Darn, that looks awesome. I suspect it died from the usual "launching a small online community" problems of hitting critical mass, etc. Maybe this - or something like it - could take off given the right amount of care by a group of dedicated folks..
Yeah tbh I think they just gave up on it. It's running on autopilot these days with very little being done to turn it back into an actual community instead of a place where all you see is dead or dying low effort moneygrabs.
It had a great start[1], but died off quickly[2]. If that strong launch and big influx of users fell off (almost entirely it seems), what chance does it have of slowly reversing itself?
Momentum is vital for stuff like this. No one wants to contribute to an echo chamber. It's not very realistic that it'd regain momentum without major changes or a big sustained push from somewhere.
That said, it's not impossible that it could revive, but it's really unlikely. And once such a drop off has occurred, it's hard to stay motivated.
It was a microblogging platform; it had a chance to become a worthy competitor to tumblr from Europe but sadly, instead of gaining funding, it got spambots. Over the last 10 years a devoted community managed to grow around the site - it's hard to say how large in numbers but now it seems it wasn't enough to keep service running.
Well, for anyone still following, not quite sure what to think.
HN sent about 2000 uniques (between direct clicks and shares) with about 10000 page views on day 1. Then it died.... :)
I've reached out to a number of blogs to share the site and its initial success, reached out to folks on Twitter, etc., and -- for whatever reason -- it just ain't happening.
It's that whatever reason part that I'm interested in now -- I think there was ample opportunity built into the site for sharing, and a number of people actually did use these tools. I'm at a complete loss, then, as to where it went wrong.
Any thoughts on where I could have improved the social aspects? Or the site itself?
Guess we'll see. It could still "go," but I don't have a lot of time and resources at the moment to spend pushing it. It was fun to build and play with, anyway. :)
Yep, plenty of flotsam and detritus amid failures to launch. Look at sites like Friendster. Why did friendster ?die?
Failure to scale infrastructure in a cost effective way that matched it's growth curve. Also, Friendster failed to adapt and develop features that resonated with emergent user activity. Within a year or two, other players emerged to eat its lunch.
? ...and when I say "die," I mean decay into near total disuse and irrelevance by the end of 2004.
Stating the obvious that I don't see in this thread yet: If there really is an active community around it that wants to keep this alive, why don't those people get active, cut some deal with Amazon and then run the show on their own?
As the discussions here have shown, server space+traffic costs are expected to be low and could easily work with donations. Then you need some technically inclined people to put in the maintenance work in their free time, but that's the same as with basically every online non-profit community made by and for enthusiasts.
If that's not happening then clearly interest is just not big enough and shutting down the logical consequence. Web archive is still around (and we all should take a moment and consider a donation, whether you care abouy DPReviews or not.)
They killed it when they decided it would be a good idea to inflate user numbers with YouTube and Gmail users. It's better to have less but active users than a ghost town.
The article suggests it was killed by the same thing that kills all "total freedom, no moderation" chat forums. They attracted all of the pedos, trolls, and nutjobs and it killed the community, just like every single community that has tried this in the past. The concept just doesn't scale. You can't build a social platform without accounting for bad actors. It's like trying to build and airplane without accounting for wind resistance.
I agree. I stopped checking about 2 weeks ago because there were only about 3 people that ever posted anything. I like the concept, but it needs to hit critical mass and I'm wondering if the hype they received is going to be the thing that ultimately kills them.
The site was successful, but it doesn't look like it had a whole lot of potential for growth; more likely than not it already peaked and was losing steam due to an ever decreasing quality in submissions.
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