Orkut
orkut.com
orkut.com
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.
[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.
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."
Feeds on the other hand feel tedious. In the end, Facebook felt more and more like work and less rewarding.
Such a shame that we all jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.
This is not something negative, some communities were just some witty or funny title and others to have genuine discussions.
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 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.
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.
- mid to late 20s are on Instagram
- late teenagers to mid 20s are on Snapchat
- younger than that they're on TikTok
- everyone is on YouTube
- nerds are on Twitter
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.
Shameless Plug: I am working on a social platform with a similar mission and might do a Show HN in the coming months :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How about 4chan? The UI/UX, not the content.
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 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/
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.
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...
Maybe he'll come up with a new concept, but his last attempt at that wasn't exactly fruitful.
i always wonder why people use everyday words as their brand
"hey i have seen you on hello"
"wot"
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.
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"
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.
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.
I don't, does it mean he had to pay Google a bunch of money?
https://www.wired.com/2004/06/lawsuit-google-stole-orkut-cod...
What does that mean?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
[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."
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?”]
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)
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.
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.
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 welcome better social media.
Sounds pretty amateurish to start a big service without running an international name check first.
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.
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 signed up for the new platform, curious to see what it will be like.
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
Photo sharing would also be on albums, which worked more like flickr-for-group-events.
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.
they weren't good at it or successful at it. they just worked hard.
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.
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.
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'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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040701033206/http://orkut.com/
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.
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.
“To be a hacker, you have to be a script kiddie before”
I remember when I quit using it, too; the platform just became dominated by a language I didn't understand.
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.
Was this while still under Google's control? Is one not able to count that low?
looks like changed from Jan 2022 -> https://web.archive.org/web/20220203014234/http://www.orkut....
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.
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?
> 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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not that long ago there were a ton of email startups doing exactly that, usually focused on Gmail.
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?
Is there an email client that has or could add social features? Do we need someone to create one?
Roads are seldom one-way.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=nl&tl=en&text=kut&op=transl...
Also I remember the days when Facebook was spoken about as "GezichtsBoek, wat moet je daar nu dan"?