An interview with the man who keeps uploading my feet to WikiFeet
thecut.com
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This question has always been weird to me, but apparently there are people who don’t experience “this thing is good, i wish to contribute” or “this has brought me joy, i wish to give something back”. I mean, thankfully there are still enough others that we can have Wikipedia, where you also don’t get anything in return. Not even “clout”. Sometimes someone will send you a thank you and that’ll make your day. Open Source is another obvious one, but it extends to the real world, too. Some people will plant flowers in public places or do yarnbombing or pick up trash in the neighborhood or whatever. Why do it? What do you get out of it? I mean, I don’t want to be harsh saying “what a dumb question”, but it just kind of makes me uncomfortable how it challenges something that should be celebrated.
The next question about it being invasive is good and valid, but this one on its own just sounds like “why not content yourself with passively consuming”. I’m glad he called himself “generous” because it’s true.
I have literally never experienced this feeling. I've thought about why I haven't a lot, and for me I think it's because I have no inherent sense of "community".
No, the thought wouldn't even occur to me. I'd just recognize the mistake and move on to what I was doing at the time.
On wikipedia? As someone who has not spent years building up a reputation? No, it would just be reverted in ten seconds flat by whoever had nominated themselves as guardian of the truth about Nick Cage.
The most that’s ever happened is that I’ve had my edits reverted until I added citations. Since then I include them by default and haven’t had it happen in years.
I don't have any reputation on Wikipedia but I have made dozens of small corrections to it, and they seldom get reverted (though they are sometimes improved upon, which I'm fine with).
Reputation on Wikipedia helps with edit wars and flamewars, on contested issues. But just fixing a spelling error or a link is not usually a contested issue.
Wikipedia is a great resource, but at some point the knee-jerk deletionists won over the culture behind the scenes. It’s toxic for outsiders for the most part.
I'm willing to accept that each person's experience is different, perhaps it's just unfortunate, but it seems to marry up with a lot of other self-reported wikipedia experiences I've seen on HN over the last several years.
You're not really contributing, it's more akin to showing off your stamp collection, but with sexual undertones that make many feel uncomfortable.
You can't copy paste, but you're also not supposed to come up with stuff yourself.
The scenario includes bringing potential harm to an identified person.
> my own wikiFeet profile, which included my full name, birthday, and photos of me and my exposed feet
"Presumably"... Presumably, for better or for worse, lots of people use their real names online, not just celebrities, and there's no reason to presume that people that share the images won't also share the name of the person.
Regardless, if someone refuses to hire you because your feet appear on a foot fetish site... it would be a very odd refusal. Perhaps if your feet were involved in some immoral activity, but on its own it's pretty meaningless.
"I'm sorry, but I found images of your bare-naked foot in the sand, online -- I don't think we'll be able to move forward with this. You might encourage others to expose their feet, or make people uncomfortable once they've seen your big toe."
"your feet are hot, I saw them on Instagram"
if you do this, please return to recover your work before the weather gets it. (maybe you can deploy it again in a new spot!)
He seemed respectful and she seemed unbothered by the whole ordeal. Interesting, not my cup of tea, but definitely interesting.
Something else that caught my attention was how early he believes his interest for feet developed, as early as six and nine years of age. I wonder how this slightly amusing predilection grows and develops over time, as to even gain sexual connotation.
Women's heels, in Western Europe, evolved from shoes worn by Persian cavalrymen; they were designed to stay in the stirrup. You still see something similar in "cowboy boots".
Women appropriated the shoes as a symbol of empowerment at a time when other "butch" fashions were being borrowed (e.g., epaulets). That they made intimidated clomping noises as you walked around was half the appeal.
Then the shoes became more and more "feminine", culminating in the "stiletto", which takes its name from a dagger used to finish off armored soldiers.
So they've always been symbols of violence.
Which makes all the more ironic that their wearers experience feet aches and leg problems, and view them as tools of male oppression. Maybe you should just stop clomping around in the things. They ruin good marble floors, make loud noises, and pain me just to look at. The whole point is for riding a horse. If you're off a horse, then it's like walking around in ski boots.
Personally, I believe this has much more to do with the taboo nature of feet (as they are usually seen as dirty), similarly to other fetishes (e.g. urine).
