osteophage | The Rise and Fall of Waterfall (Reply)

Originally posted to Pillowfort on January 4, 2022.

A post about Waterfall.social, its one-sided relationship with Pillowfort, and some of the eyebrow-raising choices involved in its development, funding, and promotion.

I did not find most of these links myself, but by and large I encountered them in private posts, so this is my attempt to construct more of a public overview. If you have sources to add, please link them in the comments.

What is Waterfall?

Waterfall.social is a blogging site launched in December of 2018 as a competitor to Tumblr. Early promotion for Waterfall in 2019 bragged that "the dev actually uses the site and can be pinged at any time of the day on Discord to be held accountable for any bad decisions."

Now if that sounds like maybe some color of flag to you—well, just hold onto your hat.

Who created Waterfall?

Waterfall was created by a web developer known as Thell. Thell's previous claim to fame was creating Tanburu, a short-lived and extremely buggy website susceptible to CSS in post tags, automatic redirects, extensive URL hoarding, and HTML in the post body, enabling one user to generate dancing bananas across the screen* of every visitor who viewed the post. The Tanburu project lived and died in 2015.

*Video contains semi-NSFW images (by which I just mean the sort of crass humor you'd expect with Tumblr, nothing pornographic, but since it might make someone glance at your screen and do a double take I'd be remiss not to give a heads up).

After the launch of Waterfall, a handful of other staff members were eventually brought on board, but Thell remained the only web dev. Based on what I can piece together, the other staff included community mods and possibly other roles.

Why was Waterfall created?

Here are some answers straight from Thell and the Staff account:

"Short answer on 'why' is 'I was bored'" & aiming to prove to that "it's not that difficult"
"P art of the core reasoning behind starting the project was as a brief 'fuck you' to Tumblr staff"
"I'll be honest, a lot of my projects are started out of spite. Waterfall for example, was created after looking at Tumblr and deciding I could do better."
"Spite is one hell of a motivator, apparently"

What is the deal with this guy and Pillowfort?

Something you may notice from reading Thell's posts is his continuous digs against and comparisons with Pillowfort. The first section of the "Why use Waterfall?" page began with four paragraphs about Pillowfort. Comparisons to PF also feature in the Staff's official End of Year One post. When contemplating how to promote the site, Thell has outright asked his users "What does Waterfall have that Pillowfort doesn't?"

One of his most repeated criticisms is that Pillowfort was wrong to collect so much money. In some cases, he's objected to charging at all, referring to the recent entry fee as "ridiculous" and "obscene." In other cases, he highlights the amount of money PF raised in order to portray Waterfall as cheaper and more efficient. In some now-inaccessible Tumblr posts (referenced here), he compared the Pillowfort invite system to a pyramid scheme.

I know of only one time that PF Staff has ever acknowledged Waterfall's existence. It is in reply to this Twitter thread where a WF Staff member claims to have received an email from them.

How did Waterfall make money?

Well, it sort of... didn't. It brought in money, but it didn't make money in the sense of turning a profit. To quote Thell, "Waterfall isn't MEANT to be profitable. I'm more focused on it being sustainable."

Over the years Waterfall raised funding via Patreon, Kickstarter, and the Commission Marketplace, which allowed WF to take a cut from art commissions arranged through the site. In July 2019, Waterfall's Monetisation Strategy involved the aforementioned funding sources, the sale of additional "blog slots," and the promise of other, eventual premium features.

At the end of 2019, the Staff reported that "We're not breaking even yet—far from it." In an early 2020 post, Thell acknowledged that "I've dumped a good £20k/$26.5k of my own money into Waterfall" and that "we ended up getting 18 cents of the $15 spent through the CM so far."

The current financial status of Waterfall is uncertain.

Art Theft Prevention System

One of Waterfall's selling points was a built-in algorithm for detecting art theft. I learned about this after someone on Twitter suggested that PF implement a similar feature, and several people responded with a chorus of objections... including Thell and the official Waterfall account.

You can see some responses to that exchange on Pillowfort here. As we discussed on that post, it doesn't make sense to object to "stealing" the premise of theft detection if your overall goal is to reduce theft. With that said, the theft detection feature itself is also predicated on some oversights, being more focused on reposting within Waterfall then across different platforms.

Glacier TV

At some point in 2020, Thell published a landing page for Glacier.tv, "a new site coming soon from the team behind Waterfall." It was intended to be a video hosting service that would automatically link with existing Waterfall accounts. I don't know that its open beta ever actually got off the ground.

Today

The Twitter account is gone, the Tumblr account is password-protected, and the main Staff account hasn't been updated since May 2021. You can find some discussion of that on PF here and here.

In that May 2021 update, Waterfall Staff express some regrets and propose some options. These regrets concern the choice to market the site as a "Tumblr alternative" and the disproportionate focus on artists. The post then proposes three possibilities going forward: Option one is to continue as they are. Option two is to rebrand the site. Option three is to create a new site entirely. The post author (probably Thell) says "I'm leaning towards the third option."

The final decision has not been publicized.