Dropjack

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

~ the last words ~

Dropjack was a Digg clone, and in 2007 that was a reasonable thing to be. Users submitted links for other users to vote on, and whatever collected the most votes climbed to the front page. The votes were called jacks and the submit button was a graphic named dropit.gif. The whole operation belonged to Jayde Online, Inc., a company out of central Canada that ran niche search engines and email newsletters. Its sections went from Apple to Activism, with a Baseball category that matters shortly.

Somewhere inside that Baseball category sits a page at /Baseball/logo-tasarımı-1/. Turkish for logo design, filed under Baseball, submitted by somebody who wanted a link pointing back at a design shop and did not care which folder it landed in. It is the only Turkish thing I could find anywhere in three thousand archived Dropjack URLs. My own country reached this site exactly once, as spam, in the wrong category.

A working front page was archived for the last time on 5 May 2014. On the 17th the domain answers with a redirect, and every capture afterward is a redirect too, eventually landing on sitepronews.com, another Jayde property. The name was retired into a sibling brand and the site behind it stopped existing.

~ the record ~

~ what the share bar says ~

The most useful thing Dropjack left behind is its template directory. The share bar under each story shipped a small icon for every service it expected you to cross-post to, and the Internet Archive still holds the images: blinklist.png, delicious.png, digg.png, furl.png, magnolia.png, newsvine.png, reddit.gif, feedmelinks.png.

Six of those eight have graves on this site. Nobody planned that; it is simply what the 2007 cohort looked like from the inside, a dozen near-identical sites each linking to the others.

Later captures of the same directory add facebook.png and googleplus.png, which dates the moment the cohort stopped being a cohort and the sharing moved onto the networks.

~ the backlink years ~

By 2012 the submissions are barely submissions. The archived URL list reads like a directory of article-marketing services, with logo design shops and market-forecast reports parked under sports categories. The links were worth money to the people submitting them, and nothing on the site stood in their way.

This is how most of the cohort actually finished, rather than in a shutdown notice. The voting stops meaning anything once the voters stop being readers, and the owner points the domain somewhere else without comment. Dropjack never published a closing notice of any kind, and dropjack.com stopped resolving long ago.

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