UrbanBaby

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

~ the eulogy ~

The people who needed UrbanBaby were mothers in New York, and in August 1999 I was a teenager in Ankara on a dial-up line. Wrong country, wrong stage of life. This one is read entirely from the outside, and I am writing it because a site that ran for twenty-one years without ever asking anyone for a name is worth a stone.

Susan and John Maloney started it as a resource for urban parents, the sort of thing that begins as listings for pediatricians and preschools. What people came back for was the forum. It grew into an anonymous board where nothing carried a username, replies were fast and short, and the honesty ran in both directions at once.

By the middle of the 2000s it was one of the more accurate records of what a certain slice of New York was actually thinking, which is why sociologists and reporters kept mining it. Strollers, nannies, private school admissions, whether to leave the city. The anonymity produced the ugliness people remember and also the reason the site was useful, because the questions asked there were the ones nobody would put their name on.

~ the dossier ~

~ the format ~

No accounts and no reputation, so nothing followed you from one thread into the next. Every post arrived as a stranger. That is a terrible design by every modern standard of community management, and it produced a board that ran two decades while sites with karma systems and verified profiles came and went.

The unsigned post is also what made it cruel. A thread could answer a real question about a fever at two in the morning and, four replies down, tell somebody their marriage was over. Regulars described it as the meanest useful place on the internet, and they kept the tab open anyway.

~ the teenager in the back office ~

Before Tumblr, David Karp did software consulting for UrbanBaby. He was a high school dropout in his teens working on a parenting forum's plumbing, and when CNET bought the site on 25 July 2006 he took what he had earned there and put it into starting his own thing. Tumblr launched in 2007.

So an anonymous board about strollers helped fund one of the largest blogging platforms ever built. Nobody on either side of that arrangement planned it, and it is the only reason most people outside New York have ever heard the name.

~ the redesign ~

CNET said it would keep the boards and expand the site from seven cities to twenty-six. In 2008 a redesign landed and the regulars hated it, which is the oldest story in community software: the owner improves the product and the users leave for whatever still looks like the old one. Part of the crowd went to YouBeMom, a plainer clone of the format, and never came back.

~ the day it went ~

CBS Interactive closed UrbanBaby on 6 July 2020 with a short notice thanking the community for the years. Red Ventures agreed to buy CNET Media Group from ViacomCBS not long after, closing that deal on 30 October 2020, so the forum was cleared off the books just ahead of the sale.

The posts did not entirely vanish. Volunteers put an archive up at ubarchive.net, and the survivors scattered to YouBeMom and a New York moms board that had been waiting for exactly this. Twenty-one years of anonymous 3am questions now sit in a static mirror maintained by nobody in particular.

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