Orkut was nothing like current social networks. It didn't have any kind of feed. You had to manually visit user pages if you were looking for something. Also, user pages had no "blog space" for posts, just main description, "testimonials" (for friends describing you) and scrapbook (like a public email inbox, later turned optionally private). Oh, and a photo gallery.
Another thing that was massive in orkut - but still niche as most users didn't use this feature - was community forums. It was great to be able to read and talk about any topic using the same account, in the same website and the same layout. Worldwide, what filled this gap was obviously Reddit, but it's still English-only for most subjects. Also the format is different, Reddit is not a typical flat internet forum.
My memory of the first version of Facebook was that it too didn't have a feed. I have fond memories of having to visit all my friends manually to see what they were up to in the last day. This made me more conscious of who I was thinking of and who I wanted to see the most. A side effect was seeing the comments of other people who were commenting about my friends updates, and then naturally diving into their profile pages. This changed dramatically following the introduction of the timeline.
[EDIT]: I personally believe that humanity has been conditioned to expect, perhaps even crave, a timeline/feed based social network, and therefore a non-feed based social network will be up against a general "expectation" of what a social network is by the populace. This expectation is driven in part by an "addictive" feeling that networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have fostered over the past decade.
The newsfeed was added later. They integrated it from a company they bought. I almost quit Facebook when it was added. In retrospect, it was so much better than what we have now. It has an end, was in chronological order, wasn't filled with spam and propaganda
The feed has been a hinderance to groups. So many people asking the same questions because you can't find the posts where they've been answered over and over.
FriendFeed! It was great. Pre-facebook you could build a feed using RSS from all your sources or comments off other sites. It was chronological and it excluded any algorithms. - If you subscribed to your friend feeds all the data slid into a chronological feed on your main site. It was the best, initially FB kept most of these features but in the end slowly killed them.
People thought the news feed was creepy. A bunch of interactions on the site that users considered semi private or like something you needed to visit the page to see -- like writing on a friend's wall -- suddenly generated stories on the feed which would be shown proactively. Many facebook users felt this was a bad change.
Especially since Facebook's game from the beginning of the feed was clearly and openly user manipulation for profit, with the aim of expanding to encompass all of a user's monetizable activities on the web, whether inside or outside of facebook e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
This is from the beginning. Wikipedia characterizes the Beacon episode with: "In general, Beacon was viewed as a mistake because it appeared to be too explicit about the intentions inscribed in its protocol."
For me visiting peoples profiles was much more addictive than the feed. I think it is a bit like the slot machine phenomenon, where you do something repeatedly and you can never be certain if there is some reward or not. Facebook (or national alternatives like StudiVZ) were great because almost all of your peers were there (StudiVZ means literally student's directory - when I first heard about it I thought it was something official). Especially if you were an introvert it was great to look up people in your social circle and to connect.
Feeds on the other hand feel tedious. In the end, Facebook felt more and more like work and less rewarding.
Community forums were huge in Brazil, they were one of the main reasons people used the website. They were so much better with actual paginated discussions instead of the mess that are Facebook continuous threads, a simple timeline instead of algorithmic blackboxes and encouraged actual discussion instead of self-promotion like the current social networks.
Such a shame that we all jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.
"You had to manually visit user pages if you were looking for something. Also, user pages had no "blog space" for posts, just main description" I mean, this sounds exactly like Friendster. And then MySpace.
For most users, communities were just another way to describe yourself, as the list of communities you were in was public. For instance, the community with most members was "I hate waking up early" (Eu odeio acordar cedo). That's a useless community, there's nothing to discuss in it.
You could find very active communities about every imaginable subject, it was super useful just like Reddit, but in a typical flat view internet forum and, most important: in Portuguese.
In the last days of orkut, when all the users looking for the "social" thing moved to Facebook and Twitter, all the activity was in communities because still today there's nothing like that.
After the end, some communities just disappeared, some migrated to own solutions like php forums and some, mainly football related, moved to VK, the Russian Facebook, which also has community forums almost exactly like orkut. I believe that 95% of activity in VK discussion boards are Brazilians, Russiand don't use that feature.
I wish him the best on this endeavor. We've bought, rebuilt, redesigned Fotolog in 2017 and we failed to lift the social network, even with 50M users. The only solution I saw to this problem, isn't technology but convincing people to come back or use this social network over others.
I have learned that social networks obeys to generations more than to features. People only switch when a new generation operates on the social network. So, in order to make Orkut succesful, the founder will have to work hard to convince the new generation (those who know have 15yo onwards up to 24yo) to use the platform and gain ownership.