Foot fetishism is by no means a modern phenomenon driven by advertising.
i think everything that is closed/covered becomes such a taboo/fetish. Feet have been in shoes (and under a long dress for women) most of the recent times. Give a couple years more of the mask regime and lips/noses would become taboo/fetish too :)
Lately it’s gotten to be more of an “in theory” than “in practice” thing for me as I’ve come to learn about fungus and micro biome, etc.
Eg https://au.news.yahoo.com/man-contracts-lung-infection-smell...
You mean, besides them being awesome?
Check out the "The Penfield homunculus" and note that in the brain's sensory map, where we process foot sensations is very close to genitalia.
It's other people's feet people like, not their own (and so don't themselves feel those sensations when they touch them or whatever).
So it would not be something that a person is just interested in and grows with time, but a primal thing that just gets activated at a certain age for him (just like attraction to a different/same gender for most of us)
Mix it with rule 34 and you got things like WikiFeet or some Czech site which is literal database of nude scenes in our whole cinema history (sorted by movies, actresses and director including screencaps of course).
The thing that makes me double-take is the consistency, breadth and depth, and liveness of the tag system.
Like, I want this level of OCD, meets del.icio.us, meets HN.
Them, knowing more than you might assume: "OwO what's this?"
You: possibly now a furry due to inversion of plausible deniability
On a more serious note, within the circle of my friends this falls into "prank link" category - rickrolling etc.
Rule34.xxx, gelbooru, danbooru. Truly a wonderful world we live in!
It's a pleasure to speak with you. Conversation is a sacrament (and an art well beyond me). I hope to capture what I love about the web: people who make life worth living.
For those who haven't already seen them (these people are rockstars), I'm also a huge fan of my beloved: https://wiki.waifu.haus/, https://sphygm.us/, and https://kickscondor.com/ - these treasures inspire me quite a bit.
Kickscondor was actually the person who first led me to your site - I enjoy their content too. I'll check out these other two as well, thank you!
Gwern's also a really interesting and passionate Internet Person, though I know you've had some interactions with him so I'm just mentioning him for the benefit of others. I've run into a couple of other treasures in my time but I'm not consistent enough at maintaining a PKM to have them to hand sadly. Maybe someday I'll start a public personal wiki of my own!
"At the end of our interview he asked me to print out the piece, step in paint, step on the story, and mail it to him with my foot autograph. I might."
absolutely incredible line
Remember RateMyVomit and RateMyPoo? Real class acts. Brought to you by the fine people that ran rotten.com.
Kids, these days...they don’t know what they’re missing...
... it's like the 90's are staging a comeback, wholesomeness and all ...
It may seem like she's being a good sport and isn't bothered by this at all, but I don't think you can draw that conclusion.
It otherwise could have been titled “An interview with the man who uploads my feet”, but I guess that one doesn’t invoke as much outrage.
Some human quirks are fun. Maybe because this guy doesn't look intimidating.
Foot people always leave me feeling creeped out when I encounter them online and I think it is at least partly because it seems like many of them enjoy making others squirm about their affinity for feet almost as much as they enjoy the feet themselves.
I believe everyone has a right to their own fetishes. Nothing wrong with being into feet. But the thing that really puts me off about this interview and the WikiFeet website is the lack of consent. Uploading photos of someone without their consent is wrong. The fact that the purpose is to satisfy a fetish adds an extra layer of creepy. Regardless of how the interviewer feels about it, and regardless of whether the photos came from a public Instagram account, it's not ok to upload photos of someone to a fetish website without their consent.
To see them where I posted them. Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. Copyright, fair use and such is a hot and nuanced topic, but the bottom line here is that personal pictures getting shared is not what most people expect to happen, understandably so.
Parents post pics of their babies all the time. It would be easy to make wikibabies, like wikifeet. Who is at fault in this case? At least this lady is an adult and posted her own pics.
Real world is messy...
This just isn't true in practice on the internet. It never has been, and it never will be.
Plenty of argument about copyright law on my siblings, but if you've ever been anywhere near a community that posts porn for each other, you will know that copyright law is the last thing they care about. Consent a close second.
Don't you assign this copyright to the social media service? Legally, if your Facebook photos get posted to another site, I think Facebook gets to complain, but not you - you signed those photos away, for Facebook to use for any purpose they like (even including a foot fetish website).
I don't disagree with you on what people expect, but it's worth reiterating that reality does not match their expectations. Facebook owns your Facebook photos, not you.
