Plastic.com

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

~ the obit ~

plastic sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it launched in january 2001, the same week i was finishing my first year of computer engineering coursework in ankara on a ttnet broadband line that had been alive only a few months. the english-speaking dev-and-media web was deep into the dotcom hangover, plastic was one of several attempts to make a community-edited link feed work after the money for editorial sites had dried up.

the parent was automatic media, a june 2000 merger between suck.com and feed magazine. two of the smartest webzines of the late 90s, neither of which could survive on banner revenue once the bust hit. plastic was the joint project: four editors, no funding plan, the tagline "recycling the web in real time." user contributors posted links and a summary, the editors decided which floated to the front. comments threaded under each story. the engine was scoop, the same one running kuro5hin at the time.

the founding editor was joey anuff, suck.com cofounder, and the team included matt sharkey and a few others (or whatever it was called). automatic media folded in june 2001, six months after plastic launched. several editors stayed on without pay through the rest of the year. in november 2001 carl steadman, the other suck.com cofounder, bought plastic for thirty thousand dollars and ran it for another decade.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

the categories were etcetera, filmtv, media, music, politics, scitech, work. each story header had a small summary and a discussion thread, the comment culture sat somewhere between metafilter and kuro5hin. registered accounts were a slow build. by november 2008 the count was just over fifty thousand and the active member core was a few thousand. small for a content site by 2008 standards, healthy for a volunteer-edited link feed with no marketing budget at all.

the tone was a survivor of the suck and feed lineage, knowing and allergic to enthusiasm. it never tried to compete with digg or reddit on raw throughput because the editorial layer was the point. the front page on plastic was curated. digg's was algorithmic. both were trying to solve the same shape of problem and plastic deliberately stayed on the smaller side of it.

~ how it ended ~

the closure note went up in february 2011, about a month after the tenth anniversary. no big announcement, no investor letter, no apology to the user base. carl steadman pointed to a successor blog called trees and things and went quiet. trees and things itself died around 2014. anyway, by 2011 the link-aggregator shape had moved on. reddit was three years into its post-condé nast acquisition growth. hacker news was three and a half years old and already pulling the dev-and-startup crowd plastic had relied on. the audience plastic had been built for no longer needed a front page someone curated.

honest distance applies. i was 27 in early 2011, deep in computer engineering work, reading hacker news and slashdot like everyone else in my tier. plastic surfaced in my orbit maybe twice, both times via a link a colleague forwarded with no context. i never registered an account. the site existed entirely in the english-speaking webzine niche that did not really cross into turkish online culture. but the lineage it carries from suck and feed shaped most of the editorial web habits the next decade inherited.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »