Enshittification reaches the wedding industry, revealing The Knot to be rotten
Three former employees of The Knot have blown thy whitsle. Jennifer Croom Davidson, former Global Fashion Director; Rachel LaFera, former Director of Fine Jewelry; and Cindy Croom Elley, former Account Executive at The Knot, have since left, are out from under NDA, and they’re truth-telling about one of the world’s largest wedding industry companies: The Knot Worldwide.
The Knot Worldwide is the current name of the parent company of WeddingWire, The Knot, The Bump, Hitched (which formerly had a presence in Australia, and disclosure, yours truly was a paid writer for them), a series of localised wedding directory websites through The Americas and Europe, and the Real Weddings TV show. They started as an AOL channel in 1996 and went to the open web in ‘97, and just before the dot com bubble burst they raised $35 million in their first IPO.
Since then lots of corporate shit has occurred, most of which bores me as someone who prefers to be on the “tools” in the wedding industry, not in the C-suite, but the trio dropped the bomb on The Lioness in an extremely detailed expose revealing that advertisers don’t get what they’re paying for and the whole business is terribly run.
This internal chatter among The Knot Worldwide’s customers is confirmed by looking at currently available web review sites; to this day, you can see complaints of contracts unfulfilled and impossible to get out of, and torrents of fake and spam leads. A recent Business Insider article also reveals that things are still amiss, reporting that 70–80 percent of the company’s leads are scams and that little to no inbound results from their advertising.
PetaPixel sums it up well:
Whistleblowers within the company say the supposed “swindling” issues began with vendors who purchased premium ads with the promise of generating new client leads, but instead were delivered spam content and even lost rankings within The Knot’s own ad-based search results.
The enshittification of the internet spares no person and knows no bounds. It is sad to see one of the few companies that made it through the dot com bubble to be revealed as rotten.
I’ve just finished reading Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P. W. Singer, recommended by my favourite Cybersecurity Guard, @qldnick 📚
It was a compelling and enjoyable read, and honestly, a refreshingly human conclusion that somewhat settles its disturbing and frightening chorus of a society a few years ahead of where we are today struggling with the effects of advancing technology.
Never go into battle with a bot you can’t trust and never trust a bot you don’t know how to snuff out.
The largest truth in this fictional read is that fear always takes the wheel, especially for those who have apparently been listening to the guy who said not to fear.
This is Luna, pitching you her idea for her new TV show. If you are a TV producer, Luna would like to sit down and talk about you buying the rights to her show.
Please, no tyre-kickers.
📷🇮🇹🚁 Fifteen of Monopoli’s best from my Mavic in Puglia yesterday
📷🇮🇹🏖️ Torre Canne, Puglia
One day we’ll have to explain to our grandkids that we all dressed daggy now because of Elon Musk.
Big news crew, new gender droppin
Doing the right thing is always the right thing
If you're interested in learning more about Tony Bennett's activism, take a look at this story from NBC, which covers his civil rights work. Bennett walked at Selma beside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., having been invited by the late, great Harry Belafonte.
⛪️ I did it, I finally did it. I crucified the sun.
… and other photos from the sunset over Monopoli, Puglia, this afternoon 📷🌇🇮🇹
This might be a silly question for an old nerd to ask, but for those that know the answer, why is the book he famously write in prison, ‘The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick’, not really listed as a book by him on his website etc? Also, the only eBook version I can find is on Kindle. Why?!
Derek Sivers in The past is not true:
Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present. We think of the past like it’s a physical fact - like it’s real. But the past is what we call our memory and stories about it. Imperfect memories, and stories built on one interpretation of incomplete information. That’s “the past”.
No matter how hard they try, the modern web can’t escape Wordpress.
📷🇮🇹🏖️ Family day at the beach at Cala Maka. The beach is apparently/allegedly called Torre Canne Nord Prima della Casa Grigia, which translated from Italian means, North Canne Tower Before the Gray House, which is the most romantic beach name I’ve ever read.
Good luck ever naming a beach better than that.
I shared these words from Craig Mod a year ago today. But since then we made the choice to uproot our life in Australia, move to Mexico, then leave Mexico, travel around the USA and Europe for a while, and come home to Australia in a month’s time.
I can guarantee I’m coming home changed, but like Craig, I’m also more confused than ever about why some people travel. I mean no judgement towards any of you, but I’ve been in Italy for a month now and it seems such a waste to leave in a few weeks. Even considering my feeling that I’ve barely seen or experienced anything, I still have a deeply resonating feeling that I’m selfishly taking in the culture here, and to do what with it? Just to give the girls a childhood photo album that was cooler than mine?
The romantic ideal of travel is to leave as one version of yourself and return another, changed, ‘better’ version of yourself. This trip changed me, but not in the ways you might classically expect. I’ve returned suspicious of travel, more confused than ever about why so many people travel. Unsure if most travel of the last few decades makes sense, or has ever made sense or justified the cost. It feels like some consumerist, uncurious notion of travel was seeded long ago and, like a zombie fungus, has mind-controlled everyone to four specific canals in Venice. To a single painting at the Louvre. To three streets and a square in Manhattan. To a few rickety back alleys around Gion. An eminently photogenic set of torii in Kyoto.
Regardless of my, and Craig’s, trepidations of travel being an unjustified expense or impact, I’m forever changed by 2020-2022’s travel-related traumas and 2023’s travel adventure.
🗺️ Where’s Josh’o? An update
Just going on the record for everyone who asks where we are, where we’re living now, and if we’re ever coming home to Australia: we’re in Italy then Paris and Singapore between now and getting home to the Gold Coast late August.
I’m back to work and at your service making weddings and elopements from August 22, 2023.
I’ve got travel around Australia and New Zealand for weddings and elopements through the end of this year and early next year before we head back to Europe in 2024.
I’ve also had some requests for the USA if you’re interested in having me there too.
June, July, and August 2024 for weddings and also elopements with The Elopement Collective and some of our team including Jason Corroto, House of Love Weddings, George Bowden, House Of Lucie, and Pearce Brennan.
Finally, I wanted to address something a few people have lovingly brought to my attention “I thought you only did elopements”.
I might be married to the @elopementcollective’s boss, but I create ceremony for all and sundry. Big weddings, small weddings, elopements, and corporate events as a master of ceremonies. As the band was named, I do weddings, parties, anything.
So very formerly: I do weddings as well. If you know someone getting married somewhere in the world and you reckon we’d be a fit, let them know I exist!
I think this would be an awesome idea: a mashup of a reddit-like voting system with events calendar and geotagging plus some Atlas Obscura.
Basically a “cool things near me and/or happening near me soon” web app.
Will the 2026 Commonwealth Games, originally supposed to be in Victoria, Australia, be the first ones to test the “Vancouver should be the permanent Olympic Games city” that Jonathan Fischer reignited seven years ago in Slate, of course but for the Olympic’s little sibling, the Comm’ Games:
That’s why the Olympics should relocate to a city that won’t just relieve the rest of the world of hosting duties for the Summer Games but of the Winter Games, too. It would have to be a place with the right climate. It would have to be a place that could afford it. It should possess something of an international flavour. It should have a proven track record. It should be located in a democratic country but not a hegemonic one. It should be Vancouver.
📷🇮🇹 40 degrees celsius today in Martina Franca, but the second you step into the shade the temperature drops about fifteen of those bad boy degrees.
Thought I would check on the two-year-old before going to bed …