> I have learned that social networks obeys to generations more than to features. People only switch when a new generation operates on the social network
This feels deeply right and helps explain why FB succeeded. For a few years it really was the place for Millennials in college and grad school. Posting your social life to FB felt meaningful. I wonder how things feel to people currently in that life stage.
As father of a 16-year old girl, I can say neither her nor any of her friends have FB accounts. Youtube, TikTok, sometimes other things, but mostly they use text chat to communicate.
> I wonder how things feel to people currently in that life stage.
Those that come after do not use Facebook. They use other Meta products, like Instagram, and non-Meta products like TikTok. This is precisely the genius of Zuck, because he understood
> I have learned that social networks obeys to generations more than to features. People only switch when a new generation operates on the social network.
way before most people and was ruthless in acquiring or shutting down competitors. That is why Meta is still alive today while many other social networks are dead.
Which is why those acquisitions should not have been allowed. We would have a much more competitive space right now if Facebook wasn't allowed to just buy their competitors.
Perhaps. Even still, social networks ebb and flow, there is no guarantee that people will continue to use Instagram in the future, so even as they were acquired, it might have been for naught in the end.
At first Facebook seemed to eat up Fotolog because of novelty and being able to do just a bit more than uploading pictures, but right as it did it decided to bloat and destroy the feed so people had no way to share pictures and be seen. That's when Instagram became huge and then got acquired by Facebook - because you had a place to share pictures again. Then they felt threatened by Snapchat so they added disappearing content and now they feel threatened by TikTok so they're mainlining video. The end result is that there's no active social network for pictures anymore - it feels like a good time for a Fotolog to come back, to make an attempt at memory permanence and small community connection instead of massively reaching disposable video.
Fotolog killed itself after the original owners sold the company. The new owners didn't upgrade de company properly, it was matter of time any other company took over, and it was Instagram. Fotolog missed this wave because it didn't make the iPhone app and when they started, it was late. In fact, it was almost imposible due the tech stack it was operating pretty 2004-5 stack. In 2008 things were moving on other direction.
Orkut was big in India too. But far from fake profiles or hate groups, brigading groups etc. The reason it got so big was the users were from populous countries.
Also, one main reason for its success I believe was that we did not have mobile phones or landline phones and we had lost touch with our friends and it was a platform to reconnect. There was no number portability. If you had lost the landline number of your friends or if they had moved to different regions, the number would have changed. With Orkut groups it was easy to find and message and connect. But later with Facebook and LinkedIn, most of them got on there.
I cannot comment on what the new platform will do to keep on a mission that it did not fulfil earlier.
Shameless Plug: I am working on a social platform with a similar mission and might do a Show HN in the coming months :)
The interesting thing about Orkut was the weird geographical distribution of adoption. I think it was something like Brazil, Turkey and India.
It is interesting to contemplate a world where one social network like facebook didn't end up dominating the entire space, but instead we had a bunch of social networks each dominating their own geographical region. And each such social network had its own peculiar dynamics, features and product experience that reflected the culture of the region it dominated.
I think such a world would have lead to way more innovation in this space.
After all in our world the only region that remained independent of Facebook and developed its own form of social network, China, has definitely contributed its own distinctive take on social network design. For good or bad, no one can deny the contribution of wechat and tiktok to this space, with their take on economic design in social network or insanely personalised algorithms.
Now imagine instead of a bipolar world of social networks that we inhabit, we had a multipolar one with for example the Nordic, Latin American and African region each having their own thriving social network universe that reflected their culture, and it is easy to contemplate a much more richer and innovative social networking landscape.
> It is interesting to contemplate a world where one social network like facebook didn't end up dominating the entire space, but instead we had a bunch of social networks each dominating their own geographical region. And each such social network had its own peculiar dynamics, features and product experience that reflected the culture of the region it dominated.
That's exactly what the world was like before Facebook. Different countries had their own social networks. I grew up during that time, and remember the variety from having friends in different countries. "And each such social network had its own peculiar dynamics, features and product experience that reflected the culture of the region it dominated."
> I think such a world would have lead to way more innovation in this space.
Such a world led to Facebook - a single, centralised, unified UX. Long forgotten are the custom themes and addons for people's social media profiles, and peculiarities and dynamics of all the different social networks.
For a while there was a Hungarian one called iWiW which IIRC stood for “internet who is who.” But pronounced like “ee-viv.”
Wikipedia says the first “I” was for International but actually I don’t think anybody knew/cared at the time. I didn’t use it much but it definitely felt like a new thing, and it’s unfortunate all these specific niche networks seem to have died out.
I think you're missing a bunch of social networks. You almost certainly have to consider Telegram (700m + monthly active users) aka 1/3 size of fb, arguably more active. Also Discord 400m+ MAU. And also remember how every app ultimately can descend into a dominant network force - remember when instagram was just an app to add filters to photos!
I wanted to keep it limited to "Facebook blue app"-like social networks and not just any app with a social element. So an app where people can interact with their immediate social network in a semi-private manner (I wouldn't even include whatsapp in this definition).
> I think it was something like Brazil, Turkey and India.
And for whatever reason, Estonia. No idea how it came to be, but for a period of time before Facebook took over, Orkut was the main social network everybody was using around here.
Facebook didn't accept new user accounts at the time. You have to remember that Facebook was for university e-mails only before September 2006. By that time Orkut was already widespread in Estonia, taking market share quickly from the previous dominator rate.ee, which was a domestic hot-or-not clone that didn't offer discussion opportunities. Orkut was a breath of fresh air compared to rate, because of its wide selection of features.
> It is interesting to contemplate a world where one social network like facebook didn't end up dominating the entire space, but instead we had a bunch of social networks each dominating their own geographical region.
One person's "regional diversity" is another's "Balkanization."
... but for this application I don't disagree with you at all. In fact, I suspect Facebook is doing a disservice to humanity at large trying to get 100% of the human population onto its network; this results in the need to do some pretty inhuman things to users, like pretending that everyone can operate under a flat mass cultural norm so that a TOS can be enforced. They're conducting a large-scale experiment on human interaction that is in no way guaranteed to pan out.
Orkut had an excellent user interface: public scrap books where you could leave messages for each other that anyone can see, no word limits, no voting, no infinite scroll, no AI systems trying to "maximize engagement", etc.
Modern social networks, save hacker news, looks over-engineered.
It is difficult to find the right balance between over and under engineering, however Orkut could have used a couple of features: strict moderation and threaded conversations, but that was it.
I think the problem with general purpose social networks, is that they are general purpose.
HN, Goodreads, StackOverflow, they all have problems, but they basically work, I find them useful. HN has the least UI features, and works the best. What all three have in common is a narrower focus. Certain kinds of topics are relevant, most topics are excluded. That's why they work.
I wish Orkut the best of luck, but I don't think luck is enough. To get a productive social network, it needs to have a more well defined purpose than "be social". The problem with Facebook, Twitter, etc. is not fundamentally their software (though that has plenty of problems), because Goodreads has plenty of software problems. The main determinant of whether or not a social network is useful, is if it has a well-defined use case. It is not a coincidence or bad luck or even bad software that causes general purpose social networks to descend to the lowest common denominator of conversation.
I don't hate myself enough to ever try to build a platform that could compete in the social networking space. But if I DID, I would definitely focus on getting niche communities in there
I need to be able to convince the social choice theory community,[0] banana growing hobbyists,[1] permaculturists,[2] etc why they should switch. Perhaps I could focus on fractured communities like all the drug forums[3][4][5][6] and have strong privacy protections. Or perhaps I could focus on up-and-coming communities like the different subcommunities in the generative art/cellular automata scenes. Or maybe even reviving communities in decline like the demoscene community.
Once you've become THE platform for one of these niches, you will already have a stable base. Serve them well! You just need to expand from there. Niche communities are the pillars of "alt" social networks
The other big part is definitely optimizing for SEO with tiny load times the way Reddit and HN have done
I should also point out that I really don't think you can get success by explicitly starting out trying to replace these existing communities. Rather you should figure out how you can compliment them and provide what isn't there or address existing concerns. For example, you can try aggregating content if the communities are spread out and serve as a sort of "hub"
Legend has it that when Orkut first started as a side project at Google, the servers were so overloaded and server latency was so high, the only users who weren't bothered by that were those living in countries with already poor internet infrastructure. Which is why Orkut was really big in Brazil and India (which have both massive populations).
Dunno if that's true, but the terrible performance was because it was running off a single box under Orkut's desk. He threw together a prototype in asp.net and launched it, with zero preparation for scaling. It took quite a bit of help from an experienced engineer just to get it split into pieces so that it could run on 2 machines.
A big reason that Orkut fell behind other competitors was that it needed so much work to port it to a scalable architecture while scaling up exponentially.
I was a Orkut user with a good connection (Tier 1 ISP) and I can't say that I remember it being slow in general. There is some fuzzy memory of discussion boards loading slowly, but that was the case often for very popular phpBB and and vBulletin boards of the time.
Related: The founder of Orkut has been trying to replay the same "social network" idea multiple times over trying to replicate the success of Orkut, and looks like this time, it's trying to ride on the Orkut brand familiarity (esp. in Brazil and India, where it was HUGE) to build out the initial audience.
Most recently (2016-2020), he was founder of another social network named Hello [1] which shut shop[2] after not being able to get any sort of prominence.
If the attempt is focused around brand familiarity then it should be quick and easy for them to put up a Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever Fediverse server and get started. There's already a growing network out there that it can just plug into and a lot of the backend and frontend code has already been written. Such a platform could even modify and rebrand existing apps to get onto mobile devices relatively quickly.
Maybe he'll come up with a new concept, but his last attempt at that wasn't exactly fruitful.
I'd guess as something of a decentralized reminder that they exist. If you pick something that has no prior associations and is uniquely identifiable to your company, then it will only come up in conversations related to your company. If you pick something that has prior associations, frequently occurs in unrelated speech, and is easily confused with an existing topic, then it comes up in unrelated conversation. The common usage can remind you of the company and bring them to mind, inflating their apparent reach.
I see it as a weaponized version of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, and think less of any company that does it. But I still think of them, which is an acceptable trade for unscrupulous branding.
He's spent his entire adulthood recycling the same idea over and over. Sometimes literally, like when he was sued for stealing code for orkut from a startup he was involved in. Google settled the case out of court, and we all know what that means.
You'd think the guy would have figured out by now that he's not the social media maven he thinks he is...or that "social network" is pretty much #1 on the list of "business ideas programmers have, that never pan out"
> He's spent his entire adulthood recycling the same idea over and over.
If it's something Googlers are famous for it's A) seeing themselves as much better at building stuff than they actually are and B) trying to reimplement the same thing over and over again hoping that this time, it'll actually work. See various social networks and/or chat applications.
Most don’t care if products succeeds or fails. After all you can always blame the product managers - who appear to be recyclable e.g name Google’s top engineers then try to name Google’s top product people; and contrast this to Apple.
However new products generate engineering demand, which means team headcount, promotion opportunities, experience, and more pay. It’s a bubble which flows from free money.
Before he worked on Orkut for Google, he worked at another company developing a similar system. That company then sued him and Google for stealing the code. Google settling means that they probably did actually steal the code.
Google settling out of court just means that they didn't deem the cost, time and exposure of a court case worthwhile. I don't think you can assume every case which is settled out of court is an admission of guilt - because often it's just the much much easier (and much lower risk) path.
Doesnt it also mean that the smaller company might not have the resources to fight the actual long battle in court because Google's expensive lawyers have the the time and money to prolong the battle so in such case its better to settle.
I think he’s saying that this suggests there was a legitimate case against him and they wanted to settle out of court because they didn’t think they would win.
Although, to be fair, it only really means that they didn’t think they would win. And that’s not the same as being, well, guilty.
> it only really means that they didn’t think they would win
Or that the suing party is so tiny that when Google wins and bankrupts them, they won't cover their own court costs or the salaries of the lawyers who burnt time defending Google's case, or that the evidence they'll present to win is more valuable to Google as a competitive secret, or or or.
There's actually a lot of reasons a company settles, and (as a long-time hobby observer of legal process) I'd caution against drawing a guilt-or-innocence conclusion from a settlement. Court is a bad place to be where neither party is in control of their destiny anymore, and a settlement just means one or both parties didn't want to be in court. That's all.
I guess they know quite well when they are guilty. And if a Google size company with unlimited legal power think they wouldn't win, it's a strong indication that they know that the case is so strong they have no chance of winning.
Companies settle all the time if the payout is less than the legal fees. Sometimes they also figure I the distraction too. (Non-googler here with no specific details)
When Orkut was operational as a google project, I kinda liked it but there were two things that were an annoyance.
1) The servers appeared to be overloaded and about 25% of page loads showed an error page where pressing F5 did not try to reload the page you wanted, it just refreshed the error page. If I used open-in-new-tab trying the link again meant going back to the page with the link.
2) People who tried Orkut in the early days got control of pages such as "electronics" or "growing tomatoes" then stopped using Orkut.
There was no mechanism to appoint a new moderator to popular topic pages where the moderator had not logged in for a couple of years so pages for popular topics were full of spam.
I was not bothered that half the discussion on pages for many popular topics was in Portuguese.
Confused! What is the Orkut history for those not in the know? Why isn't the social network there on that page, rather than an opt-in landing page for some future thing?
Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google. While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google had based Orkut on InCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in Orkut that also existed in InCircles.
It's really interesting no other comment is talking about the LGBTQ community because as far as I know founder is gay and living in Turkey and that means they have a bit closed community, general public doesn't accept them.
So I think orkut means a lot for the LGBTQ and Activists community would be great to hear the thoughts from them.
It is funny that you mention: I don't know the source of this, but a whole urban myth was going around in the heydays (India especially for sure) that Orkut Buyukkokten had envisaged a social network in the hopes that he could re-connect with a childhood flame, a girl who he was no longer in touch with [1]. Who would have known back then :)
Emphasized: "Even the (possibly cooked up) origin story of Orkut is sappy and saccharine—the lore goes that Orkut was created by Buyukkokten after embarking on a search for his missing girlfriend."
> I created the world's first social network when I was a grad student at Stanford.
Really?
[Edit: it’s a very big claim to make, and intuitively I want to say it’s unlikely, but maybe it depends on what you think qualifies as a “social network?”]
DonHopkins on May 8, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Zork source code, 1977
Zork definitely has some puzzles that are practically impossible to figure out, without some help.
The ITS operating system that Zork was developed on was a extremely open, with very little security, but lots of obscurity.
ITS was like the original "social network," where users would hang out and socialize, with lots of visibility and awareness of each other and what they're doing, where everybody could see each other's files and read each other's email, with programs like "INQUIR" for telling other people about yourself, "WHOIS" and "FINGER" for finding out about other people, "WHOJ" to see who's on and what they're doing, "SEND" and "REPLY" for sending immediate messages back and forth, "UNTALK" for multi-window chatting, "MAIL" for sending email, "RMAIL" and "BABYL" for reading email, etc.
And (important to Zork) also "OS" (Output Spy) to spy on other people's sessions over their shoulders!
Only two people could play Zork at once on DM, and only after east coast business hours. Usually there were a few other people just hanging out, spying on the two lucky people playing, chit chatting with each other and the players by sending messages and email, etc.
It was considered perfectly normal and inoffensive behavior for people to spy on each other and learn about running Lisp, hacking Emacs, or playing Zork. (As long as you're not creepy or obnoxious about it, but people tended to be polite and follow the Tourist Policy, and people liked to help each other learn. And if you liked creepy obnoxious stuff, you could subscribe to REM-DIARY-READERS!)
>TOURIST POLICY AND RULES FOR TOURIST USE OF ITS MACHINES
>It has been a long standing tradition at both the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT to allow non-laboratory people to use the laboratories’ computers during off hours. During the early days of the laboratories’ existence a non-laboratory person (such people have come to be called tourists) could gain access to one of the computers by direct personal contact with a laboratory member. Furthermore, tourist access was controlled because access to the laboratories’ computers was de facto achieved through on site terminals. A tourist sponsored by a laboratory member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The expectation on the laboratories’ part was that a large percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A second expectation was that some percentage would become interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our research efforts. Tourists in this latter group would at some point in time graduate out of the tourist class and become laboratory members. In actual fact a number of former and present staff members and faculty earned their computational wings in just this fashion. [...]
MIT-DM was the Dynamic Modeling Lab's PDP-10 running a slightly different version of ITS, and it was the only ITS machine that had any form of file protection, which was primarily used to hide the Zork source code. But even that was essentially only security through obscurity, which was why the source was eventually leaked.
Zork had its own end-game, but getting an account on MIT-DM was like the pre-game, and logging into MIT-DM itself was like the Zork Lobby where you'd hang out waiting for your turn and socializing.
You could get an account on most of the ITS machines just by asking nicely and using the right magic words, like mentioning Lisp on MIT-AI, or Macsyma on MIT-MC, or SomewhatBasic on MIT-ML. But Zork was so sought after that DM was one of the harder ITS machines to get an account on -- you couldn't just say you wanted to play Zork or hack Lisp: you had to say you were interested in MDL for some plausible sounding mumbo jumbo like "algebraic applications". But they still knew you just wanted to play Zork, though.
PDP-10/its: Incompatible Timesharing System (github.com)
this comments are so angry. I can't understand people complaining about facebook and twitter taking over world every day, becoming angry to face "just another social network". If we become this mean to every start-up, how world will manage to get rid of these giants? you won't be a part of the "new" social network if you don't like it. You don't need to gate keep current status. Internet nowadays sucks! and we need newcomers to change it.
This is HN, so complaining about Facebook and similar social media sites isn’t really an unpopular opinion.
As I get older I actually enjoy social media more. Keeping touch with friends who have moved away and having spontaneous interactions with people I like but don’t get to see very often is easier than ever.
My social media experience doesn’t really match the weirdness that gets described in alarmist articles or the compulsive, addictive patterns that some users describe. I haven’t found it difficult at all to shape my feeds to display what I want while hiding what I don’t want to see. I suspect if I just randomly followed people and never gave the platform any positive or negative signals (likes or hiding posts) then I’d have a less enjoyable experience. If I had addictive tendencies and had uncontrollable urges to scroll forever I’d also have a bad experience.
