Anime Web Turnpike

» see anipike.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The hub was the shape of the web i came online into. i started in 1998 on a modem and the way you found anything was a page of links somebody maintained by hand, sorted under headings, updated when they felt like it. Anipike was one of those and it was a very good one. It just pointed at a fandom i was not in.

Jay Fubler Harvey put it up in august 1995, early enough that most of what it linked to was somebody's personal page on a university account. Users submitted their sites and he filed them under a category, and the whole thing grew by accretion until it was carrying over forty thousand links. There was no algorithm anywhere in it.

That was the point. Search engines in the late 1990s were poor at a query like anime, which returns everything and nothing, and they were worse at the fan-page layer where the community actually was. Anipike solved it by having a person who cared read the submissions. look, for most of a decade it was the front door to english-language anime fandom, and it got listed as a must-visit beside operations with real budgets.

The Anime Broadcasting Network bought it in 2000 with plans to expand it, then ran into technical problems that delayed most of what had been announced. Harvey stepped away in january 2002. The site was relaunched and rebuilt more than once after that and it kept going in some form for another twelve years, but the era it was built for had already closed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the hub ~

The machinery involved was almost nothing. A hub was a hand-edited list. Somebody emailed you a URL, you decided which heading it belonged under, you added a line. The value came entirely from the editor's judgment about what deserved a line, which is the part that does not scale and the part that made it good.

Anipike also ran forums and a magazine at various points, which is the same move every successful directory of that era tried. Yahoo turned itself into a portal and dmoz turned itself into volunteer labor at scale. The Turnpike went toward community instead, and none of those routes survived google.

~ the decline ~

Google is the obvious answer and it is most of the answer. Once a search engine could rank pages by who linked to them, the hand-sorted list stopped being the fastest route to anything. i was watching the same thing happen to every directory i used at the time, in a different language and about a different subject.

The other half is that the fandom moved off personal pages. Anime News Network took the news layer and forums took the discussion, and by the mid 2000s the fan-site web that Anipike indexed was emptying into a smaller number of larger places. A directory of personal sites has nothing to do once the personal sites are gone.

~ what it became ~

The site went offline in 2014 and came back in july 2016 with nothing new on it. It has sat there since, a snapshot of a link list whose destinations mostly stopped resolving years ago. Most of what it points at is gone, so it works now as an index of the dead rather than a route to anything.

What it left is the habit. Every curated list that people still keep by hand, the awesome-x repositories and the personal link pages that came back into fashion, is the same object under a different name. The web got a search engine and then spent twenty years rediscovering that somebody choosing the links is worth something.

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