Essembly

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

~ the goodbye ~

American political argument in 2005 was not a room I had any reason to walk into. I was twenty-one and at university in Turkey, and what I argued about online was hardware. Essembly wanted registered voters with positions on American ballot questions, and it wanted those positions stated in public under a persistent profile.

Joe Green built it. He had roomed with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, which is the detail every write-up about him leads with and probably part of why Essembly got written up at all. The company was Essembly, LLC, registered in Massachusetts. It launched in 2005 as invite-only, opened in May 2006 to anybody with a working email address, and bought Facebook ads to fill itself up.

Newsweek counted over 17,000 registered users that July. That was the top of it. By September 2006 the site was still in public beta and the staff had largely moved to a new venture called Project Agape, which became Causes. Essembly stayed up. Nobody was really steering it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the resolves ~

The unit of Essembly was the resolve, a short ideological statement written to provoke a vote. Any member could post five a day. Everyone else voted agree, lean agree, lean against, or against, and could attach a comment they were not permitted to edit afterward. Most of the real debate happened in the threads hanging off those comments rather than on the resolve itself.

Groups worked the way you would expect, except that a group could post resolves too, either privately to its own members or under the group's name to the entire site. As a structure for organized disagreement it was better thought out than the comment walls everyone else was shipping.

~ the proximity number ~

Every profile carried an Ideological Proximity score against yours, from 0 to 100. It was computed from the resolves you had both voted on. A 100 meant you had never once voted differently and a 0 meant you had never agreed on anything, and you could open the list to see exactly which votes produced the figure.

That is a genuinely interesting piece of social software and it is the part nobody copied. Every network that came after sorted people by who they already knew or by what an engagement model guessed they would click on. Essembly sorted them by a declared position on a stated question and then showed its working.

~ how it went dark ~

On 30 January 2010 the site stopped working. The account of it is that a group of members coordinated an effort to bring it down over what was described as cyberbullying activity, and that the effort worked. Joe Green came back and had it running again by Valentine's Day.

Then it went down again and stayed down from May 2010, because there was nothing left to fund a defense against whatever was being done to it. A political site with 17,000 registered users and no full-time staff is not hard to push over. The domain resolves to a parking lander today.

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