But that’s not my experience. I log in occasionally, enjoy updates from my friends and their families, share some photos from my family, and have some quick conversations with people I like to talk to.
And honestly it’s great. I guess that’s my contrarian tech opinion. Social media is fine and even great when used appropriately. If it’s not for you, just don’t use it. I will note that HN is absolutely a form of social media, though, so it could be that your preferred social media experience is just a different format than what others enjoy.
It depends how you define social media. There is a lot out there.
Personally, I'm not tired of reddit, and I have been using it for more than 10 years now. I'm not really sure if reddit really is a social media. I know I can't use facebook/instagram/twitter/etc. Although it's true that it's up to users to filter all the toxic places of reddit.
I still believe it's possible to improve social media, reduce toxicity, avoid outsides influencers, not make it about money, etc. It's hard work, but that's why the internet is not always a cesspool.
I've been off social media for years now. The content became too manipulated by algorithms that it became useless to me.
For me instant messaging services have filled the gap of keeping in touch with friends. And no algorithms means I know exactly who gets my message when.
The benefit of IM services are also that users are more aware who they're sending stuff to. No more dumping every time you have dinner into the black hole that is social media. They don't do this because they are more aware they'd dumping that crap on real people and who don't like to see (too much of) this kind of stuff.
All in all it's like social media but better and more direct. And all the distracting stuff like "Likes" and number of "Friends" are not represented. These were becoming a goal of their own wayyy too much.
The only worry I have is... How long will it take Facebook and the like to screw IM up too by trying to build 'engagement'? Facebook itself was pretty good too when it still put people in touch without trying to further its own goals. And the age of 'buying marketshare' is kinda over, the market is quite established now. Meaning the 'extracting profit' phase will soon begin. Of course there's still good options on the market but it'll be hard to convince people to use them, just like it was hard to get people off Facebook until they made themselves impossible.
i stopped using Facebook, google and Twitter in 2012. I am even more sick of it now. Back then I didn't like what it did to me, and I really disliked the fact that we were giving a private company such an important part of human communication and society.
It hasn't gotten better. I have now stopped visiting some of my favourite restaurants because I can't read their opening hours or menu because I don't have a Facebook account. I don't know when Facebook started doing that, but one day they closed their business pages and excluded me from a lot of information that used to be public.
I am 26. I have been off of social media for about 5 years now. Friends that I want to stay in touch with are on Signal. Don't regret it one bit. Pretty happy.
This gives me hope. I've been thinking lately that one of the ways that we get through this intense disequilibrium is through a youth counterculture that treats social media as something deeply uncool that only their out of touch parents use. Youth rebellion is humanity's cultural immune system.
I quit corporate overlord sharecropper censorship social media (that is, Instagram, Facebook, Google flavor-of-the-month, Twitter, etc) and I miss using the internet to talk to my friends.
Kut, meaning something like "fuck" or, more literally, "cunt", but in terms of offensiveness it's closer to the Australian context of "cunt" than the American context.
The internet has changed, almost everybody can go online, and moderating a website is not the same thing it was in 2010.
The most fastidious and expensive task of any social network is removing bots, trolls, hateful users, and maintaining trust with users, and improve security. You can't have free speech without fair moderation.
So making sure a social media can make its users trust you, feel safe and have healthy users to user interaction, is the most important issue.
I remember enjoying the Orkut web site, way back when. Orkut, the human, interviewed me at Google in 2001 (I didn’t get the job, HR lady hinted that I passed my 5 interviews but one of the founders vetoed me). Years later when I was invited to work on a project at Google I would sometimes see him driving around the campus.
I signed up for the new platform, curious to see what it will be like.
> We worked hard to make orkut.com a community where hate and disinformation were not tolerated.
Does anyone know if this is actually true or is this all just pandering to a contemporary audience (given the last few years)? It really seems like BS (see [1] and [2].)
Also, what's with the name? I never got that. Aha, I see.
> The website was named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten
Orkut was much more like reddit-with-your-friends than Facebook. The bulk of activity happened in the community forums and as far as I remember there was no "timeline" of posts.
Photo sharing would also be on albums, which worked more like flickr-for-group-events.
It's funny because browsing (original) Orkut was the first time I became aware of just how bad the nascent white nationalist movement was becoming, because while browsing around there I stumbled across several very active white nationalist and NAZI-type groups. Most in Portugese, but some in English.
I also vageuly remember when Orkut & friends were working on "Hello.com" while still at Google sometime I think around 2012 or 2013?, running sort of hush hush in parallel to G+, with assets checked into Google3 (the monorepo) and people being like "what is this? Do you know about this, Larry" because it seemed to go against the messaging we were getting about G+ being the unified social platform, we were all being forced to pivot to etc.
