ONTD

View the whole schedule here.

Their first day went as well as you could expect.

There was some miscommunication in the Dashcon crew’s hotel contract; while Dashcon thought they could pay after, the hotel staff insisted they pay before. A staffer wrote to clear the air that “The hotel and convention had agreed on a payment plan spread over the weekend, and the hotel decided to change the plan and ask for all the money last night.” This seems both highly unlikely and highly against a contract they had signed.

Then began the frantic PayPal donation drive, which smelled like a huge scam. Tumblr user hotgaze outlined the general flaw brilliantly:

Regardless, Tumblr got together and raised the $17,000 needed in no time at all. (here are the 'admins' explaining the whole money deal and someone calling them out) Not to mention protesting the hotel staff’s decree in the lobby by singing extremely loudly.

Meanwhile, the Dashcon participants quickly became the butt of angst and a lot of jokes. (the dashcon tag is full of these gems) From a blog that counts up all the things you could buy with that money to a social justice front protesting the utter injustice of privileged bloggers getting even more money to do nothing for a weekend.

In conclusion: yes, we acknowledge this is the first time anything on this scale has been put on by Tumblr bloggers. But that doesn’t excuse the poor behavior by the participants or the mistreatment of panel participants (but that’s a different story).

If you missed this years’, don’t worry. The DashCon entrepreneurs have your back.

TL;DR: A bunch of Tumblr kiddies all got rooms in the same pre-booked hotel, which the Dashcon staff supposedly had a verbal agreement with the staff of to pay them after the con, but the hotel contract said before. Thus, the Dashcon attendees and other various Tumblr sundries scraped seventeen thousand dollars together in like an hour (without any verification of whether or not the Dashcon staff actually needed the money or whether they were just scamming a bunch of kids), donated it to the hotel’s PayPal (which confused the fuck out of the hotel staff), and are currently protesting in the hotel’s lobby by singing Les Miserables songs to a bunch of underpaid and exhausted hotel employees with no control over the situation.

Summary of events so far:

• con staff trying to push more expensive tickets onto people that apparently came with a Steam Powered Giraffe show ticket (which is apparently not happening)


• vendor hall mostly empty for some undisclosed reason


• Welcome To Night Vale ditched the con and cancelled their panel and performance when DashCon would not pay them. attendees sat in the room for an hour before they got an explanation


• people paid RESERVE SEATS months in advance for the WTNV panel


• Con staff insisting they had people in the thousands attending and present at the venue, when real numbers were closer to 500


• Panels and events were not planned at all, with hotel mints being given out as prizes


• Games room had just a single TV in it and some tables


• there was a BDSM panel and DashCon allowed minors into it, along with other +18 panels where they did the same


• some people started to sing Let It Go and were verbally assulted


• DashCon meow blaming the bank for not being able to pay WTNV


• people are demanding partial or full refunds (and they will not likely see any of it due to the con not actually having any money)


• it has already spread around that DashCon was likely a scam


• last night they ran an emergency #SaveDashCon thing and raised like 17,000 bucks


• nobody knows where it went


• most of their contracts were verbal only


• rumors of the venue meow threatening to shut the whole thing down

Leave it to Tumblr users to conduct the single most embarrassing fan convention in world history

SOURCE

Post explaining some of the things that went wrong

Girl that was there for an hour talking about it