Why did guestbooks on websites disappear?

TL;DR: Guestbooks aren’t too useful anymore as most of what they do, social media does better.

What are guestbooks and how popular were they?

For the youngens out there, a guestbook was a page were strangers visiting your site would just write whatever. Basically a comments section without a concrete bit of content attached to it. You could even call them “profile comments“.

Thinking about guestbooks as profile comments, they’re very much still around in some of the “Web 2.0” platforms like MediaWiki (Wikipedia), DeviantArt and Steam (yes, Steam has an entire Facebook, Discord, GameFAQ, phpBB and Twitch clone inside itself which nobody knows about). YouTube used to have channel comments as well, before they first got hidden in a tab and then removed.

Back in the day, guestbooks were very prevalent. GuestWorld alone had 1.1 million users in 1998, when it was bought for 3.9 million USD by Lycos. This doesn’t sound too amazing by today’s standards, but at the time this would be around 1% of all internet users (between 70 million and 140 million at the time). Scaled up to today where somewhere around 5500 million people have access to the internet, it’d be in the ballpark of 55 million users – more than Patreon has pledges (36 million), and comparable to Taylor Swift subscribers (56 million).

And that’s just one provider of it; there will have been more providers and also people just programming this feature themselves. That’s the thing: Back then, web platforms weren’t invented yet and you’d make all the HTML code yourself.

So where did they go today?

Problem 1: Conversations are janky

Compared to social media, getting a conversation going on a guestbook or profile comment is awkward:

On MediaWiki, the way conversations in user talk pages work is that Alice would write a message on Bob’s user talk page, which triggers a notification bar when Bob browses the wiki:

If Bob decides to respond, he could either

• do it on his own talk page, in which case Alice better have put his talk page on her watch list and sign up to updates for all correspondence on Bob’s talk page (this is Wikipedia’s method), or
• he could reply on Alice’s talk page which would trigger her orange banner, but make following the conversation much more difficult (this is the method my wiki, Stupidedia, used).

Note that according to Lycos, the people who bought GuestWorld, this janky public communicating was the main purpose of guestbooks:

As guestbooks foster two-way communication between site builders and visitors, we expect these services will encourage repeat traffic.

The “repeat traffic” would be the Wikipedia method, but instead of a watchlist, you’d just regularly check back on the guestbook to see if anyone responded to you.

Modern social media, particularly twitter-inspired ones, solve this use case with a lot less jank:

“@person I like you”

Problem 2: Spam

A second issue with guestbooks in particular is spam. Looking at various old pages with archived guestbooks, many of them feature some variation of

I’ve had to shut down the guestbook form that was previously on this page, due to concerns about spammers hijacking the form script. If you’d like to contact me, please send an email.

I run some very unknown wordpress blogs (you’re reading one of them), and the ratio of spam comments on posts to anything genuine is somewhere in the order of 1000:1. The anti-spam tools of today are capable of filtering most of it out of course, but at the tail end of guestbooks as a common thing, not so much. And even with today’s tools, I’ve decided to not bother with comments on this page.

YouTube to this date doesn’t allow the characters < and > in video descriptions because in 2005, this was how you’d protect yourself against XSS attacks. It’s only thanks to the forced switch to Google+ and then away from it again that YouTube comments now can use these characters.

Comments on content are somewhat fading away for a similar reason: Between a polarized public and Russian troll farms, the comment sections of newspapers in particular have turned so vile that a range of publications had to introduce opening hours for their comment sections as to not overwhelm their moderators, or close comments altogether. Google’s “Perspective API”, a AI toxicity detector, has some case studies in which they state that the NYT was able to moderate 10% of their articles without it, and using the latest of cutting-edge AI technology of 2017, were able to moderate the entirety of… 30% of their articles.

Using social media offloads the moderation requirement onto a third party. And even though moderation on all of the large social media platforms is notoriously bad and unfair, their anti-“scaled abuse” teams generally do a decent job to not allow blatant spammers overrun the site. Having done some anti-scaled abuse stuff in the past, it’s definitely not something the average website owner wants to deal with.

Problem 3: Websites are so much larger now

Profile comments and guestbooks operate on the presumption that the commenter has checked out large parts of the site before writing the entry. But many sites today, including personal blogs, are far too large for this to make sense. Taking a random Geocities sampling (via oocities), it seems like websites used to be an “about me” + a handful of pages on a certain subject. Given that you had to do all of the HTML yourself, that’s reasonably difficult.

With blogging software like wordpress, blogger and any social media though, a lot of the overhead is removed and it’s feasible to publish lots more content, and crucially, publish lots more timely content which is relevant for two weeks exactly. With search engines becoming good, it then means that visitors will read the one article they were given via search, before wanting to post their comment on it somewhere.

A guestbook here is a bit janky again: If you don’t have a per-article comment section, any posts in the guestbook will end up with very different contexts. For this site, it’d be a wild mix of German and English, about design or my creative writing or YouTube or something else – it hardly would be comparable to a Geocities page.

And if you do have a per-article comment section, well – why would I check out guestbook? I can contact you via social media or email, I can post my thoughts of what you’ve put out there via the per-article comments. Checking out the guestbook will probably show me a bunch of randos I don’t know at best commenting benign things, or just spam and malicious content at worst.

Final thoughts

As per the TL;DR: Anything guestbooks did, modern social media does better.

But that isn’t to say that I like social media. About a year ago, I stopped doing social media following the observation that I don’t need to discuss my opinions in public with strangers. Back then I credited Facebook with the idea of carelessly allowing the fully public use of social media, but after this dive into guestbooks, I may need to credit them instead. Though maybe, back in 199X and especially in the context of webrings, the distinction between a public post and a group chat wasn’t nearly as apparent as it is now.

In each case, as nostalgic I get looking at old sites, I neither wish for a return of guestbooks, nor to get back on social media.

You can write me an email via kontakt [funny looking a] leoxd.dk if you really want though.