And then there was a bit of a minor scandal and memegen-storm about a bunch of animated GIF emoji assets that included animations of people slapping women and other things some people found distasteful. I believe after that it all disappeared from Google3.
Orkut was massively big in Brazil when I was in my late teens/early 20s, it always had hate groups, brigading groups, stalkers and so on.
Disinformation was rampant, message chains such as "spread this to 5 of your friends so they know the truth" with blatant wrong information were extremely common. It was more innocent though, it always looked like it was just some teens trolling and spreading bullshit for giggles.
Even more it was a side-project from Orkut at Google I'm very sure they didn't have the capacity to moderate millions of Brazilian users speaking an uncommon language, with tons of internet-speak, slangs, etc.
Out of those, only the Aftab case predates moot selling 4chan.
That one was done by partyvan crowd who had been driven off from 4chan by that time.
It would’ve been 888chan, 711chan or rockstararmy. Of course, journalists don’t care about such distinctions and will group all of them together as “4chan”.
It will be wild if this does work. I (@killedbygoogle) would be very impressed if this takes off again. Google significantly harmed Orkut's reputation through mismanagement and modern platforms emerged in its space. Certainly a difficult journey ahead of them to get it off the ground again.
Orkut drew my interest because of they managed to become somewhat of a standard in regards to social widget embedding, how users would authenticate with a widget and the storage of widget state.
I had a profile just to test this stuff, but stopped using it when it started to get a bad reputation due to grooming. Last thing I heard was that it was still popular in Brazil, and that's it, but that was already many years ago.
I'm not really sure if Orkut could relaunch with that brand. I just assume that it may intend to relaunch because that site is trending on HN, the proper thing to do would have been for Orkut to embed the publication date in that post.
Thanks to Orkut my Contacts on every smartphone I've owned is populated with stupid nicknames of people I don't even remember... They just dumped all Orkut friends into Google Contacts at some point (perhaps during the failure of Google+) and I don't have the energy and time to clean up 1000+ contacts.
It took amazingly little time for the majority of accounts created to be fake.
I had two forums with memberships that grew at exactly matched exponential rates for months. One stayed behind the other, by a constant factor. (One was "I hate Perl", the other "I resent LISP". Resentment, here, was about its never becoming a mainstream language one could find employment coding in.)
What was said in them wasn't interesting, but the membership statistics were a constant puzzle.
I remember a bunch of us joining Orkut when it was pretty new. There was a sense of: well, now what? We were already socialising in real life, so an online social network added nothing. In retrospect we didn't understand the point of online social networks at all. Nowadays social (for us) means WhatsApp and Signal chat groups. The idea of curating a personal site, a la Orkut or more successfully Facebook, has faded away. Maybe it was always a bad idea.
Nice idea Orkut but see Bebo for how this is likely to work out: https://bebo.com/
I'm one circle away from the owners (the Birch brothers who originally started and sold Bebo for a tidy sum). I heard what they tried to achieve, it was a nice idea but just didn't fly.
Orkut was huge in Brazil in the early-mid-noughties. I always wondered what the factors were that caused this kind of social network to take off early there, at a time when phones were dumb and hardly anyone had a PC, and well before even myspace was big in N. America.
> at a time when phones were dumb and hardly anyone had a PC
It was a time when "LAN house" were common here in Brazil. Think of them as the Internet equivalent of public payphones: a "LAN house" is a place with several computers, networked together in a LAN (thus the name; LAN-networked games like Doom or Quake were huge back then), with Internet access, often with several software pre-installed (including games), and paid by the hour.
There were also other factors. It was not long after Plano Real, which not only fixed the hyperinflation we had before, but also (as part of its mechanics) temporarily fixed the exchange rate at 1 USD, so importing PCs became cheaper; and also not long after the import restrictions ("reserva de mercado") for computers had ended. Each family having its own PC back then was not as uncommon as you might think.
Ah that makes sense thanks, especially the 1 real = 1 USD period. When I visited Brazil around that time, people were accessing Orkut in these LAN houses. Having a PC at home seemed rare where I was in Bahia, probably because the economy tends to be a bit poorer there, so even with those favourable conditions a PC would have been out of reach for many ppl.
Brazil is a huge country that speaks Portuguese. That gives a chance for a separate network to scale up without being overtaken by a larger English or Chinese language network.
My father went to Brazil in the early 2000s several times over a few years and was astounded at how many PCs he saw in homes. Places with no utilities, refrigerators in the 1970s had PCs 25 years later.
