MotiFake

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

~ the eulogy ~

The demotivational poster is one of the few internet formats with a precise origin. Despair, Inc. started selling parody motivational posters in 1998, black border and all, and within a few years people had worked out that the layout was trivially copyable. A photograph inside a thick black frame, a big serif caption under it with a smaller line beneath that. You did not need to be funny in any sustained way. You needed one image and one sentence.

MotiFake launched in 2006 to be the place those got made and kept. It gave you a generator and a voting queue with a comment thread under every entry, and it billed itself without much modesty as "The ORIGINAL demotivational poster community". At its height it was holding over 100,000 posters. The network motto printed across the sites was "Entertainment Sites By Users 4 Users", which tells you roughly everything about the register the place operated in.

Between 2010 and 2012 the operators expanded hard. MotiFake became the flagship of the Moti Network, a group of around forty themed sites, each carved off for a topic or an audience. There were "Plus" editions for adult material, and separate addresses for politics, for the military, for things that had failed. The growth lasted about two years. By 2016 most of those forty were already gone.

What survived to the end was seven addresses. MotiFake itself kept the name, with After Dark beside it, and the rest were PolitiFake, Fail Epic Fail, Military Lulz, Stupid Humans, Out There. On 30 March 2018 the front page was down to seven categories, from thirty-three five years earlier. The shutdown was announced for 31 March. The servers actually stopped on 3 April 2018.

~ the dossier ~

~ forty sites, then seven ~

The expansion is the part worth looking at, because it is a decision you can watch fail in slow motion through the archive. Splitting one community into forty topic sites assumes the bottleneck is topical. It assumes people were not posting military jokes because there was no military site to post them on.

That was not the bottleneck. The bottleneck was that by 2012 the demotivational poster had been absorbed into the general meme supply and nobody needed a dedicated community with a generator and a voting queue to make one. Image macros had moved to Reddit and to the quick-caption sites, where you did not register an account or wait for a moderator. The forty sites split a shrinking audience forty ways, and most of them starved.

~ the format reached here, the site did not ~

The black-bordered poster absolutely made it to Turkey. It was all over the Turkish forums in the late 2000s, translated and re-captioned, and the local humor sites ran their own versions of it without anyone needing to know where the layout came from. Bobiler and the forum crowd had the format before most people had heard the word "meme".

MotiFake itself is a different matter. The site was an English-language community with English-language captions, and the thing that traveled was the template, not the address. That is the normal shape for a format: the layout crosses borders for free because it is just a rectangle and a font, while the community that invented it stays where it was. I knew the posters for years before I knew there had been a site whose whole job was making them.

~ nothing was saved ~

The bad part of this grave is the archiving line. Archive Team's page records the status as partial, done with ArchiveBot in the last days, and the Moti Network's own wiki says it twice in two different places: the contents of the forty discontinued sites were not archived, and neither were the contents of the seven that made it to 2018.

It got worse than neglect. Somewhere between 2013 and 2018 the operators applied heavy JPEG compression across the image library, presumably to cut storage costs on a network that was no longer paying for itself. So even the fraction that crawlers did reach is a degraded copy. Twelve years of a format that millions of people recognized on sight, and what is left is a few thousand artifacted thumbnails and a fan wiki that was mostly written before anybody knew it would need to be the record.

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