Sidewire

» see sidewire.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Sidewire inverted the one rule everybody else in social media was built on. Anybody could read it; almost nobody could write on it. The company recruited and vetted a group it called Newsmakers, people whose jobs put them inside the stories, and only they could start or join a conversation. Everyone else watched. Andy Bromberg and Tucker Bounds founded the company in 2012, Bounds having been a spokesperson for John McCain's 2008 campaign and then a Facebook executive, and the product launched in September 2015 with the 2016 election directly ahead of it.

For a while it worked exactly as designed. Sidewire's own farewell post names John McCain and Maggie Haberman among the people who posted there, alongside Chuck Schumer and the goalkeeper Hope Solo, and the initial curators came off the mastheads of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Curators posted a link with a 250 character read on it, which went out to the platform and onward to Twitter. Nieman Lab wrote it up in March 2017 under a headline calling it civil and thoughtful and either exactly right or exactly wrong for the political moment, which was a fair description of the bet.

It was the wrong bet, or at least the wrong size of bet. The company burned through its $4.85 million of seed funding from Spark Capital and could not raise more, and on 27 June 2017 it published a post called Thank You and Goodbye. The sentence that matters is short: with the support of the board and the team, they had decided to close down the Sidewire product, because they did not see enough usage to justify continuing to support the site.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the guest list ~

A thousand credentialed experts sounds like a lot until you count how many of them have to show up on a Tuesday for the thing to feel alive. That is the structural problem with a curated conversation platform. Readers are plentiful and free, and the writers are the scarce input. These particular writers were busy people who already had Twitter accounts with a hundred times the audience. Sidewire was asking the most oversubscribed people in American politics to type somewhere smaller, and offering a better class of neighbor in return.

The farewell post is unusually clear about having believed in this. It opens on the observation that building a civil space on the internet is a rare and rewarding challenge, and that most people would not even bother trying because they assume the attempt is hopeless. Two years earlier, it says, the founders were determined to try anyway.

~ what came after ~

The post ends by pointing at a new project some of the team were moving to, Current by Sidewire, and asking people to go read why it was built. Current did not last either. sidewire.com and sidewire.io both answer nothing today, and the Wayback Machine's only captures of the .io domain after the shutdown are from 2021 and 2022, when somebody else was briefly parked on it.

The record carries two dates for the ending. The Wikipedia infobox says operations ceased on 23 June 2017 with nothing attached to back it up, and the company's own post is stamped 27 June. Both are here; the one in the frontmatter is the one the company signed.

~ from outside the room ~

The whole value of Sidewire was knowing who the thousand people were, and the thousand people were Washington. From Ankara, that is a product you can describe accurately and cannot evaluate at all: whether Maggie Haberman's 250 characters on a given Tuesday were worth downloading an app for is a question only somebody inside American political coverage can answer. What survives for the rest of us is the arithmetic, which is legible anywhere. Nine months after an election that generated more political conversation than any in living memory, the platform built for political conversation did not have enough of it.

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