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Comment by nicebyte

7 hours ago

I had an account on orkut way back in 2006. It wasn't very active - I had IRL friends and none of them were there, so I had no reason to go there. The first social network that really caught on among us was LiveJournal.

I really do miss "old" forms of social media like forums and live journal, but unfortunately I think the era of people talking to each other on large public platforms is well and truly over. Even if _somehow_ it was possible to get everyone out of the claws of corporate social media, there is no fighting the onslaught of bots. There is simply no way to remake Orkut as a "good" form of social media because the world in which such a thing was possible doesn't exist anymore.

It was impossible to control the bots even back then. IMO Orkut died 100% because of spam.

That seems too late for both of those, heh. :) I started on LJ in 2001 and quit in 2006. Orkut I think I signed up for in 2004, and only lasted maybe a year there. I seem to remember the Brazilian influence even as early as that.

  • LJ was huge in the Russian speaking segment of the internet well into the 2010s. Me and my friends started using it around 2007 and I didn't interact with English content on there at all.

    The Orkut timeline I might be misremembering but I'm fairly sure I was already at the university back then which would put it 2006 at the earliest.