bash.im

» see bash.im as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

bash.im stopped on 24 February 2022, and the date does most of the work in this grave. Russia invaded Ukraine that morning. The largest humor site in the language put up a black screen and never came back.

It started in January 2004 in Ufa, built by Andrey Lavrov, who went by DarkRider and came out of the Russian and Bashkir anime fandom. The model was the English-language bash.org, running since 1999: readers submit funny things people said in chat and other readers vote, and whatever survives gets a permanent number. The first quotes were pulled out of IRC logs from RusNet channels. The whole thing ran off a corporate server at his workplace.

Konstantin Grusha joined in September 2005 and the operation moved to Moscow. From there it became far larger than a fan project. Daily readership passed three hundred and fifty thousand people before you counted anyone on RSS, and monthly visitors ran between 1.4 and 1.8 million. It kept winning ROTOR, the Russian internet's own award, taking the grand prize for humor site of the year in 2008 and first place in the humor category again in 2010.

I do not read Russian and this was never going to be mine. What makes it a grave rather than a footnote is that rip.so already buries bash.org, and the Russian one outlived the original by years and then ended for a reason the original never had to face.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the abyss ~

The moderation queue was called Бездна, the Abyss, and its design is the most interesting thing on the site. Submissions went in immediately and were readable by anyone who wanted to go and look, twenty five at a time in random order on every refresh. You voted, and you were not shown the running score.

Hiding the score was the point. Nobody could see which way the wind was blowing, so nobody voted with it. A quote that dropped below minus five disappeared from public view. Everything else had 196 hours to earn its way onto the front page or be deleted. The result was a front page assembled by a crowd that could not see itself, which is much harder to build than it sounds and almost nobody has built one since.

~ the drift ~

The original bash.org.ru was computer humor, because in 2004 the people typing Russian into IRC at two in the morning were technical people. As the readership grew the quotes moved toward everyday jokes and recycled anekdoty, and part of the audience never forgave it. A spinoff called ibash.org.ru opened specifically to hold the line on technical material.

The family expanded instead of contracting. IT happens launched on 3 November 2008 for longer stories out of the support desk and the server room. Zadolba.li took complaints and Killpls.me took misfortune. On 1 March 2012, after eight years, the site left bash.org.ru for bash.im, a domain registered on the Isle of Man.

~ the day it died ~

On 24 February 2022 the site went black. On 27 February the black screen carried two words in Russian, НЕТ ВОЙНЕ, no to war. Nothing was posted after that, and operations formally ended on 1 April 2022.

For a site whose entire output was other people's throwaway lines, that is an unusually direct ending. Eighteen years of accumulated Russian internet humor, an archive that a generation of Russian speakers quoted without knowing where it came from, switched off deliberately by the people running it on the morning the reason arrived.

~ the long tail ~

A mirror at bashorg.org stayed up, frozen at the shutdown. On 1 May 2022 a copy appeared at bash.ru.net and carried on from there, which is the usual afterlife: the archive survives and the site does not. The numbered quotes still resolve. Nobody is adding to them under the original name.

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

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