Tumblr Live shutting down reminds me of RPan, Reddit’s live-streaming service. And since not a lot of you know what it was, let me explain it to you.
So this starts with Reddit teasing an announcement. It says that something big is coming, and people get excited. Then it’s announced that Reddit is launching a live streaming service that will last a week.
Here’s how it works. Anyone can go live, but you had to stream from your phone. There’s also a limited number of spots, and after an hour your stream ends no matter what. This made it extremely competitive. Everyone was doing everything they could to claim a spot. And those that went live, fought even harder to get a spot back after they ended to keep their stream going.
Everyone was hyped and excited and fighting for a spot. We were all addicted. Since it’s Reddit, you can imagine the kind of streams that were going on. It was everything. There were people playing Tetris, dancing, reading LOTR, doing one push-up for every upvote, it was crazy. Here are a few of my favorites:
Someone sharing their email and printing out whatever was sent to them
Someone yelling inappropriate words during a school assembly
Someone writing the entire bee movie script
Someone wearing a horse head and just sitting there
Seinfeld but the camera is inside a guitar
Someone sitting on a porch with a sign that says “find me and win $100” (and they were)
Someone using a hand held clicker to count to 6969
A print shop making rpan tshirts and giving them away to chat
A open Minecraft server where everyone mined a single block of bedrock for hours
Someone watching Friends but muted and making their own dialogue
A hula hooping lady, to which another streamer made a stream where he danced to get her attention and ask her out
The reason rpan was so good was because anyone had a chance to be seen. If I was to start a Twitch stream right now no one would see me. But on Reddit, since there were only around 40 choices, I was guaranteed to get eyes. You could grow way easier than other platforms and it was awesome.
Everyone loved it. And when the week ended, Reddit said “thanks for joining us!” and that was it.
We begged and begged and begged for them to bring it back. It was the best thing ever. And after months of pleading, Reddit said it would come back for a week. We were so happy!
That week came and was almost as good as the first time. Everyone loved it. So we asked again. Bring it back.
Then Reddit said okay, you guys like this, so here’s what we’ll do. Rpan will come back once a month for a day, and there will be more available spots for streaming so more people can get in on the fun.
That was the start of the downfall.
More spots meant less competitiveness and fighting for a spot. It also meant that some streams were getting little to no views.
Then Reddit made it permanent.
And it all went downhill from there.
Making it permanent came with some changes. First, the cool retro theming they had went away. The theming was so cool, and everyone complained that it was gone. Second, they added streaming channels. You could stream on gaming, or cooking, or just chatting, or whatever. There was no limit on how many people could stream, which also made it way harder for people to get views. You’d have 1 stream with 20k people (those numbers were def inflated) and 10 with only 2.
This also lead to less random streams. It basically became 95% music based streams, which everyone hated. The variety completely went away.
We didn’t realize that what we wanted killed the platform. Rpan should’ve been like rPlace and other events; once a year and limited.
It closed down a few years after it started.
