Where's Plastic?

December 1, 2001 6:06 PM

Plastic down? Only a bizarre message from "humble(d)" Anuff and Steadman is up. AFAIK they never had a working revinue model, but they did rack up 22K users in a year.
posted by phatboy to General Weblog-Related at 6:06 PM (17 comments total)

Reading between the lines, here, at a guess, I'd say the whole "returning it to those glory days [...] before we all went back to using 2400 baud modems" thingy seems to indicate that Plastic's servers were running off @Home cable modems.

They claim they'll be back up soon, though, so I think talking about their failed revenue model might be a little premature.
posted by webmutant at 6:50 PM on December 1, 2001

A revenue model can only fail if they had one. They never had ads or any other visable source of income. The only time I saw a mention of a means of making money, they were talking about creating "customized plastics (slashdots)" for clients.

While plastic gets flack here, it was (is?) a decent site. I'd be sad to see it go. The users were good, they just desparately needed better editors.
posted by phatboy at 7:07 PM on December 1, 2001

The Plastic outage thread @ Fark.
posted by tamim at 7:17 PM on December 1, 2001

Anyone also notice that K5 has been down for most of a week now?
posted by eyeballkid at 9:27 PM on December 1, 2001

After reading that thread on Fark, I think it's safe to say we better not f*ck with Wil Wheaton here on Mefi... :)
posted by owillis at 9:28 PM on December 1, 2001

Re : K5. Rusty's bored.

Re : fucking with WW. We done did that, it seems. I don't remember it, though, oddly.

posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:36 PM on December 1, 2001

A look at the whois info for plastic.com reveals that Carl owns the domain. Curious.
posted by jkottke at 10:00 PM on December 1, 2001

I hope when they say that some cool stuff will be gone they don't mean the alt.culture archive...
posted by feelinglistless at 3:44 AM on December 2, 2001

Re: K5. Rusty's bored that K5 is still down, but not bored of running the site. It's hardware issues, which are slowly being resolved. And it's been almost two weeks now.

It sounds like they're having something like the same problem I am. How cute.



posted by rusty at 9:28 AM on December 2, 2001

Freedonia (Carl's site) is also down.
posted by bshort at 9:53 AM on December 2, 2001

You can still apply to date Carl, however.
posted by Mid at 10:31 AM on December 2, 2001

info i have heard is that carl sold his condo and, rather than use the money to buy another place to live, bought back automatic media. meaning carl owns not only plastic but also suck. whatshisname bought back feed.
posted by honkzilla at 12:12 PM on December 3, 2001

...which leaves him, what, homeless?
posted by bradlands at 1:07 PM on December 3, 2001

which leaves him, as ever, carl.
posted by honkzilla at 2:17 PM on December 3, 2001

And we wouldn't have him any other way. ;-)
posted by bradlands at 2:21 PM on December 3, 2001

the end.
posted by cell divide at 2:53 PM on December 3, 2001

(James Bond will return in Plastic Is Forever.)
posted by bradlands at 8:40 PM on December 3, 2001