• The aesthetic for all parties is basically the same.

  • That aesthetic is bad.

  • A party is an aesthetic creation, so having all guests’ first experience of the thing you are offering them be a chintzy piece of crap that matches every other chintzy piece of crap is much worse than if the thing they were selling was like low-quality toilet paper or something.

  • As far as I can tell, the only way to be informed of parties using Partiful is via SMS. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to me, but I have no desire to ever use SMS. I also don’t want to receive a message in the middle of whatever I’m doing to hear about a new party happening. Fuck off. This should only happen if the party is very time sensitive and important. Like if a best friend or much sought after celebrity is having a party in the next twenty minutes, sure text me, if you don’t have WhatsApp. Otherwise, ffs email me.

  • As far as I can tell, the only way to message the host a question about the party is to post it to the entire group. Yet there are very few questions I want to text an entire guest list about.

  • Supposing I make the error of doing that (which I do not), as far as I can tell, the guest list receives an sms saying that I have sent a message, and they have to click to follow a link to the website to see what the message is.

  • Supposing I am considering posting such a message to the entire group, Partiful will instruct me to ‘Write something fun!’ Fuck off. I’ll decide what to write, and don’t need the condescending needling. Relatedly, if I debase myself and host something on Partiful, while I’m drafting the invitation, it has been known to describe me as ‘the wonderful [host]’. I don’t want your narrativizing. a) Maybe I’m not wonderful. You don’t know shit about me. b) I actually can’t tell if you are going to seriously write that when I post the event, so I need to investigate how to mitigate that possibility.

  • When I’m invited to a party, things I’m not allowed to know until after I RSVP include a) who else is invited or going, and b) where it is. Like, what do you want me to decide about social events based on? Is this communism? It also feels like such officious withholding. Like, are you serious? You’re inviting me to hang out with people and you aren’t going to tell me which people until I say I’ll come? Are you on a power trip? Who is even on the power trip? The creators of Partiful on behalf of the hosts? “No, stand your ground, you’re a party creator now, don’t give up your advantage—they’ll give in and give in and RSVP eventually”.

  • So naturally I go through the busywork of RSVPing “maybe” so I can see key details of the event. Which is annoying. But also it constitutes me saying to my friend “maybe I’ll come to your party”, which is a slightly shitty thing to say to an actual person I’m friends with, if for instance I think it’s pretty unlikely I’ll come to their party and merely want to check if this is the rare party that I do want to go to. Furthermore, now I’ve made it clear (to an as-yet unknown set of people who RSVP’d) that I’ve seen the party and am explicitly and concretely probably-rejecting it. I’m in a whole public social interaction with it. Whereas I might have liked to examine the party without engaging, leaving my knowledge of it and position on it ambiguous.

  • Ok, so three steps in: I have moved from a contentless text message to a website and RSVP’d maybe and can at last see key details. At that point Partiful pops another notification into my phone telling me that I RSVP’d maybe.  Why? I know I RSVP’d maybe, because I was the person who did it, and it was three seconds ago. If later I don’t know and want to know, I’ll actually check in the event invitation, not the interminable list of similar looking messages from Partiful. And I was actually already looking at the event invitation until you distracted me with my phone. And if occasionally I err—thinking I RSVP’d maybe but really having RSVP’d a different thing, say—then this isn’t a fucking space expedition; things will be okay.

  • Then probably I just forget about it and leave it as a maybe, because I have other things to do in life, and this has already gone on for way too long, and I have technically RSVP’d, and who knows if I’ll go to a thing. So that’s annoying for the host, if they might have liked a real RSVP.

  • But if I do try to RSVP more specifically, my options are “I’m going” and “Can’t go”. So in the situation that arises nearly every time—I can go but I don’t want to—Partiful has decided I’m going to just tell a little white lie to the host? Or just that I should go unless I can’t? It’s true that declining events is a difficult issue, and for many people white lies are the way out. But that’s because it’s too awkward to say “I don’t want to”. But if there are only two messages you can send—basically ‘yes’ and basically ‘no’—selected by a company, it’s not actually awkward to choose the ‘no’ one, because it doesn’t distinguish not wanting to and not being able to. There’s no reason for Partiful to put a lie in your mouth there. It’s true that it’s also not that bad to say a falsehood, given that you only have two options, and are clearly most of the time going to want to say a thing you haven’t been given the option to say. But why add this note of false smarm? Like, Partiful could make the options “yes” and “no because my mother is in hospital”, and I wouldn’t hold it against people if they clicked the latter, but I would hold it against the maker of the options.

  • If I decide to tell my friend I can’t go to their party, Partiful will message me on my phone again, with a crying face, saying sorry I can’t go to the party. I don’t need this shit. I don’t want your emotional involvement in my decisions about when to socialize, corporation. True, it’s only fake emotional involvement, but I don’t want to be bathed in the fake emotions of corporations either. I’m a social animal, this stuff does change how I feel, change my sense of the sea of minds I feel I’m surrounded by, the emotions of the world. At a basic level, it’s hard to say no to things, and yet I have to: the alternative is to waste my life being overwhelmed and not even able to make progress on the spew of second-rate things I sleepwalk into saying yes to. And being pinged with pictures of crying when I judge that something isn’t the right thing for me to go to, and say no doesn’t help me. Does it help the host? Do they want to manipulate me? Probably not. Is Partiful’s hope that I learn to go to Partiful parties a little bit more if I feel micro-guilty and micro-sad when I decline them, and then the hosts have the sense that people come to Partiful parties more, so the company benefits? I doubt it, I guess the makers just lack much sense of what a good social world could look like, and are thoughtlessly enacting trumped up emotion where available, in the hope that trumped up emotion gets attention, and attention gets success.