What We Actually Came For
By the time YouPorn and RedTube had turned internet pornography into household furniture, the last person still pretending the web was for anything else was probably your grandmother—and honestly, probably not even her. What the internet wanted was obvious: bodies, friction, and the low-grade humiliation of watching people forget the camera was on.
Is Anyone Up? was the logical endpoint of all that. For just over a year, Hunter Moore ran what amounted to a revenge-porn clearinghouse—ex-partners submitted nudes, drunk hookups got documented, exhibitionists mailed in mirror selfies, and all of it went up, sorted and captioned, sometimes with a stupid gif pasted on top. People posted videos of themselves working toothbrushes and bottles into their bodies, held their cocks up to phone cameras with something approaching civic pride. The best-looking submissions collected thousands of comments from the desperately horny. The least attractive were immortalized as "Daily Gnargoyle." Bands submitted photos of their groupies under the header "Today’s Band Whore"—full roster of which members had fucked them included—in exchange for a hastily printed certificate and the kind of public record that requires a lot of explaining later.
The site should have been illegal everywhere and would have landed its operator in prison in most countries with functioning privacy law. In the US it existed in a legal gap the statutes hadn’t closed yet. Hunter fielded threats daily—girls wanting their bodies deleted from the internet, lawyers, fathers who had not prepared for this chapter of fatherhood. He archived those too, in their own category. The community thought it was hilarious. They felt untouchable. For a while, they were.
Someone stabbed him at some point. The site kept running.
What actually ended Is Anyone Up? wasn’t a court order. It was Hunter’s own decision, which is somehow more interesting than any legal takedown would have been. The site went offline a few days ago. He said it plainly: burnout, and a growing daily obligation to forward pictures of minors to law enforcement. He’d started the whole thing with negative one-twenty dollars in the bank and had needed his mother to cover nine dollars in server costs. It became the thing that made him briefly notorious for the worst possible reasons, and then apparently wore him down enough that when he met the founder of BullyVille—an anti-bullying advocacy site—he was ready to hear the pitch. The Is Anyone Up? domain now redirects there.
I’ll be honest about why I followed it so closely. Partly the obvious reason—naked people, obviously, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But what actually kept me coming back was watching Hunter build a genuinely loyal community in real time around something that had no business having one. Members tattooed inside jokes on themselves. They stripped down for merch photos. They defended the site in the strangest corners of the internet with the energy you’d expect from a cult, not a pornography index.
We exchanged occasional emails about exactly this—about how image works online, about what makes people return to the same URL compulsively, not out of enjoyment sometimes but out of something closer to need: hate, or love, or the fear of missing what everyone else saw. About how a real network is worth ten times a large one. He was more thoughtful about it than I expected, which probably says something about both of us.
Whether the BullyVille pivot is genuine conversion or just the next chapter of the same project, I honestly don’t know. He understands how to build loyalty and how to drive traffic; those tools don’t care which direction you point them.
Everyone whose body appeared on the site will be relieved it’s gone. Everyone else will find somewhere new to feed whatever mix of horniness and schadenfreude and low-grade voyeurism kept them clicking through. Neither outcome changes what Is Anyone Up? was, or how accurately it reflected what a significant corner of internet culture actually wanted—and had been wanting long before Hunter Moore came along to give it a name.