Livefyre

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

~ the obituary ~

i used livefyre for years without ever choosing it, and so did you. nobody chose it. you clicked into the comments under an article, a box loaded a second after the rest of the page, and that box belonged to a company whose name sat in small gray type in the corner. this is a grave for a piece of plumbing.

it launched in december 2009 out of san francisco, built by jordan kretchmer and henry arlander. the pitch was that a comment thread should behave like a conversation instead of a page you kept reloading. replies appeared as people typed them, and an editor could pull a good comment up into the article itself. that sounds like nothing now. in 2009 the alternative was a static list of paragraphs sorted oldest first.

it worked well enough that publishers switched. cnn ran it. so did coca-cola and major league baseball on the brand side, along with a long tail of newspapers and magazines nobody lists in the press release. the company raised about 67 million dollars and bought storify in 2013. in may 2016 it sold itself to adobe for a price neither side disclosed. livefyre became part of the marketing suite, which is where consumer products go to become features.

adobe started moving customers off it in january 2021 and shut it down for everyone on 30 november that year. the stated reason was that facebook and twitter had changed what third parties could pull from them, which had quietly hollowed out the half of the business that mattered to adobe. the comment box went dark and most of the people who had typed into it never learned it had a name.

~ the case file ~

~ the plumbing ~

for about fifteen years the comment section under any given article was not built by the site you were reading. it was rented. haloscan did it for the blog era, then disqus and livefyre did it for the news era, each one a small javascript file that showed up after the page and brought its own database. readers thought of the discussion as part of the publication. it was a tenant, and tenants leave.

~ the slide ~

livefyre's problem was that comments never paid. so it pivoted to what the money wanted, which was user-generated content for brands: search twitter and instagram for anyone posting about your product, then republish those posts in a wall on your own site. that business depended entirely on the platforms leaving their apis open. between 2015 and 2018 they closed them, instagram first and hardest. the product lost its supply and the pivot lost its point at the same time.

~ what got buried with it ~

storify went first, in may 2018, taking every embedded story with it and leaving dead rectangles in a decade of articles that had quoted twitter through it. livefyre followed three years later and did the same thing on a larger scale. go back to a news story from 2013 that had four hundred comments under it and you will find a clean, quiet page with nothing below the last paragraph. the argument happened. the record of it belonged to a vendor, and the vendor is gone.

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