Everything2

» go to everything2.com now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

the first version, just called everything, went online in march 1998. nathan oostendorp put it up, one of the small group of michigan people who were running slashdot, which makes it a writing site almost three years older than wikipedia. i had never heard of it until a reader asked for it on this page. the content moved to new software in november 1999 and again in january 2000, and that second system is everything2, or e2.

the unit is a node, which is just a title, and under each title sit writeups by different people. one node can hold a dry encyclopedia entry, a poem, a recipe and somebody's diary about the worst day of their year, all under the same word. only the author or an editor can change a writeup, and e2 is very clear that this makes it not a wiki.

~ the game layer ~

somebody on the original team clearly played role-playing games. you earn experience points and levels for writing, and you need ten writeups and 500 xp before the site trusts you to vote. a writeup that an editor likes gets a "C!", which means cool. users are noders, and the chat panel on the side is officially the chatterbox but everybody calls it the catbox. for years the senior admins were called gods, a title that only works on a site where everybody knows everybody.

no images, and until february 2009 no outside links either. whatever you needed was supposed to be in the text, or one soft link away inside the site.

~ the decline that did not finish ~

august 2000 had 9,976 new writeups. february 2017 had 93. that is the same curve every community site from 1999 drew, and most of the others are graves here now. e2 also lost its servers once. when slashdot's owners moved their hardware in november 2003 the site was dark for about a month, then it lived on free rack space at the university of michigan, and later at michigan state.

in january 2012 the original owners handed it to everything2 media llc and jay bonci took over. nate's goodbye post called it "a good ride for 13.5 years". bonci is still there. the code is open on github, and in 2026 alone more than two hundred changes were merged, most of them his, including a database migration in june.

~ this morning ~

on 27 september 2026, the day i checked, the new writeups list had about fourteen different names on it, and the newest one, a book review, went up at 08:11 utc. the monthly site news post for september was out on the third. the site says it holds nearly half a million pieces of original writing. small now, but nobody turned the lights off.

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