Type of site Shock/porn Created by Jay Stile Alexa rank 49,518 (April 2014) | Available in English Website StileProject.com | |
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Stile Project is a website founded by writer and webmaster Stile. Stile started the site when he was in high school, and ran it for 12 years under the alias Jay Stile. Stile Project grew into a large network of counter-culture, amateur adult entertainment and current-events sites, forums, and more, collectively called stileNET. On December 2, 2010, Stile announced that he had sold Stile Project; he confirmed the sale in 2012. According to Stile, after selling his website, he went on to study computer science and received his postgraduate academic degree in 2013.
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The Register referred to Stileproject.com as a "shock site" in a 2001 article. The website assembled "vast visual libraries of any taboo or depravity that could be digitized." In the early 2000s, as "the Web's leading repository of crude filth – probably the most reliable source of tastelessness in the history of the Internet," its content was criticized for its shock value. Particularly, a video showing a Korean villager killing, cooking, and eating a cat (from the BBC documentary "Culture Shock,) was highly publicized and denounced by PETA, who sought a federal investigation, which did not occur. Stile reportedly faked his own suicide live on webcam in 1999, and he confirmed the hoax in 2012.
Open-source software and porn were "memorialized in J. Stile's hoard of erotic Linux Slut images". As the site evolved, surviving purported webhost troubles, a major hacking incident and by 2004 purportedly "[not] grossing out teenagers anymore," the Stile Project's content grew increasingly pornographic.
Awards
Stile Project won Webby Awards in 2000 for Weird site and People's Voice winner.