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Earlier this month, one of the most passionate reading communities on the internet erupted. The trigger was three words: Hot Girls Read.
If you’re not familiar with BookTok, it’s a sprawling, multi-platform community spanning TikTok, Instagram, and beyond, built around a shared love of books. It has been widely credited with getting millions of younger people reading, opening up genres to new audiences, and bringing books from different languages and cultures to readers who might never have found them otherwise. It is, by any measure, a remarkable community achievement.
Like any thriving community, BookTok developed its own language over time. Phrases like “slow burn,” “alphabet soup,” and “who did this to you” became shorthand: collectively coined, widely used, and owned by nobody and everybody at once. “Hot Girls Read” was one of those phrases, and one of the biggest tags in the community.
Then, on June 3rd, a small business owner announced she had successfully trademarked it.
Allie Mitrovich, founder of Allie Rose Co., had been an active member of the BookTok community for around three years, building a following and selling book-related merchandise. According to Forbes, she posted on Instagram to announce she had secured the trademark for “Hot Girls Read” across categories including bookmarks, stickers, notebooks, notepads, sweatshirts and t-shirts. She then asked other small businesses using the phrase on similar products to remove their listings.
The backlash was immediate and severe. Hundreds of videos and comment threads followed. Critics pointed to evidence of the phrase being used online since well before her trademark filing, and some argued it derived from the broader “Hot Girl” cultural movement associated with Megan Thee Stallion. A GoFundMe was launched to formally petition the trademark be revoked. Mitrovich eventually turned off comments on her TikTok entirely.
Within days, she announced she would abandon the trademark and donate proceeds from her Hot Girls Read merchandise to literacy charities. For many in the community, the damage was already done.
This story raises something that goes well beyond one creator and one phrase. It gets to the heart of what communities actually are and what they create together.
BookTok’s language didn’t come from a single person. It emerged from years of shared conversation, inside jokes, memes, and collective identity-building across millions of members. That kind of cultural output is one of the most valuable things a community produces, and also one of the most vulnerable.
When communities are built on commercial platforms, that vulnerability becomes structural. The very features that make social platforms powerful (discoverability, algorithmic reach, built-in tools to sell products and build personal brands) also create conditions where the line between participating in a community and capitalising on it can blur. The more a platform is built around revenue and personal brand-building, the harder it becomes to protect what a community has created together.
This isn’t unique to BookTok. It’s a tension that will only grow as more people operate as personal brands alongside their community memberships.
One of the more interesting things this episode surfaces is the question of mutuality: whether members of a community are there to give as well as take.
Most people enter communities for a reason. They have a question, a need, a problem to solve. That’s not a bad thing, and it’s often exactly why a community exists. But a community only thrives long-term when enough members move beyond their own needs and start contributing to others. When that balance tips too far toward the transactional, something gets lost.
The self-promotion question has shifted considerably over the past decade. What was once a rare and mostly obvious problem (a spammer dropping links to their product pages all over the place) has become far more nuanced. More and more community members are also personal brands, side hustles, small businesses. The line between sharing and selling is genuinely harder to draw.
That’s not a reason to close communities off from members’ outside lives. Celebrating what members create, build, and do beyond the community itself is actually part of what makes a space feel human. But it requires active thought about where the boundaries are, and consistent moderation to hold them.
If that slips, it can unravel quickly.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this story isn’t the trademark itself. It’s the ferocity of the response.
Thousands of comments. GoFundMe campaigns. Stickers reading “Hot Girls Don’t Trademark Community Phrases.” That level of feeling doesn’t come from nowhere.
It tells us that people feel an enormous sense of ownership over the communities they inhabit, even when they don’t technically own them, moderate them, or control their direction in any formal way. The identity is real. The investment is real. And when something threatens the integrity of that space, even something that’s technically legal, the reaction reflects just how much it matters.
That’s actually encouraging, in a strange way. The anger is evidence of care. It’s evidence that these spaces mean something.
For community managers, it’s also a useful reminder. The members in your community care about its integrity more than you might realise. They’ll notice when something feels off. And when trust breaks, it breaks fast.
This story doesn’t have a tidy resolution. The trademark has been abandoned, but the community remains unsettled. What it does leave behind are some questions that every community professional should be thinking about:
There are no universal answers. But the Hot Girls Read story is a useful, if uncomfortable, case study in what happens when these questions go unasked for too long.
For a full account of the events, Forbes has covered the story in detail – you can read it here.
