The experiment comes to an end
I am pulling the plug on WeTheUsers at the end of the week. It's a curious feelingwalking away from something that's quite good, and that lots of other people told you was quite good.
The seeds of WeTheUsers were sewn while talking to an old friend on Tumblr several years ago. Over the course of an hour or so I talked myself into building a social blogging website to see what would happen if the users of Tumblr had the one feature that was so obviously missing (and still is)the ability to say “I only want the people I call a friend to be able to see this particular post”.
I didn't build the site for some timemaybe a year or moreand then one day while tinkering with this and that on the internet, I somehow thought “what the hell”, and got out the text editor. A note for anybody starting out in web developmentI built the entire site with nothing more than a text editor, and a free SSH client to upload the files to the server. You don't need huge design tools to build web applications.
After a couple of weeks of evenings I had enough of the site up and running to invite a couple of other friends in to playI deliberately chose people I could trust, and they gave back all sorts of useful feedback. They loved that I was using Markdown, for example, that it looked great on mobile and tablets, and that the site was so damn fast (mainly because it didn't use ANY Javascript frameworks to begin with).
Then a curious thing happened. I invited a long time friend from Tumblr in to try it out, and after spending a few minutes exploring, she posted about it on Tumblr, and it just so happened that Tumblr was experiencing all manner of outages that night. By the next morning, sixteen thousand visitors had been to have a look at the site. Google Analytics was lit up like a Christmas tree.
Then a curious thing happened. Tumblr became stable again. Almost as quickly as everybody had arrived, they left again. It was a huge lesson in the power of brands, and the power of marketing.
Given that WeTheUsers cost next to nothing to run, I have left it running on a web server over the last couple of yearsquite happily ticking away, with a small number of people playing with it. There have been odd surges of users from time to time (like the day Tumblr removed replies), but really it's time has come and gone. It was a fun experiment.
Will I ever do anything similar again? I don't know. I really don't know.
Of course I've been here before. Many, many moons agobefore blogging took offI ran a website for amateur writers to share their writing with each other, called “ThoughtCafe”. It ended up with thousands of users, was featured in the press, and grew a huge community. It slowly turned from a hobby into a chorean almost full time job moderating content, and managing people. It wasn't fun any more.
So yeah the likelihood of me running anything again is slim. I'll just sit out here on my island, writing these posts about things I used to do. For now.