Thinkspot

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

~ the last words ~

The founding event was a deplatforming. In December 2018 Patreon suspended and then banned Carl Benjamin, the YouTuber who went by Sargon of Akkad, over language he had used about another person. Jordan Peterson was at that point collecting around $30,000 a month through the same service. He left it, said he would build something that could not do to a creator what Patreon had just done, and named Dave Rubin as the other half of the idea. The promised launch was Christmas.

It arrived seven months late and it arrived as a beta. By the end of July 2019 a small group of invited writers had accounts, including Rubin, Benjamin, Jocko Willink and the science writer Michael Shermer, and everyone else joined a waiting list. Gizmodo got an invite that December and reported that the platform still held a few thousand people. That is the largest audience figure anyone ever published for it, and the beta framing never really came off.

The mechanics were stranger than the politics. Peterson's design put a minimum length on comments, floated at fifty words, on the theory that a troll who has to write a paragraph is no longer being cheap. Votes were tallied on every comment, and a comment that fell past the disapproval threshold got hidden behind a button rather than deleted, which several critics pointed out is a censorship mechanism wearing a different hat. Memes were banned outright. So were profile pictures and emoji, on a website whose entire argument was that nothing should be banned.

The end arrived on 4 September 2025 in a post titled "A Heartfelt Goodbye to Our Amazing Community", sent out over the same Mailchimp newsletter the site had always used. Nobody covered it. The platform had been publicly assessed as having no meaningful following as far back as May 2021, by which point Peterson's own attention had moved to lecture tours and then to Peterson Academy, and a free speech platform that nobody is arguing on has no reason to keep paying its hosting bill.

~ the record ~

~ the fifty word rule ~

Of everything Thinkspot tried, the word minimum is the part worth keeping. The premise was sound and it was almost unique among the social products of that decade: make the cost of speaking high enough that the people who speak have decided to. Every other platform of the 2010s went the other way, cutting the cost of posting until a reply was one tap, and then spent the next ten years building moderation departments to handle what that produced.

What went wrong with it was arithmetic, not philosophy. A fifty word floor on a site with a few thousand users means most posts get no replies at all, because the price of a reply is a paragraph and there is nobody waiting to read it. Friction is a tool for a crowded room, and Thinkspot never had the traffic that makes it worth using.

~ what it was really competing with ~

2019 was thick with free speech alternatives. Gab was three years old, Parler was launched the year before, Voat was still running, and Minds was taking the same pitch to a different crowd. Thinkspot's difference was that it was not trying to be a Twitter clone. It wanted to be Patreon plus a discussion layer, aimed at long-form writers with paying followers, which put it against Substack in the same window without anyone framing it that way at the time. Substack won that fight so completely that it is strange to remember there was a fight. It launched in 2017, charged a percentage of what writers earned, and made no claims about ideology at all. Thinkspot took no cut from its creators and charged readers $2.50 a month for the right to comment, which put its politics where Substack had put its pricing. The one that sold plumbing outlived the one that sold a position.

~ nine months of an empty lobby ~

The interesting thing about the shutdown is that nothing shut down. The goodbye post went up on 4 September 2025 and the homepage went on serving its normal marketing page, "A Closed Space for Open Minds", with a copyright line reading 2024 and a cookie banner nobody triggered. The Internet Archive holds clean captures of it through 21 June 2026. The first 502 appears on 1 August 2026, almost eleven months after the farewell, and that is still what the domain answers with today: a Google load balancer with nothing behind it.

I watched the Peterson moment from a distance that was mostly linguistic. The lecture clips reached Turkey the way all English-language YouTube reached Turkey in 2018, subtitled and stripped of context, and the part that never carried was the American platform fight underneath it. Patreon bans and Substack economics were arguments inside one country's media class. Thinkspot was built to win that argument and it was never legible as anything else from outside.

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