DMMコミュニティ (DMM Community)

» see sns.dmm.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DMM is a Japanese company that sells and rents video, and a great deal of what it sells is pornography. In September 2012 it put a social network next to the catalog. Not a review section and not a comment thread: an actual members' SNS at its own address, built on OpenPNE, which is the open source package a lot of smaller Japanese communities ran on in those years. Profiles, diaries, a friend graph, communities you could join.

The twist was what it was attached to. An activity post rendered with the title it was about sitting right beside it, carrying a buy link and two kinds of rental price against a list price of 4,094 yen, so a stranger's enthusiasm arrived pre-fitted with a button that took money. The usual direction of travel in those years was a social network bolting a shop onto itself. DMM already had the shop and grew the network out of it, which is the same move run backwards.

It lasted two years and nine months. The notice went up on 26 May 2015 and the service finished at eleven in the morning on 22 June. No reason was given at any point.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the button ~

The Japanese like button reads as something close to "nice, isn't it". DMM kept the shape of that phrase and swapped the adjective for a lewd one, so the button on this network said, roughly, "filthy, isn't it". Same mechanic underneath: one click, a counter moved, the count showed on the item. A generation of social software spent those years arguing over the right verb for approval, Facebook landing on like and the rest trying favorite or heart. DMM used one that only worked next to its own stock.

My footing here is nil. It was a members-only adult network in Japanese, bolted to a Japanese shop, and every detail above comes out of whatever the crawlers happened to save before it went down.

~ the actresses ~

For about eight months, from 14 November 2013 to 22 July 2014, there was a layer on top where performers from the catalog had accounts of their own. Fans could pay for private video and send direct mail to them. That part lasted the shorter of the two lives and was gone eleven months before the rest of it.

The numbers it left behind are small in a way the industry's reputation does not prepare you for. The most-followed accounts on the whole network belonged to some of the best known names in Japanese adult video, and they peaked at eleven hundred and ninety followers. No total membership figure for the site exists anywhere.

~ what survived ~

Nothing was exported and nothing replaced it. The diaries and the friend lists went down with the service, and no tool was ever offered for taking any of it away first. What did survive is the thinnest possible residue: the reviews people had written about individual titles, which lived in the shop rather than in the network and are still sitting under the products today.

There is one small archival indignity worth recording. Every surviving capture of the closing notice is DMM's own automatic English translation of its Japanese original, so the last words this service published are readable now only in a machine's rendering of them. The one thing that comes through the translation undamaged is the verb. It ended.

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