Originally published https://guiltyparties.com/narrative-shutting-down/ and expanded for Steem.
The social media project Narrative, which was once heralded as a potential game-changer and major competitor to Steemit and other social blogging platforms is closing its doors on Dec 30th, 2019.
Rosemary released the following statement on behalf of the team:
It is with a heavy heart that we announce that Narrative.org will begin shut-down, effective immediately.
We’ve poured our hearts, souls, and finances into this project for the last two years, and we still believe in the principles embodied in the Narrative manifesto.
We understand that this announcement will be disappointing to our Narrator community, but rest assured we have exhausted every avenue for continuing. Unfortunately, market events, regulatory uncertainty, and limited resources have forced us to make this hard decision.
Anyone who has authored content on the platform can download their own content via a link in their profile any time before December 30, 2019 at 3pm EST. The content will download in JSON format, which is portable and can easily be converted to other formats like CSV.
Effective immediately, no new content, posts, comments, or quality ratings will be accepted on Narrative.org.
Narrative members can redeem all of their NRVE up to December 30, 2019 at 3pm EST; there is no minimum withdrawal restriction in place, effective immediately.
The rewards payout yesterday was the final payout. No rewards will be accrued or paid out going forward.
As of December 30, 2019 at 3pm EST, Narrative.org will cease operations and the site will be unavailable. All member data will be deleted completely on that date as well.
The Narrative Support Community will remain open until December 30, 2019 at 3pm EST. After that date, member data from that site will also be deleted.
If anyone is interested in purchasing the Narrative platform and continuing the mission, please email us ([email protected]). If you need assistance, please visit the Narrative Support Community.
Thank you for your love and support.
source of statement text
It’s unfortunate to see Narrative go like that, particularly as it’s become the home of many content creators who’ve left other platforms for one reason or another, some of those reasons being more legitimate than others. I can see some familiar faces there. It’s also had an interesting although somewhat complex underlying mechanism behind it and was potentially going places.
There are a few Steem users that I personally knew well (I won't name them here) that ended up migrating to Narrative. Some of them made the move out of necessity, having been caught for fraud and plagiarism here. They thought that Narrative was a better alternative and would potentially rival if not replace the Steem experience. Whether Narrative could have done that will forever remain unknown now.
Competing against giants like Medium in a niche that’s already starved for quality content creators and has fairly high hurdles, such as marketing and mass-adoption, isn’t easy. HyperSpace went down just a short while ago in a similar way and some of you probably remember my rewards-declined post with me trying to backup my account to Steem. I suspect we'll see a lot more similar projects shut their doors in 2020 until one finally breaks through. You can probably guess which project I think will break through.
The test of time is a hard one to last through. Narrative couldn't do it. Steem can.
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Yeah, I signed up early and got over 30 folks signed up during the alpha sign-up phase and even bought a niche. When they went to beta in the spring I was not very active but in the summer I spent a solid month and a half over there and it was not pretty, in my opinion. I did recognize a couple of steemians over there but didn't see much from them. I ended up posting daily this summer strictly in the color challenge niche and did ok as far as earnings.
There was the eternal argument of what makes a post a quality post plus there was one self-appointed Sherrif running around downvoting everything that was not up to her standards so I divested.
It is too bad to see it go though.
Do you think you can further expand on what happened with the standards and downvoting there?
Ooof!
People on Narrative were WAAAAY over the top in content policing. I am all for downvoting plagiarism, but not much else. Narrative users would downvote short posts, simple posts, anything that seemed more stream of conscious vs professional writer. People were always accusing one another of being in voting circles. Like some guy over there went after me and summertooth saying we knew this lady from steemit (which we didn’t) and that we were in some vote circle conspiracy with her. 😂🤣
Narrators would downvote post’s if you posted your own work on other social media sites too. Some lady with autism (this is the person Summertooth referred to as the Sheriff) sort of appointed herself the content police and would downvote people from other countries who weren’t the best English speakers. And she had an insane meltdown in one post where she went attacking people and then posted all these photos of herself crying.
I thought Steem had issues... Narrative was a cluster.
