Dikt.no

» see dikt.no as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The domain was sitting there in October 2000 with a single Norwegian sentence on it saying the page would soon be in operation, welcome back. By early 2002 dikt.no described itself as Norway's most comprehensive resource for amateur writers, and it meant it fairly literally. Gunnar Roland Tjomlid had built a publishing house with no editorial gate at the front: known writers and complete unknowns posted into the same stream, and everyone could read and comment on everyone.

There were eighteen genre categories, which sounds like over-engineering until you look at how the traffic actually distributed. Poems took 77.46 percent of everything published. The rest was spread across essays, short stories, haiku, song lyrics, sonnets, screenplay pages, novel extracts and a category that translates roughly as words of wisdom. A site can offer eighteen doors and still be one room, and this one was a poetry site that had politely made space for prose.

Joining required an account and at least one published text, which is a small design decision with a large effect. You could not lurk with a username. Reading was open to anybody, but membership meant you had put something of your own in, and the house rules were strict about it being yours: plagiarism was the first thing the regulations ruled out. The menu also carried a link marked Krisehjelp, crisis help, sitting between the FAQ and the rules, because a site where thousands of people post the poems they write at two in the morning ends up needing one.

Norwegian is the wall here. Sixteen years of one country's amateur literature is a corpus I cannot read a line of, and Norway in 2005 had a dense little web of its own that almost nothing crossed out of. The nearest thing I had was Turkish forums, which ran on hardware talk and games rather than poetry, and which never thought to put a crisis line in the navigation.

~ the dossier ~

~ who owned it ~

Dikt.no changed hands more often than its readers probably noticed. SirCon ran the hosting and operations until February 2008. At that point Dagbladet, one of Norway's national newspapers, took over running the site, which is the moment an amateur poetry community became a line item in media company accounts. Later Tjomlid bought it back.

Tjomlid himself went on to become better known in Norway for something else entirely, writing the skeptic blog Saksynt on vaccines and pseudoscience, and dikt.no ends up mentioned on his own about page as a thing he used to run. The site outlasted its newspaper owner and came home to the person who started it, and then it ran out of the one resource an unfunded community site actually needs, which is somebody with time to maintain it.

~ the farewell ~

The closure is unusually well documented for a site this size, because the site documented it itself. The last full capture of the working dikt.no is from 2 May 2017, menus intact, login box intact, Facebook widget loading. Four weeks later the same address serves 687 bytes of plain HTML: dikt.no er lagt ned. Dikt.no ble lagt ned 01.06.2017. Thanks to everyone who used the service in the sixteen years it was running. Signed Mvh Thin AS, with a support email address.

There is an odd hole before that. Through the first four months of 2017 the domain served the Apache default page, the one that says the web server software is running but no content has been added yet, which usually means a site has been deleted. Then the whole thing came back in May and ran for another few weeks before the real goodbye. Somebody moved it to a new host, got it working again, and then decided.

~ what sixteen years leaves ~

None of it is readable now. The texts were in a database, the database went with the server, and what the Wayback Machine holds is front pages and menus rather than the writing. A Norwegian teenager's first published poem from 2003 is gone in the specific way that user-generated content goes: not deleted by anybody in particular, just no longer hosted.

The closing line counts the years rather than the members or the texts, which tells you what the people switching it off thought the achievement was. Sixteen years of running something that made no money, for an audience that wrote more than it read.

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