Cloob

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

~ the goodbye ~

cloob never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a persian-language product running inside a censorship regime that did not point at me. the closest analogue in my own internet was facebook in 2008 and then nothing in particular, since the turkish social network of the time was hi5 and i was never on hi5. cloob's whole life sits next door to my life, in a different language and a different government, on the same dial-up tail.

the site launched on december 21, 2004 out of tehran, built by sabaidea, an iranian internet company that also ran an early persian webmail and a couple of news properties. orkut had just been blocked inside iran. cloob arrived with the same friend lists and the same profile pages and the same scrapbook walls, in persian, on a server you could reach from inside the country. growth was immediate. by 2008 the platform was claiming around a million members and a hundred million monthly page views.

cloob spent the next decade in a fight it could not really win. iranian authorities blocked the site for periods in march 2008 and again in december 2009. cloob negotiated, complied, came back. instagram arrived inside iran as a tolerated foreign app and absorbed the personal-photo half of what cloob had been. telegram took the messaging half. by the late 2010s cloob was a maintenance project for sabaidea and not a growing one. on august 6, 2021 the company posted a closure note saying it was worn out fighting censorship while foreign companies were allowed to take over.

~ the chronicle ~

~ under the regime ~

the cloob obituary is mostly the story of how iranian platforms had to operate. you complied with content takedowns when they came down. you accepted that any post about politics could pull the whole site offline for a week. cloob did all of that and kept running because it was iranian-owned and reachable from inside iran during periods when foreign platforms were not. for a stretch of the late 2000s that was the entire business model.

the platform layered on the standard scrapbook social-network kit. profiles, photo albums, groups with discussion boards, a virtual currency called coroob you could spend in a small marketplace. there was a weblog product layered on top, with a jobs board and a classifieds section bolted next to it. the everything-machine pattern of mid-2000s social networks, in persian, behind a registration wall.

~ how it ended ~

the closure note in august 2021 was unusually direct for an iranian product. sabaidea management said they had spent years caught between iranian regulators on one side and the foreign-platform competition iran had let through on the other. instagram in particular kept being named as a competitor that had been allowed to operate without the same compliance burden. the company chose to stop running cloob rather than keep paying the cost.

the actual users had mostly already left by then for the foreign platforms cloob was being asked to compete with. seventeen years was a long life for a regime-adjacent social network. the persian-language internet kept going under instagram and telegram while cloob became a domain redirect.

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