Narrative Shutting Down

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 (info@narrative.org). 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.