We Heart It

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

~ the obituary ~

we heart it sat in the part of the social web i was not the audience for. 70 percent of the userbase was female and most of them were under 24. in december '13, when the site peaked at 25 million monthly active people, i was 29 in ankara writing computer-vision code at a research job. the feed was bedroom decor, clothes, soft quotes overlaid on pastel photographs. that was not my crowd.

fabio giolito had built the first version of we heart it as a weekend project in brazil on january 3 '08. the original idea was a personal bookmarking tool for images, the heart-button mechanic came from his own desire to save things without writing comments. the audience showed up faster than the brazilian server budget. bruno zanchet joined as co-founder, by '11 the company had incorporated in san francisco as super basic inc with venture money in early discussions.

ivp led an $8 million series a in june '13 with tencent on the cap table. close enough. the company was already running at scale, the funding round was about hiring an editorial team and shipping a mobile app that did not lose to instagram. in those days. the peak metric of 25 million monthly active users landed in december that year. the demographic skew toward teen girls became the explicit pitch to advertisers.

the slow erosion ran through '15-'19. instagram added a save-button in '16 that copied the heart-collection use case at much larger scale. pinterest was already eating the female-and-under-24 demographic with the moodboard frame. we heart it shipped a video-content partnership with popular tv in january '16 and an articles feature in august '17, neither moved the metric. close enough. the san francisco office wound down quietly through '18-'20 as headcount fell.

in 2023 the apps removed the photo-upload feature. existing users could still download images they had previously collected, no new uploads were accepted. by then the company had been transferred to super basic llc, no longer us-based, no san francisco staff. the wikipedia status read inactive but there was no formal shutdown press release. the heart-button site joined the inactive-no-formal-death pattern alongside fotolog and a dozen other photo-era survivors that never got a clean obituary.

~ the case file ~

~ the demographic ~

the 70 percent female and under 24 skew was the most consistent metric across the whole arc of the company. the boards people kept were captioned in english or portuguese, occasionally spanish. close enough. the recurring themes were clothes from fast-fashion catalogs and bedroom-decor pulled from interior magazines. the aesthetic was specific enough that fashion brands started pulling images off the heart-button feeds for trend research. by '14 the marketing pitch to advertisers was explicit about the teen-girl mood board, in those days. that ad-targeting story is what raised the $8 million round.

~ what instagram took ~

the save-button instagram launched in december '16 was structurally the same product. press the heart, the image moved into your private collection, you could organize collections by theme. instagram had a billion users by then, the heart-collection mechanic became another tab inside the existing feed. close enough. pinterest had been running the same idea since '10 at higher scale. we heart it sat between them with a younger user and an aesthetic specificity neither competitor matched, but the engagement loop was identical and once instagram added it the differentiation collapsed.

~ what the dormancy looks like ~

the domain still loads. existing collections still serve the saved images. the apps still launch and let people scroll their own old hearts. but no new uploads are accepted, no new account signups are processed in any meaningful way, the editorial side has been gone for years. this is the inactive-no-formal-death pattern, the company has been transferred to a holding entity outside the us and is running the back catalog as a low-cost archive. there has been no obituary post on the corporate blog, no farewell email to the 45 million registered accounts. the heart-button site went dormant the way most aughts social products do, by stopping uploads and waiting for the dns bill to stop being paid (close enough).

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