that anyone who makes music for a living cares more about money than privacy? That there isn't anyone who would prefer to be able to entertain onstage and live a private life offstage, even if it reduces their income? Half the responses in this subthread seem to be from people who honestly believe that every actor and musician and athlete cares about money above all else and deserves any consequences of that drive, and it's just really bizarre.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI don't mean they care about money above everything else, not in a condescending way. I only mean that lack of privacy is a part of being a celebrity, and it is a fact about the nature of things, whether anyone likes it or not. Privacy issues come with the territory.
- jon-wood 11y agoExcept they don't sign up for privacy violations. They sign up to make music, or act in films, or whatever it is they do. I'm sure some famous people purposefully encourage paparazzi to follow them, but certainly not all of them. You must have noticed how most of the photos coming from paparazzi feature someone who's famous in particular circles looking pissed off at a gaggle of photographers following them around as they go to the shops with a hangover.
- pizza234 11y agoStars make a disproportionate amount because of their popularity; the same attachment that raises their value, goes along with the attention towards their private life. If popularity wouldn't generate such attention, they wouldn't certainly get such amounts of money.
- coldtea 11y ago>How dare they successfully make music for a living, and expect their family to live normal lives! The arrogance. How dare they successfully make crappy music for a living, beating the shit out of the art of music, and willingly watering down their offerings, while at the same time selling themselves as sex symbols and teenage idols, oftentimes willingly cooperating and provoking the media for cheap publicity, and expect their family to live normal lives!
- pjc50 11y agoRelatedly, "How dare someone go into politics and expect their family to live a normal life!" Later, "Why is everyone in politics about as human as a lizard in a suit?" Or, in the Daily Mail, "How dare someone be trans and attempt to work as a teacher! We must expose them!"
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- omegaham 11y agoI agree - they know exactly what they're getting into. "I didn't think that becoming a celebrity would screw up my private life," said no one ever.
- amyjess 11y agoOh, why yes, because children deserve to be harassed and stalked because they had the gall to be born to parents who are actors or musicians.
- chasing 11y ago"It's cool being a celebrity but I'd still like to be able to go outside without some tubby dude with a camera trying to piss me off so he can sell a video clip of me acting angry to TMZ so a bunch of people can make fun of me."
- gohrt 11y ago> tubby the fat-hate is unnecessary and plays into the same paparazzi culture that you decry.
- oxide 11y agothat's an adjective, not hate speech.
- tabio 11y agothat's a spic comment.
- chasing 11y agoI apologize. "Gentleman of above-average girth, who might weight more than the average person in our skinny-normative society but still has feelings, y'know, and it's hard to get McDonald's burger juice off of a white shirt if you're out for the night trying to get Lindsay Lohan to do something embarrassing and you don't have time to, like, do laundry, and so would just appreciate it if you wouldn't make a big deal about the way he looks while he's busy making fun of other people."
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThis is an incredibly dangerous position, all the more dangerous because it doesn't seem so. Fundamentally you are dehumanizing someone. You are denying someone the protections of civilized society, you are refusing to empathize with someone else's suffering. Because their status as famous and/or rich obviates the need for compassion. And yet, is that even remotely true? Does being rich and famous make someone so much happier and immune from suffering that a little extra suffering here and there (such as invasions of privacy by the paparazzi) still results in net less suffering than the average person? Every indication seems to point toward that not being the case in the vast majority of cases. And there are many indications that the cost of fame can indeed result in significant suffering, as many high profile suicides and overdoses after long battles with drug addiction testify. Celebrities are just people, they should be treated as such.
- bmm6o 11y agoIt's a shitty thing and it's a net positive if it goes away. You are free to use your time and energy to pursue those other things that you think are more pressing.
- edgesrazor 11y agoWow, chalk seeing a BuzzFeed article on HN as one of the last things I thought I'd ever see...
- mikeyouse 11y agoBuzzfeed does a fair amount of pretty good journalism, many of their articles have appeared here before.. JustFab: The Billion Dollar Startup with a Secret Past [1] Larry Ellison's Cat Island [2] Or literally dozens (hundreds?) of others. [3] [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278697 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10089747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10089747 [3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com
- FireBeyond 11y agoIt's true. There's definitely a noticeable segment of bitter Reddit users who complain "they stole that content from Reddit", blissfully unaware of the irony that most of the things "stolen" from Reddit often didn't originate on Reddit either, but they like to squawk about BuzzFeed (as it's only theft when it happens -to- Reddit).
- gph 11y agoMaybe, but my negative view of BuzzFeed has nothing to do with Reddit since I barely go there. It's more the fact that BuzzFeed is the tabloid of the internet.
- hammock 11y agoJust click on the (buzzfeed.com) at the top, dude
- sharkweek 11y agoTheir newsroom has attracted some pretty big names as of late. I used to find the site childish, but their BuzzFeed News section has won me over.
- chasing 11y agoI'll only read this if someone copies it and pastes it to another site with the title "12 Crazy Reasons Why the Fast Times Of The Paparazzi Came to a Halt." Nice that Buzzfeed is doing journalism. Shitty that it's funded off of their content theft...
- JulianMorrison 11y agoI honestly see the paparazzi photo scene as comparable to child porn (obviously, lesser, but on the same scale). Here we have a mass market of seemingly ordinary people consuming violations of other people in a way that makes it clear they don't see the victims as other than a source of titillation, an industry that serves this content up to them out of pure asocial greed, and these photographers actually going out there and committing the violations, because it's fun and the money is good if you don't have a working conscience and can depersonalize your prey. Each blames the others. Guilty, all of them.
- derefr 11y agoRegarding your analogy: I still never had it explained to me who pays child-porn producers. The economics of invasive celebrity photography go like this: companies pay (down-market) advertisers to get them name recognition; those advertisers pay tabloids for ad-space; the tabloid pays paparazzi for a hook to go on the cover. What are the comparable economics of child abuse?
- coldtea 11y agoDo the producers actually get paid, from some kind of market, or do they do it to on their own (like "amateur pornography") and just share it / leak it? The moral issues and the huge risks involved seem to big for people to go into that professionally and I can't imagine any viable market. Secondary sources might get paid for access of course -- or might even not, all those stories in the media always talk about forums / clubs etc. and people exchanging stuff, not so much paying for it.
- derefr 11y agoI know the supply side of the economy exists; the Russian mafia apparently does quite a bit of child-porn production, and probably it's not because they're a bunch of pedophiles. I'm just not sure where the demand side is. Like you said, I've also never heard of child porn "consumers" who weren't just trading the "amateur" videos created by others in the same groups. From another angle: jump on Tor and you can find places to buy stolen credit cards, hire hit-men, or order drugs within 15 minutes. But you'll never encounter a "put Bitcoins in, get illegal pornography out" page. Is this sort of stuff just really well hidden (which I doubt, given the Streisand Effect); or is it a semi-backwards "industry" that avoids using the Internet for anything; or what?
- chris_wot 11y agoAnd nothing of value was lost.
- majani 11y agoAny article about paparazzi is not properly balanced without a mention of the way many, many stars actually cooperate with them for media exposure.
- knodi123 11y agoluckily, this article mentioned that, > Little more than a decade ago, stars like Paris Hilton would “inadvertently” leak their plans to the paparazzi — part of the wink-wink symbiotic relationship that fueled their tabloid fame. But what once took an army of clamoring paparazzi can now be tweeted, Instagrammed, Snapchatted, and Vined.