Hatena Idea

» see i.hatena.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Every company with users has a place where the users write down what they want, and almost every one of those places is a list nobody reads. In April 2005 Hatena built one at i.hatena.ne.jp and attached a market to it. You arrived with a balance of idea points. You spent them on requests you believed Hatena would actually implement. When an implementation landed, the people holding that request were paid a dividend. A request that attracted a thousand points was considered listed, and trading from then on set what it paid.

It was not a voting box with extra arithmetic. What the price tracked was whether the company would ship the thing, which is a different quantity from how badly anybody wanted it, and Hatena said so in its own closing notice: predicting an implementation meant weighing the operator's benefit alongside your own, so that users and the company ended up examining the same request from the same side. Wanting a feature was free, and being right about one paid a dividend, which are two different activities that a suggestion box cannot tell apart.

Hatena ran it for eight years and never took the word beta off the logo. The announcement came on 28 June 2013 and the service stopped on Wednesday 31 July. New submissions ended that day, and so did trading and the ability to move points between accounts. From then on, bug reports and feature requests went into a contact form on each individual product, which is where most companies keep them and where most of them sit.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the roadmap as an asset ~

The reason Hatena gave for closing it is more interesting than the usual low-usage line, because the market did not fail. What failed was the thing the market was priced against. Hatena said its development and operations structure had changed and its services had diversified, so the idea mechanism had become hard to use inside the development roadmap at all.

Read that back through the design and it is almost mechanical. A prediction market needs a settlement event that everyone can see coming. In 2005 Hatena was a handful of products with one roadmap, and a bet on a bug fix was a bet on a company small enough to have a single answer. By 2013 there were enough teams that there was no single answer to be right about. Hatena Blog, opened as a beta in November 2011, and Hatena Space, opened in January 2013, both shipped with their own feedback channels and never used Idea at all.

~ the numbers hatena published ~

Japanese companies usually close a service with a thank-you and no arithmetic. Hatena published the ledger instead. Over eight years and three months the service took in 31,821 ideas from 5,781 users, and implemented 8,154 of them, which is roughly a quarter. The closing post carried a chart of cumulative registrations running the whole eight years.

A one-in-four implementation rate on 31,821 requests is a very high number for a public suggestion channel, and it is the one fact that argues the market did what it was built to do. People were spending a scarce balance, so they spent it on things they thought were buildable.

~ what i.hatena still says ~

The host is still up. In 2026 i.hatena.ne.jp answers with a short page carrying the closing announcement and a thank-you for eight years of trial operation, above a link to the group diary entry that explained it. At the bottom sits a copyright notice reading 2005 to 2015. The service died in 2013 and somebody touched the gravestone two years later.

Individual idea pages were kept readable on purpose, and the idea notation across Hatena's blogging and bookmarking products still resolves to them, so a 2007 argument about a feature can still be linked from a 2007 blog post. Hatena switched off the market and left the order book open for reading.

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