Hyde Park (hydepark.co.il)

» see hydepark.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Hyde Park opened in May 2000, named after the corner of the London park where anyone is allowed to stand up and say something out loud. Arnon Shtelrid and Ziv Yanous were both young and the pitch was literal: a place where anybody could put an opinion up and argue it out with whoever showed up.

It filled fast and it filled wide. Culture and leisure boards sat next to science and military ones, and there was a large religious section that pulled in observant and Haredi users at a point when almost nothing on the Israeli web was addressed to them at all.

By 2004 it was the third-biggest forum and chat destination in Israel, behind Tapuz People and Nana, reaching roughly fourteen percent of the country's internet users. For a site two people started in their twenties, in a market of about six million, that is a serious number.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The religious boards are the part with an afterlife. Behadrei Haredim began as a forum inside Hyde Park and grew into one of the main news sources for Israel's Haredi community, which it still is. A general-purpose argument site produced a working newsroom for a readership the mainstream Israeli press was only covering from the outside.

The shape of that is familiar to me from a different country. The Turkish forums I was on in the same years, donanimhaber and frmtr, worked the same way. A board for a hobby becomes the place the hobby actually happens, and then it becomes a publication, without anyone sitting down and deciding that should be the plan. Hyde Park did it with religion where ours did it with hardware.

~ what got buried with it ~

Ownership moved twice. Machshava-Vanish Technology bought it in 2005 and folded it into the Chavera network. In September 2007 it went to Global Networks. In August 2016 it was put up for sale, and the sale did not happen.

In April 2018 the site went down with no notice given. Eighteen years of threads, on a site whose entire value was the threads, stopped resolving on an ordinary weekday. There was no farewell post and no export offered, which is the standard ending for a forum that has been on the market for two years and has run out of people willing to keep paying for the disks.

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