[HN Gopher] Orkut
___________________________________________________________________
Orkut
Author : memorable
Score : 315 points
Date : 2022-06-20 05:36 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.orkut.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.orkut.com)
| karthie wrote:
| another social media site, do we not have enough already
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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
| Buyukkokten
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut#Hate_groups
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut#State_censorship
| piva00 wrote:
| It's pandering.
|
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| prvit wrote:
| Accusing moots 4chan of swatting people is a weird retcon.
| I bet you can't name a single instance.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| https://www.mediamatters.org/maga-trolls/day-parkland-
| surviv...
|
| https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/06/06/1769711/-Davi
| d-H...
|
| https://www.gawker.com/5824545/internet-prankster-sends-
| swat...
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=sRsxDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT16&lp
| g=P...
|
| https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article2572533
| 77....
|
| https://psc.apcointl.org/2011/08/01/swatting-9-1-1-hoax-
| call...
| prvit wrote:
| 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".
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110902152829/http://partyva
| n.i...
|
| Blaming 4chan was just a part of the fun, the mods could
| ban these threads and the people posting in them, but
| they'd still get the blame.
|
| And FWIW, your other links tend to be more about 8chan
| than (post-moot) 4chan.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| aaws11 wrote:
| > "they worked hard"
|
| they weren't good at it or successful at it. they just worked
| hard.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| arthurgibson wrote:
| no https..
|
| looks like changed from Jan 2022 ->
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220203014234/http://www.orkut....
| biztos wrote:
| > 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?"]
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Yeah. Email threading and AIM and good old meatspace were
| earlier social networks.
| [deleted]
| pmlnr wrote:
| USENET wants a word with that.
| ngvrnd wrote:
| Plato wants a word with that
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I think of ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing Network at the
| MIT-AI Lab) as the first social network.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23115608
|
| 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!)
|
| https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73...
|
| >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)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/its
| varjag wrote:
| Yes it was, in the accepted sense of the term (a silo website
| with social graphs for users).
| p49k wrote:
| That describes livejournal which launched in 1999.
| toast0 wrote:
| And sixdegrees, launched in 1997.
| meerita wrote:
| 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.
| personlurking wrote:
| Wow, Fotolog and Orkut. Brings me back to when I was first
| discovering Brazilian culture and learning Portuguese in the
| early/mid 2000s.
| civilized wrote:
| > 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| civilized wrote:
| text, like SMS?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| yes, not that she would call it that, she just hits the
| app called "Text" on her smartphone.
| outericky wrote:
| also instagram chat and snapchat
| no-reply wrote:
| SMS or iMessage.
| majani wrote:
| Nowadays the need for Facebook arises after you finish
| school and want to reconnect with lost friends
| emmo wrote:
| That's the idea though, right? She's the new generation.
| phreack wrote:
| 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.
| galacticdessert wrote:
| Oh I soooo miss Fotolog, was a great concept
| boredemployee wrote:
| Me too! I was 16 when created my account there, man time
| flies!
| simula67 wrote:
| 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.
| chunkyguy wrote:
| > Modern social networks, save hacker news, looks over-
| engineered.
|
| How about 4chan? The UI/UX, not the content.
| LightG wrote:
| All I needed was telnet...
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I was part of the Orkut closed beta, wow time flies
| cerol wrote:
| 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).
| Strom wrote:
| 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.
| elros wrote:
| Bad, bad server. No donut for you!
| uranium wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| asp.net at google? Did it run on windows machines?
| controversial97 wrote:
| 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.
| Julesman wrote:
| So, what if the truth and reality and what people should really
| be talking about is sad and difficult and opaque and hard to talk
| about?
| victordmor wrote:
| 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.
| jokoon wrote:
| 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.
| carvking wrote:
| But what happened to Orkut ? Why the relaunch instead of just
| growing slowly ?
| silisili wrote:
| Call me cynical, but I read
|
| > The world needs kindness now more than ever
|
| as 'I want to try again to make money.'
|
| Sorry, but if you're launching yet another social network, you're
| gonna have to do better than 'people are mean.'
| meerita wrote:
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Yes, but the road from hell is also paved with good
| intentions.
|
| Roads are seldom one-way.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The only social network idea I would take seriously (here my
| own idea ... feel free to copy) is:
|
| 1. You use your existing email.
|
| 2. You create a desktop app that reads your email, and if the
| email is "social" you import it into your locally stored feed.
|
| 3. For those who want it online everywhere, some end-to-end
| encrypted web thing to act as the desktop client.
