“”"""" Gossip Girl Here, Your One And Only Source Into The Scandalous Lives Of Manhattan’s Elite. " xoxo Gossip Girl""""
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Wow. Never heard of it, since I left H/J in my teens to go to Eventing, then to Dressage. What a vile site. Won’t be going back.
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Yes!
Hard agree. That site is made to bully and talk badly about people in our sport. It is beyond immature and disgusting. I would like to think we have grown past this but clearly we have work to do as a community. I wish people would actually act like adults and treat other people in a decent manner. It’s the bare minimum.
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BACK and Dysfunctional is my sense after looking this up. Fortunately I have no idea who they are talking about with most of the names. Mean and ugly.
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Wow… CotH has it’s issues for sure, but seriously, going after an 18 year old for saving a beloved eventing venue? Do they want to kick some puppies while they’re at it?
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It is getting them clicks, so that is all that matters (to them).
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How do you all know what it says if you don’t have accounts?
Is there a way to read the posts without creating an account?
Diva is that site that people say they wouldn’t give so much as the bounce rate to but you know, late at night, after a little wine, they’re peeking 
And considering I have zero desire to show at WEF now, some would say it’s done some good in this world 
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Thank you.
I never heard of it before now. I was able to see the 4 things in the news feed without joining. I’m willing to go check out any website that isn’t an obvious virus farm scam, but I do give some thought to what I join. Just that brief glimpse was ugly and homophobic. I don’t see any need to investigate further.
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Diva is mostly made up of a miserable group of people, I have never posted but check it occasionally because they tend to be accurate when it come to gossip which in fact turns out to be true, so its not really gossip at all. I haven’t missed it while it was down and have no plans to even look at it anymore.
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Too close in tone to the Dressagehub nonsense.
OK, but don’t you think the question about “What bank lends an 18-year-old enough money to buy a farm” is a fair one?
No, no one on that site asked it in those words. But did CoTH also bother to ask or answer that question. So was this just a feel good praise piece or reporting?
The kid isn’t a douchebag, for being the signatory on that loan or not. But the question about what relationship CoTH wishes to have with its readers doesn’t make one an a-hole, either. A-hole or not, I thought CoTH’s style of praising those with privilege because that’s what ought to be relevant to all of us goes way back and it’s a main reason I don’t subscribe.
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Ok. Not to derail but I have wanted to talk about this but didn’t want to be that B to bring it up.That article irked me. Kid seems sweet and a hard worker but… No.
No bank is loaning money to an 18 y/o for anything, let alone property in an expensive NE state. Give me a break.
Also real patronizing to all of us living in reality who busted our bums for 30 years to finally get that itty bitty 3 acre farmette.
Privileged kid who decides to do good with family $$, h*ll ya, good for him! But I am not buying what that article was selling.
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If the bank gave the kid a loan I’m sure they have a reasonable expectation that he or perhaps there is a co-signer, can pay it back. Banks don’t just give money away.
I don’t care how privileged he is, he’s saving a farm that could easily have become another housing development, that’s what matters to me and should matter to the equestrian community. I’m tired of all the griping about people who are fortunate enough to have money too.
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Correct.
But let’s be honest. There was either a co-signor, or the kid had a trust fund to use to buy it. Which is fine. That’s none of my business…
And of course there was a down payment… that was in the hundreds of thousands.
But when the Chronicle wrote up a story saying he worked and saved and somehow convinced a bank to take a risk on his business plan or something (I can’t recollect the exact details of the article) - it comes off as bizarre and dishonest.
I hope the young man does great things with Huntington. But let’s be honest about one more thing… it was unlikely that property was in imminent danger of being turned into McMansions. It’s a very specific location in Vermont. Beautiful… but preserving open spaces from suburban sprawl is not the same issue there as it is in parts of Pennsylvania where his family came from, or in Loudoun County, or any number of other historically horsey areas where beautiful old farms are getting consumed by suburban developers. That whole angle of the article also fell flat with me.
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I also thought the tone of the article was a bit odd. I don’t begrudge the kid at all for buying the farm, if I was an independently wealthy kid you can bet I would have bought my own horse farm as soon as I was legally able to … but it was presented as though it was some sort of act of charity done with funds he’d scraped together on his own, when really it was just a wealthy young man buying himself a horse farm he’d always liked when it came up for sale. It is good news that he’s planning to continue holding events there, though!
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So the general tone of most “respectable” horse publications is fawning, boosterish, Pollyanna, somewhere between free advertising and a club newsletter. That’s quite standard for any publication that serves a small hobby group.
The solution is not to go to the nastiest possible toxic gossip mode complete with personal and homophobic slurs (in another news item). The solution is not to turn into Dressage Hub or HorseShowDiva and take a vindictive sociopath approach.
I just assume that articles on COTH are sunnyside up or at best over easy, and tread fairly lightly over the unavoidable bad things like Safe Sport bans or horse deaths. This is not hard boiled investigative journalism. But the corrective is not to lob rotten eggs at people.
Apologies for the breakfast metaphors.
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