Most of the terms-of-service agreements I've seen state that the creator retains the copyright, but grants the site a non-exclusive license to display the content.
Assigning the copyright would be problematic. For example, a professional photographer who posted their photo to Facebook would lose their right to sell the photo or post it to another site if they didn't retain the copyright.
It's more complicated than that. What actions require a license? Nobody needs a license to create a hyperlink. The concept of a "link license" was a big subject of debate in the 1990s, but after much hand-wringing and heated discussion, we converged on a permissionless model for hyperlinking on the web. I think everyone here understands the high value of frictionless linking.
Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site. But what could be done about it? Permissioneless linking is a huge boon for the web and humanity. Should we add friction to linking just because foot fetish sites exist?
Okay --- what if it's not linking, but actual photo embedding? Still, we'd need to examine the costs and benefits. Embedding public content in another context is great for commentary, synthesis, and other creative transformations. People love to showcase hard work and beauty. Should we add friction to photo embeds everywhere just because some squicky foot fetishists use embeds to aggregate images? Again, it doesn't seem worth it.
Ultimately, we have to learn to let things go. There will always be people in the world who use public things in a "wrong" way: a politician you don't like may use your favorite song in a campaign; a company might use your open source library to make a product you'd prefer not to exist; or public property records might let speculators arbitrage prices in a way that seems unfair. But whenever we're tempted to Do Something about people using the public thing in the wrong way, we have to think "is this Doing Something going to be net positive? What about the value of the commons itself? Am I willing to destroy that just to Do Something about this one thing?" Most of the time, the answer is "no".
Let's not suppose this. This site does not do this. It doesn't show photos in their original context (e.g. Instagram), nor does it even display the 'original' image (meaning IG hosted image) out of context - which would also be wrong.
It's primary use case is to literally re-host unlicensed images out of their original context without permission (even though it's 'rules' state otherwise).
Yep, what furyg3 said. I always think about cases like that from a creator perspective. If I'm a painter, I probably sell my work, so it's in my interest that every usage lead back to a canonical place where I expect to make sales/build following/communicate with fans. So reposting a picture and posting a link to a said place I chose are absolutely different things.
There's always fair use, which should cover things like education, citation, etc. That's a different topic.
And don't get me wrong, copyright system is broken and rotten to the core, but some of the concerns on which it builds are perfectly reasonable.
This is the weird part. If aliens showed up and started viewing the site in question, they'd probably mistake it for reference material, some kind of critical encyclopedia.
That's a huge loss of generality.
I don't think so. The author's core discomfort (to which I'm sympathetic) seems to not be about the image hosting, but about people enjoying pictures of her feet in a way that makes her uncomfortable. I don't think that wikiFeet moving to a hyperlink model would alleviate the author's discomfort with wikiFeet existing, so we need to talk about that core discomfort, not about the specific mechanics of image sharing.
Not really. It's just a couple of innocent javascript lines away (on a browser extension) to the site with visible photos.
Also the obvious massive difference that such a model would allow the original poster to delete the image.
But legal or not, I think it ought to be considered common decency not to post photos of someone on a fetish website without asking for their explicit permission to do so.
Well, they're in facebooks domain now, so you really don't have a tell in whats okay and what not after you uploaded them[0].
> but I still find it morally wrong and disturbing.
that's okay of course, but it obviously won't stop anyone from doing anything they deem okay and acceptable. How are the supposed to know what you find morally wrong and disturbing, anyways? For all they know those pictures are public and you want to present yourself to the world.
> legal to republish someone's public Instagram photos
According to the link that's instagrams business, not yours. If facebook doesn't care then there's not much you can do about it since you don't have royalities over the pictures in which you appear.
> But legal or not, I think it ought to be considered common decency not to post photos of someone on a fetish website without asking for their explicit permission to do so
Some people would consider "not poisoning the public water supplies forever" common human decency, but that doesn't stop multiple actors from doing so. "human decency" is not worth a penny on the internet, which is in my opinion common knowledge that we try to teach kids in primary school here. It does not matter what you think, since it's out of your hands you made your data public.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2249952/Face...
2. text links sure, because it has a whole other behavior and then if someone wants they can take the picture down, make it private or whatever. same thing for iframe but I bet it won't happen there because instagram itself will shut down the iframing reeaaalll quick.
so in short, yes, if it was a bunch of other things that have some similarities but are not exactly the same it would probably be ok with people.
