Most Awesomest Thing Ever

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

~ the last words ~

In April 2010 a Brooklyn advertising agency put a toy on the internet and then left it running for twelve years. Most Awesomest Thing Ever showed you two things pulled at random from its list and asked which one was better. Pizza or Wi-Fi. Teleportation or Justin Bieber. You clicked one, it gave you two more, and behind the screen a win-loss record was being kept on every item in the catalog.

The agency was Big Spaceship and the site launched on 15 April 2010. Press found it inside two weeks: Time wrote it up and ABC News put it on television, with the Huffington Post running a headline asking whether the most awesomest thing ever was in fact the most awesomest thing ever. You could nominate new items, but only with a Wikipedia link and an image attached, which is a submission form that filters out most of what submission forms usually attract.

I have no memory of this one from the time, which is probably the correct relationship to have with it. It was an English-language link that moved through blogs and American morning television in one particular April, and by 2010 I had been online for twelve years and had built up a healthy resistance to sites that wanted me to vote on things. The surprise is not that I missed it. The surprise is that it was still standing in 2022.

~ the record ~

~ the mechanic ~

You cannot get four thousand things into rank order by asking people to rank them. Nobody will do it, and the ones who try will disagree in ways that do not resolve. What you can do is ask a very large number of two-way questions, which take a quarter of a second each, and let the win-loss records sort themselves out. Hot or Not had already proven the principle with faces in 2000.

The clever part here was the catalog. Requiring a Wikipedia link for every nomination meant the list filled up with real nouns rather than in-jokes, so the comparisons stayed legible to a stranger arriving cold. That is why the thing was still usable a decade after anyone was promoting it.

~ the final standings ~

When the rankings were read off in January 2022, teleportation was first and time travel second. The universe came third and the internet fourth, which puts the medium the vote was running on below two methods of transport that do not exist. Pizza closed out the top ten.

The bottom is where the time capsule is. Item 4,418 of 4,418 was Justin Bieber, with Kevin Federline immediately above him, then a run through Sanjaya Malakar and Edward Cullen from Twilight. The top of the list is mostly timeless nouns and physics. The bottom is a precise photograph of what one English-speaking crowd was tired of in 2010, and nothing dates a crowd faster than what it decided to dislike.

~ twelve years of nobody switching it off ~

The last copy the crawler saved from mostawesomestthingever.com is dated 3 December 2022, a normal 22KB page. After that the address produces no captures at all for three years, which usually means the domain stopped resolving rather than a server returning errors. When the crawler finds the name again in November 2025, what answers is a Cloudflare 522.

Big Spaceship never announced anything, and there was no reason to. The site was a demonstration of what the shop could build, and demonstrations do not get a farewell post when somebody finally closes the hosting account. It outlived the agency's own interest in it by about eleven and a half years.

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