Niconico Matome

» see mtm.nicovideo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The closing notice states the product thesis more honestly than most launch announcements manage. Niconico Matome existed, it says, to promote the making of articles through which you could more casually come to feel as though you had watched a video. Read that twice. The service was a machine for producing an acceptable substitute for watching the thing.

Mechanically it worked by cutting still images out of a video and pairing them with the comments that had scrolled across the screen at that moment. Niconico's whole identity is that the audience's remarks are drawn over the frame at the second they apply to, and this took that layer, flattened it, and laid it out down a page as text under pictures. The output was a web article. The input was a video and the crowd that had already shouted at it.

The second half of the pitch was distribution. Dwango's launch release on 28 November 2017 led on being able to share videos easily with people who were not members, which is a quiet admission about what Niconico had become by then: a walled garden with a sign-in wall, losing ground to a video site that had no wall at all. A Matome article was a way to get something out of the garden and into a link somebody would actually click.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it got used for ~

The operator's own account of how people used it is the most interesting document it left. Two patterns, neither of them the pitch. The first was compilations of favorite scenes from videos people liked, which is close enough to the intended use. The second was that uploaders used it to save snapshots of their own videos.

That second one is the service working as an archive rather than as a shop window. Someone who had made a video was using the summary tool to keep stills of their own work, inside a platform where their work was already hosted. Nobody designs for that. It is the behavior you find when you build a tool and then go and look at it a year later.

~ after the shutoff ~

The notice went up on 16 April 2019 and set out two dates. On 19 April you could no longer post an article. On 22 May the whole thing stopped. The stated cause was that evaluni had weighed up how much the service was actually being used, and that sentence ends without a number in it.

There is no scandal attached to this one and no lawsuit, which in Japanese curation services of that decade makes it slightly unusual. It ran on a nicovideo.jp subdomain while being operated by an outside company, it ran from November 2017 to May 2019, and it closed with an apology for the short notice and a request that people carry on supporting niconico. The host does not resolve. What remains is a WordPress blog, archived once in April 2019, explaining to nobody in particular why a service for not watching videos was being withdrawn.

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