Makeoutclub

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

~ the obituary ~

makeoutclub belonged to a scene i was never in, on a continent where i did not live. it started in 1999 as a hangout for american emo and hardcore kids, the ones with the right band shirts and the sad haircuts, and its whole world was basement shows in boston and record collections. i was a teenager in turkey on a dial-up ttnet line, listening to different music and reading different forums. this one passed me by completely, and it would have passed me by even if it had been in my language.

what makes it historically interesting is how early it was. gibby miller put makeoutclub online in 1999, and it already had the thing we now call a profile: your photo and your record collection, with a way to browse other people and message them. that is the core of every social network that came after, and it existed here before friendster in 2002 and myspace in 2003. for a few years it got real press, time and rolling stone, as the strange new place where a subculture lived online.

but it never grew past its scene, and that was probably the point of it and also its ceiling. friendster and myspace took the same idea to millions of people who had never been to a hardcore show, and makeoutclub stayed small and specific while the world it invented went mass without it. it survived on loyalty and nostalgia through a string of redesigns, kept alive by people who had been there in 2001. on the first day of 2017 it finally went dark, seventeen years old, a founding document for a genre of website that had long since forgotten it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it invented ~

the case for makeoutclub is that it got there first. the personal profile, public and built around taste rather than a resume, shows up here before anyone made a giant business of it. it was not trying to be a platform. it was trying to be a clubhouse for a specific kind of kid, and it accidentally sketched the blueprint that friendster and myspace would sell to everyone.

~ why it lasted so long ~

most social networks die when the crowd leaves for the next one. makeoutclub survived seventeen years because it was never chasing the crowd. it had a small, specific membership that aged along with it, people who stayed for the community rather than the growth. that is also why its death is quiet rather than dramatic. there was no mass exodus, because there was never a mass. it just got old, and one new year's day it stopped.

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