The Listserve

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

~ the goodbye ~

One email a day, and the writer was picked by lottery. You put your address into a box on a very plain web page, and from then on you were in a drawing that ran every twenty-four hours. If your name came up you got a message telling you so and three days to write something, and then your words went out to every other subscriber. The emails were unedited. There was no approval step and no theme.

What came back is the part that is hard to summarize, because a randomly chosen person writing to tens of thousands of strangers does not converge on a genre. Some of it was advice. Some of it was a confession written at four in the morning by somebody who knew they would never meet a single reader.

I was not on the list. By 2012 I was nearly thirty and working as an engineer, and the daily-email-from-a-stranger project was the sort of English-language internet idea that circulated through a particular set of blogs and never much past them. I came to it long after it had stopped sending.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the rules ~

The constraints were the design. Only the day's winner could send, so nobody could reply to the list, which removed at a stroke the mechanism that turns every large mailing list into an argument. Replies went straight to the writer and nowhere else, and the writer's address stayed hidden unless they chose to give it out. Submitting an email licensed it under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so the words belonged to whoever wanted to quote them afterward.

It was made by five graduate students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. ITP is exactly where a thing like this gets built, a program willing to treat a mailing list as a medium rather than as plumbing.

~ what it actually did ~

The press arrived almost at once. The Observer wrote it up in April 2012, days after launch, and Time followed by asking what you would say to a million people. The Wall Street Journal got the best story out of it: a winner in August 2012 spent her one email inviting the entire list to a picnic in Prospect Park, and several dozen strangers turned up in Brooklyn on 26 August to meet each other.

The obvious objection was raised at the time and was correct in principle. An unmoderated channel into tens of thousands of inboxes can carry anything at all, and nothing in the design stopped it. In practice the project kept a good reputation for its entire run, which is the kind of outcome that is easy to lose and almost impossible to engineer.

~ the postmortem ~

The farewell is dated 19 May 2018 and titled Thank you and goodbye. It opens by saying that after five years they had decided to shut down The Listserve, and it gives no cause beyond that. The team mention having explored commercializing the project and expanding it, and having declined both. The tone throughout is of people putting something down carefully while it still worked.

thelistserve.com is still served over plain http, frozen. The signup box is where it always was, the FAQ still explains the lottery in the present tense, and across the middle of the page sits the line the makers added on their way out: we're so grateful for your support. After more than five years, we have ended The Listserve. Goodbye :)

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