|
| Voila, you have a way to keep in contact with friends, and keep
| photos / timelines of everyone.
| lproven wrote:
| You've basically reinvented Usenet, but worse.
|
| Check it out. It's still there. You might like it.
|
| https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Main_Page
|
| Free accounts on free server: https://www.eternal-
| september.org/
|
| Works great in Thunderbird, pretty much as you describe.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Hands up who has heard of email? And sent an email?
|
| Hands up who has heard of usenet? Would know where to
| start!
|
| Ok.
|
| My idea could also work with any message system. Turn your
| whatsapp and email and sms and so on into your "feed".
|
| See stuff in a "feed" that is quality enough that people
| are proud enough to send to you as a person rather than
| shitpost on a social network.
|
| Keep that stuff out of the data broker network.
| lproven wrote:
| 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, 1/2 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.
| pmlnr wrote:
| You want a closed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet .
| r_c_a_d wrote:
| 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?
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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)
| NavinF wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yep, trust Facebook with your private info but not an open
| source app.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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?
| bdcravens wrote:
| > No sane person would give email-read permissions to a
| random social network app. Not until you get massively
| successful
|
| Not that long ago there were a ton of email startups doing
| exactly that, usually focused on Gmail.
| pmlnr wrote:
| "I made a social network, sold it, got very rich, but now I
| miss it, so I'll re-build it. Might sell it again later, LOL,
| don't know yet."
| rbanffy wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut#Origins
|
| Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google. Orkut
| Buyukkokten, 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 Buyukkokten 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.
| funstuff007 wrote:
| > grew to a community of over 300 million people
|
| Was this while still under Google's control? Is one not able to
| count that low?
| hjkl0 wrote:
| 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?
| xchip wrote:
| Thanks to Orkut I am still receiving spam in Portughese in gmail,
| every day :|
| piva00 wrote:
| 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.
| atlgator wrote:
| Is anyone else tired of social media? Maybe I'm just old.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Absolutely. But I'm also old (45)
|
| 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.
| bjoli wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
|
| I welcome better social media.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Get them to join Hacker News. ;)
| archb wrote:
| 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.
| bugeats wrote:
| 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.
| jokoon wrote:
| 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.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| .NET
|
| IIRC, Orkut was a super early adopter of .NET - which was
| interesting in particular at that time since it was windows only
| & LAMP was taking off.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| "I'm an optimist. I believe in the power of connection to change
| the world."
|
| I am a realist, I believe that connection happens in real life,
| and human beings will always misuse online communication.
|
| Wake up from your dreams.
| pikseladam wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| espine wrote:
| 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.
| skibz wrote:
| I was curious what the site looked like back around the time it
| got started.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040701033206/http://orkut.com/
| account_created wrote:
| I learned hacking from orkut at age 14. Haha, nice script-kiddies
| days, that's why I say to everyone:
|
| "To be a hacker, you have to be a script kiddie before"
| mrwh wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Instagram has not faded away yet
| simonswords82 wrote:
| 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.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| People don't want to work for a company that the founder names
| after himself anymore these days. It's too vain and too 1980s.
| bdcravens wrote:
| nor do they want to work for a company that ends in "-ly" or
| "-io". It's too 2010s. What are the cool kids naming their
| companies these days?
| speed_spread wrote:
| I hear that prime numbers are all the rage.
| mertnesvat wrote:
| 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.
|
| Some ref... https://gay.blog.br/en/geek-en/orkut-social-network-
| was-foun...
| srvmshr wrote:
| 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 :)
|
| [1] https://www.theweek.in/leisure/society/2018/04/22/orkut-
| the-...
|
| 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."_
| tinus_hn wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ggm wrote:
| My memory is that it just policed trolls and hatespeech.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| 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.
| pdenton wrote:
| This won't be a thing in Holland. Not that it matters much, but
| just saying.
|
| https://translate.google.com/?sl=nl&tl=en&text=kut&op=transl...
| marapuru wrote:
| Not too sure about that. I've seen Flickr doing pretty well,
| and pronouncing that was always an issue.
|
| Also I remember the days when Facebook was spoken about as
| "GezichtsBoek, wat moet je daar nu dan"?
| [deleted]
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| It also sounds like slang for 'orgasms' in Finnish. The first
| time I heard of Orkut I assumed it was a casual sex hookup
| site/app.
| p2hari wrote:
| 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 :)
| baybal2 wrote:
| It's absolutely mindboggling how Google had 2nd largest social
| network after Facebook for some years, and then just simply
| closed it because NIH.
