Sosh

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

~ the obit ~

Sosh answered one question for one kind of person: what should I do tonight. It launched in San Francisco in 2010 as a hand-curated list of what was actually happening in the city, written in the voice of somebody who went out a lot rather than in the voice of a listings database, and it spread to New York and then a few more American downtowns. A search engine could tell you a restaurant existed. Sosh told you which Tuesday to go and what to ask for when you got there.

Taste is made by people and people do not scale the way software does. Offline Labs, the company behind the app, raised more than sixteen million dollars and grew to forty staff, most of whom existed to find and write up the sort of evening that never shows up in a feed: a cocktail class in a back room, a chef working at arm's length from twelve guests who could ask him anything. That is editorial payroll dressed as a technology company, and every new city meant paying for it again from zero.

By late 2015 the money had run out. Acquisition talks with Airbnb went nowhere. On 5 November 2015 Postmates announced it was taking eighteen of the forty employees, founders included, and told TechCrunch plainly that none of Sosh's technology was coming across. Merchants who had been selling tickets through the app were pointed at Eventbrite and left to it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the last afternoon ~

The archive dates this one almost to the hour. At 21:38 UTC on 25 November 2015, sosh.com was still redirecting to its own home page with the app behind it, which it had been doing for weeks. Three and a half hours later the same address returned something else: a page whose title was Farewell.

Rishi Mandal signed it as CEO. It thanked people for exploring their city, claimed millions of guest experiences, and invited readers to write in with a favorite Sosh memory. Underneath sat a row of counters, one for staff and one for drinks consumed, scripted to tick upward when the page loaded, so the archived copy preserves them frozen at zero forever. Below those, two numbers and nothing else: 2010 and 2015.

~ a local payroll ~

This was a product about a specific set of American downtowns and it never pretended to be anything else. I was in Turkey and in my late twenties while Sosh was at its peak, and the equivalent service here was a friend who knew which place in Kızılay justified the walk. Nobody built an app for that, and the reason the San Francisco version worked at all was that somebody was being paid to go out six nights a week in San Francisco.

The farewell page outlasted everything around it. It answered at about ten kilobytes, unchanged, every month from 2016 until the end of 2020, a goodbye note nobody was reading served by a company that no longer employed anyone. It shrank to a stub in June 2021. Today sosh.com answers in under two kilobytes to say the domain is for sale.

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