COSMiQ

» see cosmiq.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2006 I was at university with a ttnet line at home, which was the year the dial-up part of my life properly ended. Lycos iQ launched that january into a German-language internet I had no reason to be inside of. The barrier was never the product. Question and answer sites work in one language at a time, and this one worked in German.

The launch date was 12 january 2006 and the target was not subtle: Yahoo Answers had opened weeks earlier and Google Answers was still running. Lycos iQ went out in Germany and in Sweden, where it was called Spray iQ. Editions in Britain, France, Denmark and the Netherlands were opened and then shut again at the end of february 2009, which tells you roughly how the parent company was doing.

What set it slightly apart from Yahoo Answers was a house rule. Knowledge questions were preferred and opinion questions were deleted, a moderation policy that sounds pedantic and produces an archive worth keeping. The person who asked rated the answers, points accumulated on the people who gave them, and the ranks ran from Einsteiger, meaning beginner, up to Einstein. A bookmark manager was bolted on the side and user tagging tied the parts together.

Lycos Europe wound itself up and the site outlived it. On 16 june 2009 Hubert Burda Media took it over and renamed it COSMiQ. On 1 january 2011 Burda moved it again, into gutefrage.net, which Burda also owned and which was the larger German question site by a wide margin. From that point on, COSMiQ belonged to its own competitor.

~ the dossier ~

~ the numbers ~

On 20 march 2013 the site recorded 918,815 members, 772,962 topics, over three million questions and just past nine million answers, and Alexa had it at 1262 in Germany. Those are not small figures for a service whose owner had already filed it internally as a duplicate. The archive was the only asset that mattered and it was the asset nobody in the ownership chain was being measured on.

~ how it actually ended ~

In february 2018 gutefrage.net emailed the members. Falling membership, not profitable, switching off on 3 april 2018, please bring your questions to gutefrage.net instead. No buyer was sought and no campaign was run to save it, because the company closing it was also the destination it was pointing people toward.

~ what came after ~

COSMiQ is a small instance of something the German web did repeatedly: build a national version of an American service, then consolidate the national versions into each other until one is left standing. The detail worth keeping is the Pro and Contra section, where users argued a question for seven days and the side with more support won. It was switched off in may 2012 at the users' own request. Most features die because nobody used them.

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