| spencera wrote:
| Weird, yesterday I ended up at hello.com and was interested by
| the site... orkut.com has exactly the same layout and "languages:
| English Portugues" selector at the top. Coincidence?
| Dangeranger wrote:
| Not that weird, hello.com was also founded by Orkut Buyukkokten
| [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_(social_network)
| underlines wrote:
| Orkut had reached critical mass in several countries, especially
| spanish and portuguese speaking ones.
| madmax108 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/05/orkut-founder-launches-
| he...
|
| [2] https://hello.com/
| joshxyz wrote:
| " hello team" as closing salutation lol
|
| i always wonder why people use everyday words as their brand
|
| "hey i have seen you on hello"
|
| "wot"
| MereInterest wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm registering helloogle.com and waiting for the phone call.
| Worked for them!
| sva_ wrote:
| An Oogle from hell.
| [deleted]
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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"
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Worked at Google.
|
| 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.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| As an outsider to Google, I tried this exercise.
|
| Celebrity engineers at Google: Larry Page, Sergey Brin,
| Jeff Dean Celebrity product people at Google: Marissa
| Mayer, Sundar Pichai
|
| In full fairness, I first heard Sundar Pichai's name when
| he was promoted to CEO of Google.
| AJRF wrote:
| > Google settled the case out of court, and we all know what
| that means.
|
| I don't, does it mean he had to pay Google a bunch of money?
| markoc wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.wired.com/2004/06/lawsuit-google-stole-orkut-
| cod...
| leoedin wrote:
| 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.
| sumedh wrote:
| 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.
| mathattack wrote:
| 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)
| querez wrote:
| > Google settled the case out of court, and we all know what
| that means.
|
| What does that mean?
| hjkl0 wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > 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.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| 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.
| manfre wrote:
| Businesses don't want to pay unlimited legal expenses.
| Even if they were certain they'd win, settling could have
| been the cheaper option.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It only actually means that they thought it would be
| cheaper to pay money to make the problem go away than it
| would be to litigate it.
|
| Part of that calculation is the cost of the lawyers, and
| another part of the calculation is their own thoughts on
| how likely they'd be to lose.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes and it could benefit from the entire fediverse network.
| elevaet wrote:
| 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.
| cesarb wrote:
| > 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.
| lupire wrote:
| 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.
| nwatson wrote:
| 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.
| codyogden wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| chunkyks wrote:
| Fond memories. I met my now-wife on Orkut.
|
| I remember when I quit using it, too; the platform just became
| dominated by a language I didn't understand.
| karimmaassen wrote:
| For the Dutch speaking community, Orkut has always had a strange
| connotation to it, as part of the name is a swear word.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Same for Finnish, orkut is slang for orgasms.
|
| Sounds pretty amateurish to start a big service without running
| an international name check first.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes it's always been a weird name for us. Definitely put me off
| from even looking at it back in the day.
| geuis wrote:
| Or or Kut?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kut#Noun_4
|
| I don't think the name would be that much of a problem given
| how often the word is thrown around informally.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Saying it in public is one thing. Using it in branding that
| you want users to associate with is another.
| brink wrote:
| Well then it should be super popular.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| culi wrote:
| 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
|
| [0] https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/
|
| [1] http://www.bananas.org/
|
| [2] https://permies.com/
|
| [3] https://bluelight.org/xf/
|
| [4] https://www.shroomery.org/
|
| [5] https://drugs-forum.com/
|
| [6] https://www.erowid.org/
| culi wrote:
| 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"
| wintorez wrote:
| I owe a lot to Orkut
| [deleted]
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| ak_111 wrote:
| 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.
| diamondage wrote:
| 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!
| ak_111 wrote:
| 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).
| majani wrote:
| It's still kinda that way now. Eastern Europe has VK, China has
| WeChat, Japan has LINE. The 2 billion people in those
| geographies count for something
| moreira wrote:
| > 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.
| biztos wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWiW
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > 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.
| Zanfa wrote:
| > 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.
| Strom wrote:
| 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.
| mbfg wrote:
| 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.
| sintapilgo wrote:
| 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.
| Morthanc wrote:
| I agree, but I think it depended on the community. Some
| communities had very active forums and others were barren.
|
| This is not something negative, some communities were just some
| witty or funny title and others to have genuine discussions.
| sintapilgo wrote:
| 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.
| doliveira wrote:
| 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.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| 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.
| Fargoan wrote:
| 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
| smartbettor wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| asveikau wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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."
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
| captainmuon wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" 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.
| yojo wrote:
| And The Facebook. Even the wall wasn't there at launch. You
| had some form fields to fill out, a picture, and that was it.
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