itiraf.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

There is no honest way for me to claim this site. That is not modesty, it is how it was built. It had no profile and nothing to log into. You typed a paragraph you were not going to say to anyone you knew, you sent it without a name, and either an editor published it or nobody ever saw it. Anonymity leaves no personal record behind, so everybody who used it ends up in the same position, which is that nothing can be proven either way.

It opened in October 1999, which puts it among the oldest Turkish internet brands of any kind. Ersan Özer built it while he was working at NTV, and the archive backs the date up: the earliest capture is 27 November 1999, a page of two kilobytes. The tagline it kept for twenty years was hayat okulu, the school of life.

The numbers Özer gave a Milliyet interviewer in the early years are the ones worth keeping. Three hundred thousand confessions had come in and thirty thousand had been published. Six or seven hundred arrived every day and about sixty went up. Roughly 28,000 people read it daily, at a time when the Turkish web had maybe a couple of million users total. He described the filtering plainly. Nothing purely sexual, and a preference for the ones people would forward to a friend. He also claimed he could tell an invented confession from a real one by the first sentence.

The reason it worked is the reason it is hard to write about. It was a place to put the thing you had no other place for, in a country and a decade where that was in short supply, and the price of that was that no confession belongs to anyone afterward. Özer said at one point that the site had become something developing outside of him. That was true of every reader as well.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who owned it ~

For a site with no accounts it changed hands a lot. Özer sold it to EBİ in 2004 and stayed an entrepreneur, later attached to Uzmantv and Mediakraft. When EBİ split its operations in 2012, itiraf.com moved to Workbench along with the older Turkish dating property Siberalem, ending up in a portfolio of aging brands that were each individually profitable and collectively unloved.

That is the ordinary fate of a 1999 Turkish website that kept working. Nobody rebuilt it, nobody killed it, and it quietly earned enough from advertising slots to justify leaving the machine on. The 2018 pages still carry a Google ad unit sized 250 by 250, which was a standard the display industry had already moved past.

~ the 2013 scare ~

In September 2013 Özer passed on a rumor on Twitter that the site was closing, and the reaction was large enough that the owner had to respond publicly. Workbench's general manager said flatly that they were not thinking of closing itiraf.com and were planning new projects for it. The site went on for another six years, so the denial was honest.

Two widely repeated Turkish retrospectives now say it ended in early 2017. That is wrong, and the archive settles it. Through 2019 the crawler was picking up live confession pages with entry numbers above a million, on the URL pattern the site used until the end, which is a title in Turkish attached to a number. First love. What goes around comes around.

~ the ending nobody announced ~

The last time the archive got a real page out of it was 7 January 2020, fourteen kilobytes, ads and all. The next attempt, on 8 March 2020, comes back 503. So does April. There are no captures after that, and today the domain has no address record at all, so the answer to what killed the oldest confession site in Turkish is that a hosting arrangement lapsed in the first weeks of 2020 and nobody with the password cared enough to notice.

For a site whose entire function was to receive things people could not say anywhere else, going silent without a farewell page is a strangely consistent ending. Twenty years of other people's worst sentences, and not one sentence about itself on the way out.

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