The Partiful app is a ‘vibey’ nightmare. Here’s my party-inv...

Stop inviting me to your parties. I think I have not only aged out of going to some nonstop rager hosted by you, specifically for your benefit, but I also can’t keep track of when your unnecessary gatherings even occur. You might think I sound incredibly unfun, but actually, I am the life of the party. It’s just that at my age, all the life has been sucked out. “Tom’s 32nd BDay Bash!!!” at Squirrel Lodge is on 2 November, but then “Shelly’s Pre-Turkey Day Shindig?” is two days later. You actually think I’m going to both of those?

Besides, I can’t recall what I ate for breakfast, let alone what day your party is. Unfortunately, technology has a solution to my memory problem.

This year was the year of Partiful, a purple Y2K-looking mess of an app that is designed to not only centralize your social activities into one place, but also give you the option of annoying strangers who had the misfortune of attending the same party you did. One day, every young or young-ish person started using Partiful, blasting out invites and hoping you would cave and download this weird app you’d never heard of. Well, of course, I downloaded it. I guess I could have pretended to be a luddite and told all my friends I refused to put Partiful on my phone. But I have a PlayStation 5, so that excuse won’t work. When the news dropped last summer that Partiful was founded by former Palantir employees, I could have deleted it on moral grounds and assumed others would follow my lead. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s stopped using it, so tech inertia does as intended. I still have it, but I hate it.

If you’re as decrepit and old as I am, you will remember Facebook used to do this for people. There was a tab for events; you could invite your friends and post photos from the occasion on the event’s wall. Boy, those were the days. I sure miss Facebook and how convenient it was to have only one social media app for everything. Someone should bring back Facebook.

Sorry … Facebook still exists, you say? And people use it? To post anti-vax conspiracy theories and AI mashups of SpongeBob with JD Vance’s face? Huh. Well, no wonder I’m not on there any more.

When Facebook lost every last shred of cool factor and became a place for boomers to get scammed for their social security numbers, a horde of other apps came rushing in – not to fill the entire void that Facebook left, but one teeny, tiny function that was a fraction of what Facebook could do. People started posting photos on Instagram, so Facebook bought it. Even though Facebook itself allows you to post photos. Facebook Messenger became a dead zone of thieves and horny security guards on lunch break attempting to invade your DMs. WhatsApp rose to popularity as an alternative messaging service that’s fully encrypted. Facebook bought it, even though Facebook itself has a messaging function.

You get it. There are simply too many apps, all doing essentially the same thing, except progressively uglier. And Partiful is uglier than most. But young people don’t call things “ugly” any more. They call them “vibey”, as the New York Times described Partiful’s candy-coated hellscape in 2024, when the app was first starting to invade our precious personal time. Their logo – a stylized “P” that looks like someone poured liquid mercury on a dinner plate – is transparently aimed at gen Z nostalgia for the 2000s, a mostly awful decade defined by September 11, shockingly ill-fitting pants, and Ruben Studdard’s Sorry 2004.

Once you get past the violet puke background, you can respond to invites from people who know you or browse a list of open events in your area that anyone with a smartphone and functioning cell service can attend. Things called “Club Brat” or “Hootermania” that could be a high-level performance art piece or an orgy. Hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Just like literally any other invitation app (Paperless Post, Evite, Apple Invites), you have to respond to the host that you will either attend, not attend or let them know you will “maybe attend”. I love the “maybe” button, because it allows me to feel less guilty about skipping “Carmen’s Flirty 40th” at Dave & Buster’s. I will consider your party up until the exact moment it starts, when I will decide to absolutely, positively not go.

Except Partiful actually shames you for responding “Maybe”! When you click it, something like an early 90s video game cut scene pops up that asks you to “Pls Commit Soon.” Yes, it says “Pls”. Giving up on spelling words is vibey, I suppose.

Partiful won’t even let me be passive-aggressive without chastising me and aggravating my sense of grammatical propriety. If I can’t pretend to want to go to your party, then what’s the point of our pretend friendship anyway? We need an alternative to Partiful as soon as humanly possible, and I think I have just the idea.

I won’t suggest going back to Facebook, since everyone who doesn’t believe in shapeshifting lizard people has long since abandoned it. You could invite people via a “close friends” Instagram story, but you will accidentally invite the random sexy Russian bot you followed “by mistake”.

The answer is simple: handwrite your invites. Go old-school and sit down with a pen, some stationery, a stack of envelopes and a few stamps. Not only does this avoid the need for downloading yet another app that does one simple thing poorly; you will be so sick of writing – your hand cramping, the nerves in your arm stinging, the ink staining your clothes, all that licking of things – that you will immediately realize that throwing your “Radical Pool Day Spectacular” isn’t worth the hassle.

Thank me later.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist