For the past seven-plus years, I’ve made 34 Storify stories by combining posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to tell stories in different ways. At the time I started, it felt like a great possibility for storytelling in general (check out this Storify) and the future of journalism in particular.

Storify will come to an end on May 16, 2018—and so will access to all the stories people created over the years.

So here’s a look back before it leaves.

• My most-read Storify, with nearly 3,000 views, was reactions to the 2011 Super Bowl Halftime Show: https://storify.com/mjanairo/super-bowl-half-time-show
• Another well-read Storify was the breaking news of reports of a gunman on the campus of the University at Albany in 2013 (it turned out to be a man in law enforcement visiting his son): https://storify.com/mjanairo/lockdown-rumor
• Sometimes I used Storify to save social media conversations I found interesting, as in this one about the Filipino identity of Rico, the main character in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers: https://storify.com/mjanairo/starship-troopers-rico-and-identity
• Another one I used often as a cautionary tale for social media users is called The Aurora Twitter Fail, in which a fashion brand touted its Aurora dress for trending on social media on the day of the mass shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado: https://storify.com/mjanairo/the-aurora-twitter-fail

My 34 stories over eight years isn’t all the much. I was working in a newsroom when journalists started to use and look at social media more closely, and Storify was a great way of compiling posts. I think people read it because nothing else did it quite that way back then.

Storify, though, didn’t play well with other platforms. Note how the storify stories are only links, and those links will no longer work after May 16, 2018. Whereas today WordPress, which this is written on, will display individual tweets with just the link. Another issue I always had with Storify is that it didn’t have good analytics. It said how many views a Storify had, but it didn’t compile views per user and say when a view happened.

Over on CogDogBlog, there’s a suggestion for how to extract links to recreate Storify stories on WordPress.

So a Storify that I had created years ago called “The Future of Media” looks like this link: https://storify.com/mjanairo/new-story-1-4edf7a95ae57572e5e10606c-4edf7a95ae575 can now be re-created below as this:

The future of media

We took to social media to find some answers

Ironic, isn’t it?