ShortNews

» see shortnews.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ShortNews was mostly other people's news, retyped shorter. A registered member read something somewhere, wrote a few lines summarizing it, linked the source, submitted it. Other members rated and commented. Andreas Mihalovits and Oliver Stangl built this in 1999 out of Regensburg, which made it the oldest portal of its kind in Germany by a margin that only grew as the competition died.

The thing that actually drove the traffic was smaller than the site itself. ShortNews handed out free news tickers that anybody could paste into their own website, and those tickers sat on thousands of German pages sending readers back. It was a syndication play running underneath a community, and for a while it worked better than the community did.

Operations ceased on 28 February 2018. The company did not publish an explanation, and nineteen years of member-written summaries went off the web with it. German forums spent the following weeks asking each other where to go instead.

~ the dossier ~

~ points for a paraphrase ~

Almost every action on ShortNews earned points, and points set your rank. On top of that sat the Shorties, a second currency awarded to news items that got read a lot, redeemable for vouchers and physical prizes. Contributors were competing for standing against each other while producing free editorial for a company in Bavaria.

That machinery is the part I recognize, even though I never touched this particular site. In the same years I was on donanimhaber and frmtr. The currency there was post count plus a signature block listing your hardware. People argued about rank with a seriousness the actual content never earned. German or Turkish, it made no difference: the reward loop was identical and it predates most of the platforms that later got credit for inventing it. ShortNews just kept running its version for two decades after the fashion moved on.

~ the stern years ~

From 2001 ShortNews had a cooperation with Stern, the large German weekly. That arrangement is the closest the site ever came to the mainstream. It ended on 1 March 2007. Stern launched its own user-generated project shortly afterward under the name tausendreporter, which lasted until a relaunch killed it in 2009.

The split produced months of argument between satisfied and unsatisfied ShortNews members, carried out partly on tausendreporter and partly in the ShortNews forums. Not long after the separation Mihalovits signaled that blogs would be accepted as news sources, and they were. The Shorties were abolished in June 2016. By then the moderation had thinned out and the complaints about unanswered support had become their own genre, and the shutdown notice, when it came, surprised almost nobody who was still logging in.

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