People have the right to write non-nice things about you (as long as it's not libel). They can write that they don't like you for whatever reason, or they can write that they get off thinking about you. There's freedom of expression to do stupid, non-nice and indecent shit.
The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged.
That's alright. I'm pretty much indifferent to the whole thing, but I still enjoyed the interview. Notice that the man may be "quite damaged", but still the first thing that he does is ask the interviewer if she was offended by her public photos being there, and offering to delete them.
> "ask the interviewer if she was offended by her public photos being there, and offering to delete them."
You may see that as being polite, I see that as just another creepy power play, where he's now implying he has control over her pics.
So based on that posting personal information like address, name, age etc. Without consent can put this site out of business after few fines.
I agree with you, morally. However, there is no hope of controlling what someone thinks when looking at your uploaded photos.
What you see as a technicality is actually a big difference. No one on wikiFeet would have seen the pictures of the interviewer if someone hadn't posted it.
Posting something is not explicit consent to do whatever with it. Would you say the same if these pictures were appearing on a shirt for example? Or if they were used in a movie, or in a newspaper article?
The very first site rule is "uploading copyrighted photos is forbidden unless you have permission from the copyright owner" which I presume is supposed to shield the site owner from this legal issue, but I think we can all agree that the vast majority of photos on this site do not meet this requirement.
And secondly there is the question of context. I may give my employer permission to put my photo on their "About Us" page, but I would not be amused if the later transferred it to a "Consultants who we will never work with again" page.
Context is the problem and it is unclear. In most countries you can't really prevent people from saying things about you. If someone wants to post online that they like you feet they are allowed to do so. I agree that when this is distilled to a database of people and their feet it feels a bit weird, but I struggle to find a point where it becomes not ok.
So the foot fetish website is infringing copyright. And the author of the image can sue them for damages.
They can also ask ISPs to blacklist the page if they don't comply.
Kind of all the stuff that the MPAA does when they find a movie rip on someone's server, the photographer could do here, too.
On the other hand, copying a picture to another website can also be a copyright infringement.
Ps. This also doesnt cover copyright claims.
The legality of it depends on copyright and on TOS of places where it was uploaded originally.
Imagine that instead of rehosting the images they just linked to the original source on social media. This is now legal, but is it "right" to aggregate images under this context?
This is saying that you have nice feet, which may make some people uncomfortable, and isn't necessary "right", but is completely different.
Foot fetishists are SO common. If you don't count the boob & ass normies, foot fetishists are a clear number one in the fetish sector.
I don't know if they're that common or they're just easy to cater to (taking a few pics of feet isn't a huge issue for anyone who makes a living on their looks).
Now that I am older, I have come to appreciate the time, ambition, energy and reward that goes into being a public figure. I am also a bit wiser to the whole game of getting attention whilst pretending that you are not looking for it.
I feel like the best way to deal with this situation is just to accept that its all OK. Its OK to be an young, rich, attractive white woman. Its OK to publish pics of yourself on instagram. Its OK to be into feet. Its ok to like and share public content that you find online. The message of the article is that its a bit weird, but its OK. Lets not be too quick to shame and judge.
(The comments about Jennifer Aniston were interesting too- there is clearly a subtext here about the reach and power of women on these platforms, and again- this is all OK!)
> I feel like the best way to deal with this situation is just to accept that its all OK.
It's not all ok. It's ok to be into feet. It's ok to be any age, race, class. It's ok to publish anything you want about yourself in any way you choose. I'm not judging or shaming any of those things.
What's NOT ok is using/sharing someone's photos without their consent. In legal terms, it's likely a violation of copyright laws. In terms of morality/decency, it's a violation of respect for another person's boundaries.
> Yeah. For example, a musician from England who performed barefoot, like I’ll find a picture I think is sexy, and I’ll put her name in IMDb. And she didn’t have a page, so I couldn’t post hers. But you did.
I feel the same way, but this seems to me to be a rule to make sure that only pictures of people who have considerable public exposure to begin with are okay to be posted, which seems sensible to me.
How about ESPN and athletes? They sell fetish obsession 24/7 to sports addicts of every possible variety. Fetishists obsessed with how tennis players grunt. You name it.
