Himabu

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

~ the eulogy ~

Himabu launched on 1 May 2015 as a social app you could only join if you were a student, middle school and up. The pitch was that everyone in the timeline was your own age, which is a promise no general-purpose network can make. It worked. By June 2015 it had eighteen thousand members, and at its height roughly eight million registered accounts with over six million posts a day, which for an app restricted by age in a single country is a very large number.

The age restriction was also the reason it ended. An app advertised as full of teenagers, with no way to verify that anyone actually was one, is an address. Nanameue built countermeasures for years: an AI patrol that blocked users from trading LINE and KakaoTalk IDs so conversations could not move somewhere unmoderated, a mascot system for flagging rule-breakers, and from April 2019 a student ID check for age registration. In June 2019 the company started a joint research project with the Toriumi lab at the University of Tokyo on suppressing trouble inside community apps.

None of it moved the number that mattered. On 30 October 2019 Nanameue announced the app would close at the end of the year, and the founder's statement did not hide behind operating costs. He said Himabu was without question the app making the deepest happy connections in Japan, and that it felt like it was making the most sadness in Japan at the same time. The company said it would keep hardening safety through the final weeks, and that if violations spiked after the announcement it would bring the closing date forward.

I was thirty-five in 2015 and living in Ankara, so this app was doubly closed to me, by age rule and by country. It is worth writing down anyway, because shutting down a profitable product with eight million users on the grounds that you are hurting people is a decision almost nobody in this industry has made.

~ the dossier ~

~ the numbers ~

Japan's National Police Agency publishes an annual count of child victimization cases originating on social platforms, broken out by app. Himabu is in four of them. In 2016 there were 1,736 cases nationally and 77 traced to Himabu, which put it fourth. In 2017: 1,813 nationally, 181 from Himabu, second behind Twitter's 695. In 2018: 1,811 nationally, 214 from Himabu, second behind Twitter's 718. In 2019: 2,082 nationally, 307 from Himabu, second again.

Read the trend rather than the ranks. The national total was flat across those four years. Himabu's share of it quadrupled. Everything the company shipped to fix this was landing in a period when its own contribution to the national figure was going up every single year, and the 2019 number was already known internally before the October announcement.

~ the actual end ~

There had been earlier trouble of a smaller kind. In 2016 Nanameue apologized publicly over a set of unforced errors: a feature had used images from well-known anime without permission, and the rules screen new users saw on signup was written in slang that included telling them to block anyone creepy on sight. The images were swapped and the wording was rewritten. That was a company being sloppy. What ended the app was not sloppiness.

The last version shipped to the App Store on 28 December 2019, three days before the lights went out, which means somebody was still building for a product with a public death date on it. The official account's final post on 31 December said it had been the best app.

~ the next chapter ~

Yay! launched on 1 January 2020, from the same company, with the same team, aimed at everyone rather than students. The pitch to existing users was straightforward: come over, bring your account. Nikkei's business press later described the whole maneuver as a restart from being called a hotbed of sex crimes, which is a brutal sentence to have attached to your previous product and an accurate one.

The logic underneath it is uncomfortable. The thing that made Himabu dangerous was the guarantee that its users were minors, because that guarantee was exactly what made it worth infiltrating. Removing the age wall removed the target. Yay! is bigger now than Himabu ever got, which suggests the students-only promise was never the reason eight million people showed up.

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