Czat.onet.pl

» see czat.onet.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 15 September 1999 the Deputy Prime Minister of Poland sat down in a chat room and took questions from whoever was logged in. Leszek Balcerowicz was also the Finance Minister and the architect of the country's postcommunist economic program, and Czat.onet.pl was the first Polish site to put somebody like that in a moderated room with the public. That was three months or so into its existence.

It had opened in 1999 as part of the Onet.pl portal with twelve rooms sorted by topic. The count climbed from there, and in 2001 users were allowed to make their own, which is the moment a chat service stops being something a company programs and starts being something a population occupies. Rooms were run by whoever founded them, with superoperators and operators appointed underneath. A handful stayed in the hands of Onet staff. By the end there was only one of those left.

At its height Czat.onet.pl sat at the top of the three big Polish chat services, ahead of Interia's CZATeria and the Wirtualna Polska chat. Megapanel figures put it between 500,000 and 800,000 users depending on the month. Rooms ran a little over three thousand, counting private ones. The busiest was called Towarzyski, roughly the social or companionable room, and it could hold more than a thousand people talking at the same time.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rooms ~

The room names survived in a place nobody intended as a memorial. The Wayback Machine's index of czat.onet.pl is full of login URLs with the room name sitting in the query string, so the room list is readable today as a column of URL-encoded Polish. Towarzyski. Kalambury_Rulez, a charades room. Filozofia. HipHop_i_Rap. GaDu__GaDu, a room named after the messenger everyone was also running. Evangelion. Olsztyn, for one city in the northeast. DEUTSCHLAND. Kantyna_Słubicka, a canteen named for Słubice, the Polish town that sits on the river directly across from Frankfurt an der Oder, which tells you who was in it.

Then there are three more in that same list: rooms for ten to twelve year olds, for twelve to fifteen, for sixteen to nineteen. Unmoderated user-created rooms, sorted by childhood. That was normal in 2004 and it is the part of the index that reads worst now.

I do not read Polish and I have never had an Onet account. What I have is a list of room names pulled out of an archive crawler's database, which is a strange way to meet a place, and more than most dead chat services leave behind. In Turkey in those same years the equivalent rooms were on IRC and then in MSN, not on the portal, so the shape is familiar even where none of the specifics are.

~ the poem room ~

The best thing that happened on Czat.onet.pl was a room for writing poetry with strangers. Multipoezja was the idea of the poet Michał Zabłocki and ran as a multimedia project with the chat as its workshop. The first session was in July 2001. People showed up and built poems line by line with whoever was present. On 11 June 2009 the room produced its two hundredth poem, titled Dwie setki poetki.

Lyrics came out of it. The band Pogodno recorded Piosenka o śmiesznym tytule, a song with a funny title, from text written in that room. So did Maszyna do świerkania, and Czesław Śpiewa took the Fryderyk for Song of the Year with it in 2009. A poem called Blokowisko, named for the concrete apartment blocks, picked up a distinction in a literary competition. A portal chat room, the kind of product a media company runs to sell banner advertising against, won Poland's national music prize by accident.

~ no reason given ~

The last real update to the service and its Java applet landed in February 2009, so the thing ran for nearly eight more years in the state it was left in. In December 2016 the users were told it would close early in the new year. Onet did not publish a reason, then or afterward.

It went off on 4 January 2017. The chat tab vanished from the Onet.pl front page and the address czat.onet.pl started sending anybody who typed it to the portal homepage instead, which is where it still sends them. Eighteen years and three thousand rooms, and the exit was a redirect.

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