StrawPoll.me

» see strawpoll.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

You did not sign up for StrawPoll.me. Somebody pasted a link into a chat window, you clicked it, you picked one of the options, and the page turned into a bar chart. Then you closed the tab and forgot the whole thing existed until the next time somebody pasted a link.

That was the entire product. The first archived copy of the homepage is 1,536 bytes: a box for the question, three boxes for the answers, nothing else. There was no company name anywhere on it and no signup wall. The polls were numbered in order starting at 1, so the address bar told you roughly how many had come before yours, and by the end that counter had gone past fifty million.

It belonged to the streaming side of the internet more than anywhere else. Twitch chat used it to decide what a stream did next and speedrunners used it to vote on categories, with forums picking it up for the kind of question that gets a thread locked. Discord arrived later and barely changed the pattern. The tool was ambient enough that most people who used it a hundred times could not have told you who ran it, because for years the answer was not written down on the site.

In 2013 I was a working engineer in Ankara, old enough that nobody was asking me to vote on what a streamer should play next. I still clicked these links. Everybody did. A poll link is one of the few things on the internet that crosses every community boundary there is, because it costs nothing to answer and the answer is immediately visible.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who was holding it at the end ~

The last working copy of the homepage gives the ownership away in its asset paths. Every image on it was served from media-strawpoll.cursecdn.com, the page initialized a JavaScript object called Cobalt.Constants, and a script at the bottom quietly rewrote the footer so the privacy policy link pointed at fandom.com/privacy-policy. Curse built it out, Fandom ended up owning it when it bought Curse Media, and the brand on the page stayed StrawPoll the whole time.

Archive Team's note on the site says only that it was purchased by Fandom shortly before its demise. The CDN hostnames say the Curse relationship was years old by then, and Fandom bought Curse Media in 2018, so the likelier reading is that StrawPoll came over in that deal and nobody wrote it down.

~ the week it stopped ~

The Wayback Machine dates this to within four days. On 1 August 2022 at 22:28 UTC the homepage was still answering with a full 5,490-byte page. By 5 August it was returning a 302, and the 302 pointed at a Fandom support article titled "StrawPoll.me closure, August 2022". Somewhere in those three days a redirect rule went in and the site stopped being a site.

The notice itself is short. Low usage, difficult decision, no access to poll data, and a suggestion that users check out the rest of the Fandom community. It is still there today at strawpoll.me, four years on, nine lines of unstyled HTML sitting on a domain that used to carry a counter in the tens of millions.

Nobody downstream got told. The Nightbot forums have a thread opened in February 2023, six months after the fact, by someone whose chat command had quietly stopped working and who could not find out why. A moderator answered that Nightbot had only been a consumer of StrawPoll's service and had no information to give. The replies trail off in March 2023.

~ fifty million dead links ~

Sequential IDs are wonderful for archivists and terrible for a shutdown. Because every poll lived at strawpoll.me followed by a number, the service was trivially enumerable, and a user called Wingy made a complete copy in late 2019 which now sits on archive.org. Another archivist later pulled around 200,000 more.

What those copies cannot fix is the link rot. Fifty million strawpoll URLs are still embedded in forum posts, Reddit threads, Discord scrollback and YouTube descriptions going back a decade, and every one of them now lands on the same nine-line goodbye. The polls were never the point. The point was the moment of voting, which was over before anyone thought to save it.

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