I have no opinion on orkut.com but Orkut was a nice guy when I happened to camp near each other at Burning Man. He was nice enough to share his grilled chicken with us. And actual cooked food is a bit of a luxury there! Thanks Orkut, and good luck.
Reddit is the natural evolution of Orkut. Me as a Brazilian have all the nostalgia feels, but it's obvious that unless Orkut comes back with something innovative, Reddit will reign over easily.
Weird, yesterday I ended up at hello.com and was interested by the site... orkut.com has exactly the same layout and "languages: English Português" selector at the top. Coincidence?
You have to make choices as a social network provider, Either, mostly anything goes, and then you have twitter and facebook. Or you severely restrict nastiness. In that option, the collective set of moderators then determine what goes for nastiness, which in all likelihood, will enrage a huge portion of the potential user base, one way or another. It might be a noble quest, but it will fail unless you build,
as truth social has done, a network for like minded people. Truth Social will likely fail as well, showing that even within a group, there are major divisions. (It may fail for other reasons as well). The same would be true for a platform that build it's network for liberals only.
I suppose you could build a platform for sharing dog and cat photos, and allow saying things like "Who's a good boy", and you might have something sustainable. Although, who knows maybe the cat and dog people will fight over feed space.
Orkut is a great reminder that social networks succeed because of external network effects.
Why did it take off where it did and not elsewhere?
How would you predict or model that?
This reminds me of Elon Musk flexing his muscles re. Twitter.
Sure, a lot of people use Twitter right now. But don’t you know how this could change completely in 6-12 months because of the smallest of changes in the product? Or that when that happens, no change you make will ever turn it back?
“I sold the social network before realising I could use it to topple governments and now I want back in”.
Now, it’s easy to assume sinister reasons, but maybe it’s just that he wants to build something that’s less of a toxic cesspool like Facebook and Twitter.
I have good memories of Orkut - it outed me and my current wife to each other thanks to the crush list feature. Not every match was this lucky, but this one really was.
Tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds. Millions, a couple of decades ago. That's why it's _called_ Eternal September: because it was a feature for all AOL users. In 1997, ½ the US was online via AOL, and it had 175 million users per week.
Just because you haven't heard of it does not mean it's obscure... or doesn't exist or isn't still alive and well.
1. No sane person would give email-read permissions to a random social network app. Not until you get massively successful.
2. No typical user will use a desktop app to browse a social network unless some features are impossible to implement in a webapp (e.g. Discord's screen sharing with sound)
3. That requires users to trust that your app is really end-to-end encrypted. They're not gonna until you get massively successful. Your servers would also need to tunnel a ton of data. For example, I'm pretty sure webapps can't make IMAP requests directly from the user's browser. You'd have to bundle a WASM TLS library in the client and run an open WebSocket proxy on your server to forward requests to any IP that might be an email server. Of course those IPs are often shared with other services. Thanks to end-to-end encryption and Encrypted Client Hello, you'll never know what fraction of your bandwidth is really being used to retrieve email.
Oh and my gut feeling says most of your users will be the sort of people that new users will not want to hang out with.
Who said I trust FB? FB is not your competition and "open source" means nothing to literally 99% of users.
Look, you’re not the first guy to come up with an idea like this. We’ve all thought about it and shot it down 5 minutes later because building anything useful on top of email is really really hard. I brought up at least one serious technical problem that makes the E2E encrypted webapp you described very tricky. Why not just use email for optional contact discovery like every other app instead of shoving all the data through email?
I had a different idea based on Google’s App Engine - you’d run your feed (for any reasonable use, it’d fall under the free tier) on their servers and rely on an API spec to move information between the feeds. Some security issues were a bit hard to solve (you’d be able to DoS someone if you wanted to)
Totally agree. The infrastructure is already there. In fact, this is what email was when it was a "program" you ran, rather than a web thing, and all your contacts were real people you knew rather than businesses.
Is there an email client that has or could add social features? Do we need someone to create one?
A platform that decides what is ‘disinformation’ aka the Corona version of science where we pretend the facts are known in advance and there can be no debate, only a choir preaching to itself. No thanks.
Yes, but I presume that memory is from before the pandemic and thus before the introduction of the New Science. Which obviously is full of holes of course; the statement that children under 6 should not be vaccinated against COVID-19 is disinformation in the US but scientific truth and the government and mainstream medical position in the Netherlands.
Another thing that was massive in orkut - but still niche as most users didn't use this feature - was community forums. It was great to be able to read and talk about any topic using the same account, in the same website and the same layout. Worldwide, what filled this gap was obviously Reddit, but it's still English-only for most subjects. Also the format is different, Reddit is not a typical flat internet forum.