WikiFeet apparently has an IMDB rule in terms of who may be published, which seems within the realm of being reasonable as a cut-off.
And I strongly suspect that if the owner of eg Instagram photos that are being published on WikiFeet wanted them taken down for copyright reasons, WikiFeet would certainly comply with a simple email.
A bit of a harsh, knee-jeek reaction to something entirely meaningless. Topped with a vague proposition of privacy in a public forum.
It's just feet. Unless someone knows you, your "privacy" isn't likely to be in peril from a site filled with feet.
From a legal consent perspective are you also opposed to google image search for the same reasons, that google did not get consent to redisplay the resulting images? What about pictures of public personas in news articles where consent was not given? Could I prevent my friends from posting unflattering pictures of me? What if I google images of feet to get off on? Maybe consent should apply to audio and written information, so people are not quoted out of context?
The legalities around consent seem to get complicated, and conflict with other legal precedent. Also you might have a hard time convincing other people of the harm in feet pics, and that might be the first thing you need to do to get a law passed against it.
Why does my browser lie to me like this?
edit: inspect element clearly shows
<a href="https://www.wikifeet.com/Laura_Bassett"> my wikiFeet page</a>
Yes, mousedown replace the href attribute, and then a few milliseconds after put the original link back. To debug that king of thing, you just put a break point on attribute modification of the link attributes, and you will see there is js triggered
> What's going on here? Is it replacing the links on mousedown?
Yes. Observe what happens to the URL shown when you right-click the link.
(Usually, those comments get downvoted, so please feel free.)
I feel this submission is too quirky and long-form for the front page of Reddit. On occasion HN does a good job surfacing these sorts of articles.
So you are absolutely correct. Hn is just reddit suddenly
But it is not ok for a group of collectors to organize collections on internet out of crops of publicy posted photos, for something completely legal?
How many users would continue to use Instagram?
Yet Sci-hub is not legal.
I think I'm in the wrong timeline.
Are there others out like me?
Where do you go to chat, and may I chat there, please?
Interestingly, while it's been around for years, the word "boob" means it's basically invisible to Google.
Now I can see an important problem to solve. Innovation!
I guess it's because feet just toe the line between ordinary photos - there are huge celeb sites - and more intimate ones you wouldn't want to see posted online.
Now, if it would have been 'young kids' instead of 'feet' it would be rather more unsettling. And I don't think many would think "its not his fault".
I'm for reducing the stigma around individuals who have pedophiliac thoughts but do not act on them but that is not what you are describing. You are talking about someone acting on them.
Sometimes you don’t need or want to know the low level details of your implementation :-)
I would really like to know how that works.
But, not becoming famous is something to strive for. or. not becoming famous is? Either / or.
I guess if you really think about it, adoring any body part is a “fetish”. It’s just socially acceptable to like tits or ass, and society has deemed adoration of feet as undesirable.
To fetishize the foot is something different.
I would think things that signal healthiness or contributors to increased chances of survival are subject to a biological response, rather than specifically reproductive parts. In which case, a foot devoid of issues can be a pretty big signal of healthiness, for example one not subject to bunions or flat footedness, etc.
Anyway I'm opting out of that one, I like my internet scent-free. I guess there may be some people who are really into smelling?
Wikifeet tries to ensure a person is actually a public figure via the IMDB requirement as there is really no objective and automated way to tell the difference. Should this woman qualify? She's been a well-known writer for over a decade, guest starred on several cable news shows, which is why she is on IMDB. Apparently, she's the woman who accused Chris Matthews of improper green room behavior, which led to his dismissal from MSNBC.
I can't say that means she deserves to lose all right to privacy forever, but that is unfortunately the tradeoff you make becoming even just a minor public figure, and she doesn't seem to mind. A person who really desires privacy can get some of it at least, more than this. Wikifeet doesn't allow anything like revenge porn or posting of hacked or stolen photos, and you can request to get them taken down if they belong to you.
Wikifeet also has a section of their site for people not classified as public figures, but you can only post pictures of yourself there and they're catalogued separately from the celebrities.
For what it's worth, if you go to her page, she seems to have posted more photos herself, which explicitly say they're dedicated to her fans on Wikifeet. And her site rating is up to 5 stars now.
Some of us, admittedly, like women with nice ass. I think feet is less creepy if you really think about it. But to each to their own!