Socialite Rank

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

~ the obituary ~

The magazine piece that explained Socialite Rank to everybody else ran on 4 May 2007, five days after the site was already gone. Isaiah Wilner wrote it for New York and described the site's voice as something bellowing down from the heavens, and by the time it reached newsstands there was nothing left at the address to check that against. The order is right, though. Socialite Rank spent a year being read by the people it was about, then dissolved just before the general public was told it existed.

It opened on 24 April 2006 and posted a list every two weeks: twenty young women of the Upper East Side, in numbered order, scored on style and press coverage plus something the site called the hot factor. Nobody knew who was writing it. The women in the rankings read it, and read it closely enough that a move from six to three was a real event in somebody's week.

It announced its own closing on 26 April 2007, two days after its first birthday, and the pages were off the web by the 29th. On 1 May two people surfaced to claim it. Valentine Uhovski and Olga Rei said they were step-siblings and former child stars from Russia, working in New York, and neither of them was a socialite. That was the whole content of the reveal and the reason it landed.

The reason they gave for stopping was not legal trouble, although legal trouble was available. Olivia Palermo's father had put a lawyer on the site after it published what looked like an apology letter written in her name, which she had not written, and a complaint went to the Manhattan district attorney. The site closed on its own schedule anyway, which for an anonymous gossip blog is close to unheard of.

This one ran on a readership that was a guest list. It worked because the twenty women in the rankings read it and everybody else was reading over their shoulder, and there was no version of that in Ankara in 2006 for me to have missed. It reaches me as a documented episode in a closed New York world, put back together from an encyclopedia entry and a magazine piece filed after the funeral, which is how it reaches almost anyone who was not on the list.

~ the case file ~

~ how the ranking worked ~

Twenty names in numbered order, every two weeks. The mechanic was simple enough to be brutal, because a ranked list is a fixed quantity of room and a woman climbing it is a woman pushing somebody else down. The site never needed to publish anything false to do damage. It only had to publish an order.

The dangerous part was the second loop. Ranking well required press coverage and public appearances, so the ranked went out and generated both, which produced fresh material for the next list, which raised what the next list was worth. The site was scoring behavior it was also causing. Publicists found the address fast, and the line that gets quoted from the aftermath is that once the names came out, people simply stopped going out.

~ the letter ~

The Palermo episode is where it stopped being mean and started being actionable. Socialite Rank published a letter of apology attributed to Olivia Palermo, written in her voice, admitting to things. She had not written it. Her father hired a lawyer and a complaint was filed with the district attorney's office.

Anonymous publishing in 2006 was anonymous in a way it stopped being not long after. There was no obvious next move against a blog with no masthead and no company behind it. The site closed before anyone had to find out what the next move was, and then the operators walked out into the open and gave interviews, which is not the behavior of people who think a case is coming.

~ what replaced it ~

Park Avenue Peerage, the rival, picked up thousands of readers in the weeks after Socialite Rank went dark and ran for a few more years on the same subject from a friendlier angle. The format did not outlast the decade by much. Instagram handed every person on those lists a channel of her own, and that removed the reason to care what an anonymous scorekeeper thought this fortnight.

What is buried here is a shape that only works while the internet is small enough for a closed group to be the entire audience. Socialite Rank had no ambition to be read by everybody, and it was never going to survive being read by everybody. It was read by the twenty women it ranked and by the people who wanted into that room, and when it stopped, the thing it had been measuring stopped being a measurable thing.

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