Partiful

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on the event invite app Partiful and the decline of spontaneous invitations.

Last month, my two roommates and I threw a Lunar New Year party that drew an unexpectedly large and raucous crowd. At one point during the night, I realized I probably didn’t know half the people in my living room — not that I minded. People were having fun. There was plenty to drink, and the guests were all friends of friends. The party’s claustrophobic conditions, however, could’ve been mitigated had we used an invitation service like Partiful and asked people to RSVP ahead of time. Instead, we sent the party details in a flyer over text and Instagram, and told people they were welcome to forward it to their friends.

The spontaneous party invitation — in which an event is brought to the attendee’s attention a few days or even hours beforehand — has only grown rarer since the pandemic. Covid, of course, severely impacted nightlife. More events became ticketed or began requiring RSVPs, a practice that has bled into more personal events, like birthdays and dinner parties. It has become less and less common to randomly roll up to a function without knowing who the hosts are, or to catch wind of an acquaintance’s party that suddenly shifts the evening’s plans.

I’ve written about how the opportunity for spontaneous social activities, like dining out under the reign of Resy, has dwindled in a post-Covid world. The cresting popularity of Partiful has further endangered the casual party pitstop, among the cohort of young, tech-forward urbanites that I happen to be a part of. In 2022, Partiful has triumphantly emerged as the go-to invite app among my New York acquaintances. My closest girlfriends and I still insist on sending party invites over e-mail. I think there’s a charm to long thematic screeds that could be lost in the Spam folder, but I’m in the winnowing minority. Everyone seems to be team Partiful.

The platform bills itself as “the sexiest way to get all your guests on the same page,” although it functions similarly to Facebook Events, Eventbrite, Guestboard, and Paperless Post. The New York Times describes Partiful as “the least cringe” invite option, a description that seems more derogatory than complimentary. It is “more streamlined than group texts or Instagram stories, more casual than Paperless Post and less embarrassing than Facebook.” The sleek, festive interface tracks RSVPs, automatically updates headcount, and allows the host to send text blasts and reminders to every attendee. Attending guests can lurk through the guestlist and see those in attendance, as well as post comments in the RSVP thread. It’s convenient and easy to use. And I certainly don’t begrudge any of my friends for using it to send out invitations.

Partiful closed a $20 million Series A round last November, led by the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz. More recently, its founding team (who are mostly women) became the subject of tech Twitter discourse about Partiful’s profitability. Its founders have also spoken about the condescending and lightly misogynistic responses they’ve received about their product: “Can’t help but eyeroll when people say ‘I could’ve built Partiful’ or ‘I built something similar to Partiful,’” tweeted co-founder Shreya Murthy last week. On social media, the company has adopted a playful and snarky tone, exhibiting a “too cool for school” Zoomer insouciance, when addressing friends, fans, and haters alike. Its description on Crunchbase, a site that offers company insights on early-stage startups, is written in all-lowercase text: "ur on crunchbase. when u should be partying. im sick."

I have no personal qualms against the Partiful founders. I just firmly reject the platform's attempt to refine — no, streamline — the improvisational nature of party planning, in which an “aesthetic” poster can be mocked up in a matter of minutes. Partying is a lavish and leisurely activity. Hosts should have no need for efficiency, attendance hype, or emoji reactions. There's a chic mystique to keeping the guest list private, to saving the surprises for later.

Partiful might masquerade as a trendy party app for hot, young people (its core demographic is aesthetically aligned Gen Z-ers and cusp millennials), but it spiritually aligns itself with a suite of consumer-social apps that contribute to the technification of everyday life. Its function, then, appeals to those who are drawn to Silicon Valley’s neurotic task-scheduling impulses. If every spare thought and workday task can be cataloged and accounted for, why not do the same for parties? This may be why so many young, white-collar professionals have gravitated towards Partiful. Yet, I can’t shake the personal impersonality of the service—how, like Facebook Events, it enables hosts to send out a mass invite, eliminating the need for pleasantries or a follow-up.

The most memorable parties I’ve attended exude an aura of debauched carelessness—much like the opening scene of Babylon, but without the elephant, mounds of drugs, and full-frontal nudity. I encounter strangers in the bathroom line who I’ll never see again, and clink glasses with the host whose name I’ve already forgotten. And I believe that hosts, too, should be primed for unexpected chaos. A good host doesn’t try to manage the party. They let the vibes unfurl and ride the evening’s coattails. Reject pre-planned modernity; embrace the anxious, unknowable excitement of a good night of partying. No RSVP necessary.

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse and some weekend long reads.

• “Justice Comes Home”: A devastating essay by Hyejin Shim, a community organizer and domestic violence advocate, on reckoning with her family’s history of abuse. (Lux Magazine)

• Joan Didion’s apartment is for sale. (Curbed)

• Nile Capello in Atavist Magazine on the dark reality of tween YouTube fame.

• Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness, on the Edward Hopper (Whitney) and Alex Katz (Guggenheim) exhibits in New York: “There’s something desperately moving in Hopper’s geometries, something devastating in his rendering of light.”

  • Greenwell highlights a favorite Hopper of mine, Room in New York, which is also the subject of an equally devastating poem by Victoria Chang.

• A lazy pizza dough recipe for the weekend. (Smitten Kitten)

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