Memepool

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

~ the last words ~

memepool sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. in 1998 i was 14 in ankara, on a 33.6k home modem, the english-language weblog scene was at most a name on a usenet thread for me. memepool was a us-coded product in english, the audience was the small early-blog readership of around 2000, the format expected the reader to already be deep enough in the early web to find the link interesting. that was not me in '99 or '00.

joshua schachter started memepool in 1998 with jeff smith. the design was the same thing every early-weblog had, a vertical feed of short posts, each one a link out plus a one-or-two-sentence note. the contributor list was small and rotating, posting was distributed across maybe a dozen people. the editorial culture was finding the weirdest possible link and saying as little as possible about it. close enough. the audience for that voice grew through '99-'02 as the early weblog scene found memepool through other early bloggers linking to it.

schachter had been keeping a personal collection of links separately, tagged with single-word categories, hosted on his own site. that side project was del.icio.us. the link-collection mechanic was structurally identical to what memepool's editors did publicly, the new pitch was that everyone could keep their own tagged link archive. del.icio.us launched in '03 and was acquired by yahoo in december '05. memepool kept running through that whole window with mostly the same contributor pool.

the slow fade ran 2005 through 2008. the audience for opinionated link feeds had moved to del.icio.us, then to digg by '06. the memepool contributor list was thinning, the posting cadence had dropped from daily to weekly. on april 21 '08 the site went on what was called a hiatus, no posts for nearly four years. one final post landed on march 26 '12, then the domain stopped resolving by december 14 '13. close enough. no farewell, no archive export, the link-by-link record of what the early english weblog scene had thought was interesting between '98 and '08 went offline.

~ the record ~

~ the predecessor pattern ~

del.icio.us was memepool with the editorial layer stripped out. anyway, in those days, the memepool contributors were the curation, the readers got whatever the editors chose. del.icio.us made every user their own editor by giving them their own tagged collection plus the optional public side. schachter's bet was that the mechanic generalized, that you did not need a small editorial team to make a link archive work if the tagging system was good enough. that turned out to be right for almost a decade, then twitter and reddit absorbed the same engagement loop at much larger scale. memepool's editorial frame quietly mattered through that whole arc, since del.icio.us inherited the implicit memepool aesthetic of preferring weird obscure links over mainstream ones.

~ what the early weblog feed looked like ~

the early-weblog page in '99 was a vertical column of dated entries, each one was a paragraph or less. the link was the point. close enough. the commentary was supposed to add a single observation or joke and get out of the way. memepool's contributors held that discipline harder than most, sometimes the post was just the link plus a single word. that compactness is what the early weblog scene remembers as the lost format, the rest of the medium moved toward longer posts and explicit personality through '04-'08, the short link feed became del.icio.us then became a single tweet.

~ the long dark ~

the four-year gap between the '08 hiatus and the '12 final post is the part that reads strangest. the archive stayed online but nothing new posted. the contributors were not announcing departures, the site was not being formally retired, the domain was being paid for by someone but no one was writing. close enough. that quietness is fairly common for late-'00s blogs. the difference is that memepool had been culturally load-bearing for the previous decade, so its silence sat heavier than a normal blog hiatus. the march '12 final post was a one-off, the december '13 domain expiry was the actual end. there has been no archive mirror of the full memepool history posted anywhere as of '26.

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