Favstar

» see favstar.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

favstar belonged to english-language joke twitter, and that was not my crowd. turkish twitter had a comedy scene running on the same platform at the same hours, with its own famous accounts and its own internal politics, and none of it was ever going to route through an english-language leaderboard. the mechanism travels perfectly well. the leaderboard did not.

tim haines put it up in july 2009, one person, no funding, built on twitter's public api. what it did was almost embarrassingly simple: it counted the favorites and retweets on your tweets and sorted them. that gave every account a page listing its own greatest hits, and it gave anybody else a page listing yours, which is a different thing entirely and the reason it mattered.

in 2009 twitter had no way to see this. the timeline was reverse chronological with no algorithm picking anything out, so a good tweet moved past and was gone in an hour. favstar was the only place that remembered. it turned an ephemeral feed into a permanent record with a running score attached, and for a certain kind of user that was the difference between shouting and building something.

~ the record ~

~ the trophy ~

favstar pro cost thirty dollars for six months and bought you deeper stats plus the thing people actually paid for: the ability to award a trophy to somebody else's tweet as the best of their day. that mechanic built a whole small society. a hundred and fifty to two hundred people would be competing for the weekly trophies at any given time, and a favstar link in your bio was a membership card announcing which corner of the platform you belonged to.

that corner was joke twitter, an offshoot of weird twitter, and the distinction between the two was mostly about whether you would admit to caring. weird twitter used favstar and treated saying so as uncool. joke twitter used it openly and built careers on it. comedians and tv writers were watching the same counter, and a fair number of the amateurs on it were hired off the strength of what it recorded.

~ what twitter took back ~

the first blow was cosmetic and it landed in november 2015, when twitter replaced the star with a heart and the favorite with the like. a service named for a feature that no longer had that name was suddenly a period piece. the second was structural. twitter started ordering the timeline algorithmically and surfacing top tweets itself, which is the exact job favstar had been doing for free since 2009.

what actually killed it arrived in 2018. twitter announced it was retiring user streams and site streams, the apis that let a third-party service watch accounts in real time, and replacing them with the account activity api. haines said twitter had not been forthcoming about the details or the pricing and that favstar could not operate in that uncertainty. when the pricing did appear it ran to $2,899 a month for up to two hundred and fifty accounts, against a service tracking millions.

~ the nineteenth of june ~

pro memberships went off sale in mid-may 2018 with refunds promised for anybody paid up past the closing date. twitter then postponed the api retirement by three months, to 16 august, which would have bought favstar a summer. haines closed it on 19 june anyway, because a three-month reprieve on a deprecation is not a business.

tweetbot and twitterrific and the rest of the third-party client generation were fighting the same fight that year and mostly lost it too. the note favstar left behind put its peak at fifty million monthly visits, which is a large number for a scoreboard with one person behind it. what disappeared with the site was nine years of a record of which jokes had worked, kept by the only party that had bothered to keep one.

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