bobiler.org

» see bobiler.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I saw this site's output for about fifteen years without visiting the site. That is not a criticism of it, it is what winning looks like for a humor site. A monte would arrive forwarded, or screenshotted off somebody else's timeline, watermark cropped, uploader's handle gone. You laughed at a thing made by a stranger on a site you were not on. Most of Turkey's relationship with bobiler worked exactly that way.

The site itself started in 2006, built by Ozan Tüzün, and it spelled its own name with a Turkish letter where the English one belonged: bobiler.örg. Users called themselves bobiler, a made-up plural of a made-up word, chosen with the self-deprecation that Turkish internet humor ran on for two decades. What they uploaded was called monte, short for montage, and it meant an image edited in photoshop until it carried a joke.

That word is the inheritance. Turkish internet slang later borrowed the English word caps for the same object, but for a decade the native term came out of this site, and the standard form of the joke was worked out here: a still lifted from Turkish film or television, captioned in a typeface everyone recognized. At its peak roughly a million people a month were reading it and tens of thousands were uploading.

There was an iOS app in 2012, Bobiler Evreni, which laid the content out as a virtual universe of planets. Late on there was a look at whether NFTs could pay the bills, which the team decided against. Neither of those is what it will be remembered for. It will be remembered for a file format, a caption style and a word.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a monte was ~

It helps to be precise about the object, because it was not a meme in the American sense. A meme template gets reused with new text. A monte was a one-off piece of image editing where the work itself was the joke, and the craft mattered: cutouts left deliberately bad, jokes that only land if you know which 1970s film the frame came from.

That made the site more like a workshop than a feed. People built reputations under handles and competed for the top of the day's list, with running gags a newcomer could not decode. It also made it fragile. When image jokes moved to Instagram and Twitter, the making of them scattered to phones, and a website whose whole value was being the place where the good ones were collected had nothing left to be.

~ the letter ~

The goodbye went out on 3 March 2022, written in the site's own lowercase register. It opened with sevgili bobiler, dear bobiler, said the site was going on a break for probably a long time, and then explained the situation in the vocabulary of a fifteen-year in-joke. Running a parallel universe in this era is not easy, it said. There are black holes trying to swallow our planets, a darkness that keeps growing, geopolitical problems, and on top of that we keep traveling backward in time.

Then the line that does the actual work: biliyorsunuz makina da mazotla çalışıyor. As you know, the machine also runs on diesel. Turkey's inflation was running above fifty percent that spring and a lira-denominated advertising business was paying dollar-denominated hosting. The letter asked everyone to back up their montes to their own computers before the 26th, thanked them for fifteen süperli years, and signed off as the bobiler ekibi.

~ the last page ~

The archive holds a complete site on 26 March 2022, fourteen kilobytes of front page, working normally. What is on that front page is the part worth keeping. Every monte uploaded on the last day is about the last day. There is one called son monte, the last monte, and one whose title is a line Turkish readers know by heart, about the good ones getting on beautiful horses and riding off.

The next capture, on the 27th, is 628 bytes. All it contains is the name and a date range: bobiler.org, 2006 to 2022.

That tombstone is also the best surviving evidence of when the site was born, since the press coverage kept saying fifteen years and 2007. The people who ran it put 2006 on the stone. Captures stop entirely in April. The domain has no address record now, and the montes are wherever their authors saved them, which is to say mostly nowhere.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »