Enjoy (炎ジョイ)

» see enjoy.mocovideo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Spider Networks had six people on the payroll, contract staff included, and an office in Tachikawa out at the western end of Tokyo. Its capital was twelve million yen. Its usual output was an opinion poll service that asked the internet which female celebrity looked best in a kimono and which manga in Weekly Shonen Jump people had liked. On 20 November 2007, through an internal unit it called Poison Lab, it released something else.

The Japanese word is 炎上, enjō, literally a blaze: what happens when a blog post attracts a crowd that will not stop commenting. The product name punned on it. 炎ジョイ, read as Enjoy, with the character for flame standing in for the first syllable. The press release that went out at four that afternoon described it as an entertainment-type social bookmark, which is an accurate and alarming phrase once you know what it did.

You registered a site or blog that was burning. Enjoy grabbed a capture of the page and stretched a transparent layer over it. Anyone could write on the layer, and the comments drifted across the page from right to left the way they do on Nico Nico Douga. You picked a side first, attack or defense, and the service drew a map of which side was winning. One click sent an attack request or a defense request out to everyone else. The feature list uses the word game, in those words, about requesting an assault on somebody's weblog.

The idea was not as cynical as the feature list makes it sound, and the company's explanation afterwards is worth taking at face value because the numbers turned out to support it. They had approached bloggers and site owners for permission, and pre-registered the ones who agreed. The theory was that giving people a place to let off steam on a layer would keep a certain amount of shouting off the actual blog. Someone who came to Enjoy and got the thing out of their system would not then go to the real site and post it there.

~ the record ~

~ the layer ~

Five months earlier Niwango had tried the general version of this with Nico Nico Bookmark, which screen-captured any page you fed it and let anyone pin a note anywhere on the image. That one died in October of being ignored. Enjoy narrowed the same machinery to one situation, the pile-on already in progress, and added the part Niwango never had: two opposing sides with a scoreboard between them, and a button for calling in reinforcements.

Narrowing it is what made it work, and working is what killed it. A general tool for annotating the web is an abstract proposition. A list of blogs currently on fire, sortable by newest and by biggest blaze, is an afternoon's entertainment that explains itself in one screenshot. The blog parts you could paste on your own site showed the newest fires and the biggest ones.

~ one server ~

Poison Lab expected about a thousand people. They had provisioned exactly one machine on that basis.

Major portals picked the story up and roughly two hundred thousand people came through in two days. As the crowd grew, so did registrations of ordinary sites that had never been asked and had never agreed, and those sites went up in flames at speed. By the afternoon of 22 November the company had taken Enjoy down, deleted every comment anyone had posted, and put an apology in its place saying the fires had jumped to sites outside the cooperating group and that the whole staff was sorry for the trouble.

~ what the numbers said ~

Between four in the afternoon on 21 November and eleven the next morning, nineteen hours of a two-day life, Enjoy logged 141,491 visitors against 899,908 page views. They left 85,323 comments between them, about four from every person who wrote anything at all. Then there is the figure that makes the whole thing worth remembering: of the users who left a comment on the layer, two percent went on to visit the real site underneath it.

The containment theory had been right. Ninety-eight people in every hundred shouted at the capture and never touched the blog, exactly as designed. That counted for nothing, because the design had been sized for a thousand visitors and two hundred thousand arrived, and a two percent leak out of a crowd that size still puts a steady stream of strangers onto a weblog that never volunteered for any of it. Spider Networks said it would rebuild the thing as a discussion site for interesting pages and release an alpha soon. Nobody has found evidence that it ever did.

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