everything2
Read with us. Write for us.Everything2
(thing) by hackermatic Sun Sep 29 2024 at 14:11:07Back in 1998, Wikipedia was three years away, Slashdot had the monopoly on News for Nerds, and everything cool ran on Perl. Nate Oostendorp created a wiki that became home for the aspiring writers of the English-language dotcom scene: one that wasn't there to organize objective facts and figures, but one that could encompass that plus, well, everything else in the world. Stories of young love and (mis)adventure, reviews and editorials, daylogs (blogs), compelling sentence fragments, references and meta-references through inline hyperlinks.
So many links! All the links are surely what make it so addictive, like Wikipedia after it. As a reader, you start a car crash story and by the end of it, you have 10 more tabs. As a writer, you realize links are a key part of the playful dialogue between writers and across nodes (articles). Node titles can be whatever you like, so you start using links for mouseover asides, double meanings, and to earn cool -- and not just in the node text, but by gaming the links in the box below it. The medium shapes the message and encourages new ways of messaging to emerge, a lot like post-length, fourth-wall-breaking hashtags do today. And it can be more participatory than those hashtags -- a link to nowhere can be an invitation to the reader to fill that node!
Like a lot of everythingians, I fell into the nodegel in adolescence/early adulthood, and my write-ups and upvotes reflect the energy, little dramas, aching self-seriousness, and occasional poor judgment of that part of my life. The catch is, I joined a few years after activity had peaked (probably 2003), so I rolled up to the most amazing and fascinating house party in the world, but my own experience of it is hanging out with the cadre of friends still lingering in the driveway, smoking and telling their best stories in the early morning quiet. There's a lot of magic in those moments, too.
A committed group of writers are still there, and you should go see what they've been up to! Go read the Cream of the Cool and follow some links. It's almost time to write for the Halloween Horrorquest. Find an oddball empty node and fill it with poetry. It's a small community now, and not a self-promoting one, but not an insular one, either.
everything2 is proof that social magic can emerge from new technologies and the right set of constraints. That an experiment whose zeitgeist has passed can be cherished for decades afterwards. That it can sow the seeds of what comes next, but also that by patiently nurturing its soil, it has the chance to someday bloom again.
This is my last #effortchost, my last unpublished draft, and I could think of nothing more fitting. Thank you for the last two years, everyone. And thank you to any future reader who stumbles upon the Cohost archives and carries this place's magic with you to the next places.
