Demotivalo.net

» see demotivalo.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The demotivational poster is one of the few internet formats I can date precisely in my own memory, because it showed up everywhere at once and always in the same shape. A photograph sat inside a thin white border on a black background. Under it went one bold word, and under that a smaller line that undercut the word. The whole thing was a parody of the motivational posters that hung in office corridors, and by the late 2000s people were making them in every language on earth. The joke survived translation better than almost anything else from that era.

Hungary got its own home for them in 2010, and Demotivalo.net became the first and, by a distance, the most popular. It grew fast enough to collect 200,000 Facebook followers, which in a language with roughly thirteen million speakers is a very large audience. The mechanics were a moderation queue. You uploaded a picture and wrote the lines, then an administrator decided whether it reached the voting page. Posters that scored well there were promoted to the hot page. By December 2014 about 12,500 had made it that far.

The good years were 2010 to 2013. After that the staff, which may have been a single person, began disappearing for long stretches, and that proved fatal in a very specific way. Nothing appeared on the front page without approval, so when the approver was gone the site simply stopped producing. Bugs piled up unfixed. Somebody would resurface every so often to push a few posters onto the hot page, then be gone again. The last time anyone did that was February 2016.

The site itself hung on for another year with nobody home. Its front page was still a complete page of about eleven kilobytes on 1 June 2017, and the last capture anybody considers working is from 11 June. By 1 July it had collapsed to roughly half that size, and from the middle of August it was a 388-byte stub that never changed again. There was no shutdown notice at any point, because by then there was nobody left to write one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sister sites ~

The operators did what anybody does with a format that works. They cloned it sideways. Kommenthuszar.com collected troll comments and strange posts off Facebook. Klonok.com was built on lookalikes and Idokapu.com on then-and-now pairs. Oszdmeg.com ran on feelings. The last two, Cukigyar.com and Ezmiez.com, did cute animals and funny pictures from around the world.

Four of the six survive in a way almost nothing in this archive does. ArchiveTeam Hungary later acquired the domains for Kommenthuszar, Klonok, Idokapu and Oszdmeg, and now serves them from its own infrastructure out of the archived crawls, so those addresses answer today with their original contents. Cukigyar and Ezmiez are recorded as dead and lost.

~ the volunteer who saw it coming ~

Between July and November 2014, an ArchiveTeam volunteer going by bzc6p ran what the wiki calls a panic grab of Demotivalo and its surviving sister sites. That was two and a half years before the front page broke, at a point when the place was merely neglected. The judgment turned out to be right, and the timing turned out to matter enormously, because the automated crawlers could not do this particular job.

Pagination on Demotivalo was generated inside the browser by a JavaScript tool, so a crawler following links never reached the deeper pages. The Wayback Machine has the front page across the years and very little behind it. Whatever survives of the actual archive of Hungarian demotivational posters survives because one person decided in 2014 that a quiet site was a dying one and went and copied it by hand.

~ the number that stopped moving ~

12,500 posters on the hot pages as of December 2014, out of a much larger pile that never cleared the vote. Nobody counted again after that, which is its own kind of evidence. A site with an active moderator produces a bigger number every year.

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