Instead of focusing on creating their own content, users were way too worried about the rewards other narrators were earning. Like children squabbling about who has the most green m&m’s or if one kid’s slice of cake is bigger than the other’s.
Narrative could have done better were it not for many of the users.
That sounds pretty messed up.
Perfect.
Stellabelle? xD
I'll try, and I'll try not to ramble too much but no guarantees. My first handful of posts were about precious metals and they got a bit of traffic so that was nice. Then I made a post about the 10oz of silver at spot price on JM Bullion. In that post, I put a screenshot of the deal from the JM Bullion site and when I came back the next day this self-appointed Sherrif had downvoted my post and commented about how I was plagiarizing. This brought an avalanche (a few ;)) of downvotes. I contemplated having it out with her right there but decided to just not use screenshots any longer.
I slowed down on my posting at this point but did show up daily to read, vote and comment on other posts (my bread and butter on steem when I started here). This is when I noticed The Sherrif and a few others start to push their view of a quality post. The Sherrif made quite a few posts about what made a post a quality post as if it were a black and white thing but for me, it is not. What I see as quality someone else might see as shit, it is just no that cut and dry. She also started a downvoting campaign and was downvoting EVERYWHERE. To me, this was like legislating morality in a way and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
While this was taking place there were also some good posts about ways to improve the site overall and there was also a separate site to suggest fixes and the like with some excellent ideas. The next problem I noticed was that the developers and the management team were almost non-existent. I have worked in big corporations and owned my own business and if there is one thing I know it is that if you want the business to succeed, as an owner/exec you have to be accessible to your customers/clients in some way. These folks were nowhere to be found and it fostered resentment and doubt and pissed everyone off.
A big mistake (IMO) was that downvotes were anonymous and reason free. In other words not only did you not know who downvoted you, if they did not comment you did not know why. This is just dumb. I am fine with anonymous but shit, let me know why I was downvoted so I don't fuck up like that again. As you can imagine this led to grudge-based downvoting which was sad. And during all this, the "team" was nowhere to be found. I can only guess but I do believe this is a big reason they failed.
As I type this I am remembering some other things, one being there were no nested comments, so there was NO chance at having a decent dialog in the comments as you would have to tag each person you were responding to, then for them to respond to what you said they would have to make a new comment and tag you back, and so on....ridiculous.
Oh, one more thing, one of the big things the "team" would say (not directly but in the advertising and on the site, was that WE were in charge, that it was a "member-governed platform". I can't find it now but in all the advertising and such it was always, "you, the narrator, is in charge, it is your site". But, of course, we had no actual power save for posting, commenting and voting. I actually called Rosemary out on this in a post she made but she sidestepped me in her answer. Let me see if I can find it...OK, here is her post. This is also a good example of how non-nested comments are dumb as hell. I mean, why would you NOT nest comments? I just don't get it.
Here is my comment:
and here is her response to me buried in a long reply tagging many people...
I don't know man, it's too bad they had no idea what they were doing.
So what I'm getting from everything you and everyone else said basically there were inherent design flaws that were never corrected and people who wanted to harass others ended up exploiting these flaws. And the team forgot that they had clients to respond to or to do their job.
Bingo! Great distillation @guiltyparties! You could maybe even cut it down to that last sentence. :)
Interesting... One can't help but wonder about content creator sites based on STEEM and it's place in all of this. How much longer will the lights stay on at Steemit Inc? Like you said about the hard test... time will tell.
Steem can run independently from the Steemit Inc team if it has to. That's the real benefit of having a functional blockchain and non-staff developers contributing to it.
Yah Got the email today. I never posted much cause to rep you needed to throw down cash. But I liked the look and feel..
Didn't realize an email went out. Did it say the same thing as the post?
Yah pretty much the same... was a bit shocked. But then I never took to posting much in there..
Can’t say I didn’t see that one coming. I was doing the beta and just creating a niche people were downvoting them like metal detecting and stuff I gave up shortly all I really wanted was to reserve my username. Never interacted beyond that.
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What kind of a tool would downvote a metal detecting post