Alkışlarla Yaşıyorum

» see alkislarlayasiyorum.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

For two and a half years Turkey did not have YouTube. The block came down in May 2008 and did not come off until the end of October 2010, and in the middle of that gap a Turkish video site that had already been running for four years found the audience it would keep for a decade.

Fatih Aker started it in August 2004, before YouTube existed anywhere. The name translates as I live on applause, which is a line from a Zeki Müren song, and the site's own meta description called it the only site in Turkey and the world that lives on applause. What it actually was: a clip archive with uploader handles and comment counts under every entry. Turkish film scenes sat next to television that had aired the night before. Later there was an audio section and a collections tab, but the object was always the clip.

Investors bought it in 2011 and the direction changed. Turkish coverage of the closure is blunt about it: the uploads got shorter and broader at the same time, and the audience thinned out behind them. From 2013 the copyright letters started arriving in volume, which meant the older the archive got the more of it had to come down. The final farewell blamed the legal process and the expenses, and it did not pretend the platforms had not won.

I was on TTNET in Ankara through the whole block and I remember what the hole felt like. It got filled by two or three Turkish addresses, and this was one of them. I cannot tell you which clips I watched here rather than somewhere else, because in those years video arrived the way everything arrived, pasted into a forum thread or sent over MSN by somebody who did not say where they got it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ban years ~

The block was the best thing that ever happened to it and also a warning it did not read. When the biggest video site in the world is unreachable from your country, a local site inherits traffic it never earned on product quality. That inheritance ended on 30 October 2010.

What the site did with those years mattered more than the years themselves. It built a habit: Turkish people looking for Turkish clips typed a Turkish address. That habit was strong enough to carry it another decade after the traffic advantage disappeared, which is longer than most of the sites that had the same windfall.

~ what it served ~

The last working front page, captured on 21 July 2020, is a good census of what the site had become. A fire crew frees a kid whose arm got stuck in a storm drain in Mersin while he reached for his phone. Below it a Tofaş full of teenagers drives bumper to bumper with a truck, filmed from inside the Tofaş.

One entry is a compilation titled the most watched videos of the day, dated the day before, which is a site quoting itself. Another is the WWE Smackdown 2007 opening titles, uploaded by a user called davidsilva with a caption about how they used to wait all week for Friday. A sixteen-year-old site posting nostalgia about its own middle period is not a bad way to go out.

~ the last twenty-four hours ~

The announcement went up on 23 July 2020 and the site went with it. Webrazzi covered it the same day, egirisim the next. The farewell said that everything has an end and that alkışlarla yaşıyorum had finished its job, that the legal processes and the costs of recent times had become too much to carry. It was signed by the admins, using a word about themselves that no memorial page needs to repeat.

The archive backs the speed up. There are working captures on 20 and 21 July 2020, nothing at all after the 23rd, and the domain has no address record now. Sixteen years of user uploads went out with no migration window and no successor site holding the files. The clips are wherever they were copied to before somebody pulled the plug on the same afternoon they mentioned it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »