Figment

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

~ the last words ~

figment was for teenagers who wanted to write fiction. i was closer to thirty when it launched, an engineer, and whatever writing i did went into code and forum posts, not into short stories for other teenagers to read. this one sits in a demographic and a decade i can only look at from outside.

it launched on december 6, 2010, built by jacob lewis and dana goodyear, both of whom came out of the new yorker. the idea was clean: give young writers a place to post their fiction and read each other, with feedback that came from other writers instead of a teacher with a grade book. it ran writing contests, sometimes with real publishers attached, and for a stretch it was one of the busier corners of the teen-writing web. random house children's group bought it on october 29, 2013.

the ending was harder than most. on december 31, 2017, penguin random house shut figment down and deleted every story on it. not archived, deleted. the plan was to move people to a newer publisher-run site called underlined, with a story tool bolted on later. but the years of drafts that teenagers had posted, the practice novels and the abandoned chapters, did not move with them. they were simply gone at the end of the year.

~ the record ~

~ the day it died ~

most dead sites fade. figment had a date and an execution. everything written on it had to be gone by the last midnight of 2017, and it was. for a platform whose whole point was helping young people keep and share their writing, ending by deleting all of that writing was a strange and heavy way to close. the replacement kept the publisher and lost the archive.

~ what it was really for ~

a lot of people learn to write by writing badly in public and getting told, gently, how to do better. figment was one of the places that happened for a few years, for teenagers who might not have had it anywhere else. that is worth more than the traffic numbers suggest, and it is exactly the kind of thing that leaves nothing behind when the servers go quiet. a teenager's first novel is not the sort of file anyone thinks to back up.

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