Story Wars

» see storywars.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Story Wars took the one thing fiction normally refuses to share and shared it. A story opened with a prompt and a first chapter. Anyone could write chapter two. So could anyone else, and they did, which meant chapter two existed in six competing versions at once. The community read them and voted one of them in, so the story moved forward with a different author than it started with. Then the whole argument reopened at chapter three.

The company sat in Gothenburg and the site ran in English, which is a normal arrangement for a Swedish consumer product and tells you who it was built for. Teachers found it early. The education-technology blogs of the mid 2010s wrote it up repeatedly as the rare writing tool students actually opened on purpose, because the competitive framing did the work that a blank page cannot: you were not writing an essay, you were trying to beat five other people to the canon.

The archive first sees storywars.net in October 2014 and the shape barely changes for five years. A single-page app, a story feed, a voting widget, a forum underneath. It never raised a round anyone recorded and it never got a Wikipedia article. What it got was a few thousand people who wrote on it constantly, which is the kind of traction that keeps a site alive long past the point where it makes sense as a business.

~ the dossier ~

~ the reprieve ~

On 23 November 2019 the Story Wars forum carried a thread titled "Story Wars is Saved (officially)". Three weeks earlier the site had announced, on Facebook and on Instagram, that it was shutting down on 12 December 2019. Something changed in between. The thread promised the site another five years.

Nobody wrote up what happened. There was no press release, and no second announcement when the five years quietly became one. The reprieve exists in the historical record only as a forum thread behind a login and a screenshot somebody took of it on 14 December 2019, which is why the shutdown date everyone cites for Story Wars is wrong by about fifteen months. The site that was saved in November 2019 was running normally all through 2020.

~ what the crawl log proves ~

The homepage holds a steady 7,700 to 7,970 bytes through the autumn of 2020. The last capture of that size is 1 November 2020. By 18 November it is down to 6,328. There is one failed fetch on 28 January 2021, and then on 12 April 2021 the address answers with something new and smaller, 5,130 bytes, built in Gatsby where the old app was not.

That smaller page is the farewell, and it is four sentences long. "We are sorry to announce that Story Wars has closed for the forseeable future." The misspelling is in the original. It thanks everyone who helped "create some truly amazing stories and grow a community of writers", then tells you to keep writing and leaves a contact address. It stayed up for years after that, which is longer than the reprieve lasted.

I was in my thirties and writing firmware documentation during the years this ran, so a voted-on collective novel was never going to be my internet. The part that reaches me is the bookkeeping. A product that announces its own closure and then survives the date owes its users a correction, and Story Wars issued that correction as five years in a forum thread nobody archived properly. Dead sites usually leave one date behind them. This one left two, and both of them are wrong.

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