MyLifeIsAverage

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

~ the obit ~

FMyLife had arrived from France in 2008 and taught the English-speaking web a submission format: one paragraph in the second person, ending in a fixed tag. Every entry was a small disaster. Within a year the counter-sites appeared, and MyLifeIsAverage was the one that stuck. Guru Khalsa and Enrico Mills launched it in May 2009 while they were undergraduates at UCLA.

The rule was that nothing could happen. You wrote a few lines about your day and the point was that the day had been fine. Somebody held a door for you. The vending machine gave the right change. Readers voted, and the average entry collected several hundred votes, which meant the front page was a ranked list of the least eventful moments a few hundred thousand people had experienced that week.

It ran on that for years. More than two million stories went in. The footer credited a company called Corniche with the trademark and the copyright, dated 2009 to 2014, which is roughly the window in which anyone was still paying attention to it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why the format worked ~

FMyLife was a complaint engine and complaints escalate. Every submitter is competing with the last one, so the disasters get larger until the site is mostly fiction. MLIA had the opposite pressure built into it. You could not win by exaggerating. An exaggerated entry was off-format and got voted down, so the incentive ran toward accuracy about small things.

That turned out to be a surprisingly durable engine. An archive of two million verified-boring days by teenagers between 2009 and 2013 is a better record of what that period actually felt like than most of what was written about it at the time.

~ wrong age, wrong language ~

I was twenty-five in 2009 and past the age this was for. MLIA was an American high school and college site, written in a register of English that assumed you knew what a locker looked like, and Turkish teenagers of that moment were on Facebook and hi5 rather than on single-format submission boards in another language. I read about it later, the way you read about a school you did not attend.

~ what the crawler saw ~

The Wayback Machine dates the ending without anyone having announced one. On 6 June 2019 mylifeisaverage.com answered with its own homepage, title intact, Google AdSense slots still firing, the Corniche copyright line still in the footer, about 4.8 KB of it. The next capture is dated 21 March 2020. It runs 43 KB and lists ebook titles. High Def 2009 Factory Nissan Xterra Shop Repair Manual. Engineering Drawing N2 Question Papers And Memos. The domain had been picked up and converted to a PDF spam farm.

That pattern held until 1 December 2022, which is the last capture of any kind. Today the DNS record still points at a server in a Linode range and nothing answers on either port. There is no closing post and no explanation anywhere. A site about things not happening stopped in a way that matched.

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