rip weheartit

and another one bites the dust. 

weheartit is done, and its demise remains a mystery. their twitter account is private, and no statements have been issued, yet every link redirects to their homepage with a giant banner to download their app. some redditors speculate that the app has been sold and the company is looking to liquidate it, but no official explanation has surfaced. I mean, it looks like that app will still be around, but the functionality is severely limited. The website as we know it has disappeared in the blink of an eye.

to be honest, I'm shocked that weheartit has made it this far. I mean, with all the ad banners and janky UI, it looked like a spam site, just with ~aesthetic~ pictures. it's kind of a miracle that it managed to last so long when its heyday has far passed. 

I've actually never been a huge fan of weheartit. It's like the final boss of sourceless image landscapes, and as someone who will spend hours digging around the internet for the flickr or tumblr user behind a photo, scrolling on weheartit drives me fucking insane. Nothing hurts more than coming across an old tumblr post, thinking you'll finally stumble upon the original poster, just to get redirected to weheartit.com. agonizing. It's even worse because weheartit actually used to have a source link for all of their posts and then got rid of it for some fucking reason several years ago. 

I could go on about how much that site sucked. The search feature was garbage and half the posts I wanted to see were removed. I actually didn't even notice it was down at first because of how dysfunctional it is. 

That said, a deeply nostalgic self-proclaimed internet historian, I'm kind of devastated by its loss. Weheartit is/was the image life source of the internet. Images would get recycled endlessly, flitting from flickr to weheartit to tumblr and back, spreading all across social media. Now, it feels like there's a giant black hole in cyberspace. There must have been hundreds of thousands of images on that site, and they're just gone, most likely because of corporate greed. I hate that I'll never see the weheartit collections I saved back in middle school again.

aside from its devout users and tumblr nerds such as myself, I don't think we'll feel the effects of its loss for a while. 

a few years ago, I took a trip to the Free Library in Philadelphia to see their rare book collection for a college class (I promise there's a point here.) While gazing at the selection of Sumerian tablets and ancient manuscripts, one of my classmates remarked how it's amazing that those books managed to survive for thousands of years when our cell phones barely last for a couple. Our tour guide nodded in agreement. "It makes you think about what things from our society will last in the future," she said. 

and that's the issue here. Weheartit doesn't have a physical existence, and it has been excluded from the web archive. So when it's gone, it's gone. No one will be able to look through their past collections now or in the future. What remains is a dusty server that will turn to rust.

anyways, my condolences to everyone who lost their collections and saved images. it's genuinely fucked up that it just closed down without any warning to its users (some of whom actually paid to use the site.) It now joins the ranks of indulgy, ffffound, xanga, polyvore, wanelo, photobucket, and stumbleupon. Gone but never forgotten. 

At least we still have favim....for now.