GivesMeHope

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

~ the last words ~

Emerson Spartz was twelve years old when he built MuggleNet, and by his early twenties he was running a company that owned around thirty websites. GivesMeHope was one of them. It launched on 31 May 2009 with a question at the top of the page, what gives you hope, and a box underneath it sized for an answer you could read in one breath.

The format was borrowed deliberately. FMyLife had crossed over from the French site Viedemerde the year before, and its whole architecture was a stream of two-line misfortunes submitted by strangers and voted on by other strangers. GivesMeHope inverted the sign and changed nothing else. Spartz and his co-founder Gaby Montero, both Notre Dame graduates, described the result as Chicken Soup for the Soul in a Twitter-length version, which is an unusually honest piece of self-description for a startup.

It worked immediately. Quantcast had the site taking more than 500,000 hits a day, the Facebook page passed 160,000 followers by August 2009, and Esquire wrote it up inside the first week. A book of collected entries came out in the autumn of 2010.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The readership was American and young, and the submissions ran to hospital corridors and graduation weeks. I was twenty-five that year and some distance past the demographic writing in about senior year. There is also a translation problem sitting underneath the whole thing: complaint carries across languages almost intact, which is why FMyLife went from France to everywhere without losing much, and sincerity does not travel nearly as well. GivesMeHope stayed an American site for its entire run.

The strongest evidence that it meant something to the people reading it is a grim one. At Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, after four students died by suicide inside eight months, students built a local copy of the site and called it HMGGMH, so the school could post its own entries. A format invented as the cheerful answer to a French complaint site turned out to be usable for grief.

~ the machine behind it ~

GivesMeHope was never a standalone project. It sat inside Spartz Media, later renamed Dose, a company built on the premise that virality could be measured and then manufactured. Spartz said openly in interviews that he treated headlines as an optimization problem, which is a sentence that aged into the entire 2014 content economy.

The money followed the method rather than any one site. Dose raised venture funding and turned toward the viral-listicle model that BuzzFeed had made legible to advertisers. A feed of earnest two-line submissions from teenagers does not monetize like a quiz about which city you belong in, and once the parent company's attention moved, there was nobody left maintaining the thing.

~ the last capture ~

There is no shutdown notice anywhere. The Internet Archive has givesmehope.com serving its usual front page, about twelve kilobytes of it, on 25 July 2016. The only record after that is a redirect on 5 August, and then the crawler finds nothing at the address for six years. Wikipedia's infobox says closed 2016, and that is as precise as the public record ever gets.

The domain came back in 2022 under somebody else, as a WordPress blog publishing listicles about kindness under an author account named admin. The name turned out to be worth more than the archive it was attached to.

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