kahkaha.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

It wrote its own name with spaces between the letters: k a h k a h a. c o m, across the top of every page for sixteen years, in the way a certain kind of late-90s site set its title to look like a logo when nobody had a logo. Under it, in a sans-serif at ten pixels, the claim: Türkiye'nin En Eğlenceli Sitesi. The most entertaining site in Turkey. Nobody had audited that.

The first capture is from January 1999 and it is a frameset, so the archive holds a page whose entire content is an apology for using frames. What was inside the frames, judging by the metadata a few years later, was a joke archive and a message board, with keywords listing Kemal Sunal and Cüneyt Arkın next to the words for girl and boy. The pitch line said that if you feel like having fun or finding new friends, the big entertainment is one click away, and that thousands of others are already on kahkaha.com.

I was on a 33.6k modem at home in those years and this is exactly the category that loaded on it, free and mostly text, encoded in windows-1254 so the Turkish letters came out right. But chat rooms specifically were never mine. I had ICQ and then MSN, which meant the people I talked to were people I already knew, and a room full of strangers with handles was a different hobby that a lot of Turkey had and I did not.

What is odd about this one is not the death, it is the drift. Sites of that vintage usually die as the thing they were born as. This one kept selling whatever the year was selling, and by the end it was unrecognizable as the site in its own title bar.

~ the dossier ~

~ the jeton desk ~

By January 2005 the navigation reads like a business plan that had been revised too many times. Tanış-Kaynaş, meet and mingle. Cep, meaning mobile. Then games, chat, jokes, webmail, e-cards, and at the end of the row a link labeled Jeton Danışma, the token help desk. The archive does not preserve what the tokens actually bought, but the presence of a help desk for them says the free entertainment site had a metered room somewhere inside it.

By 2009 the metadata had stopped mentioning jokes almost entirely. It leads with polyphonic melodies, colored wallpapers, picture messages and logos, then lists the handsets: Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola. That is the ringtone economy, and for a couple of years around then it was the most reliable way for a Turkish content site to charge anybody for anything. Every entertainment portal in the country tried it. The ones that survived had something else underneath.

~ the last thing it sold ~

The final working front page, from 1 December 2014, has six links on it. Two of them are Açık Artırmalar and Açık Artırma Bilgileri, auctions and auction information. Then okey and tavla, the tile-and-dice pair every casual gaming site in the country ran, followed by a page of Flash games. The last two are sohbet and komikler, chat and funny stuff, the only survivors from 1999 and sitting at the end of the row like furniture nobody wanted to throw out.

Then the archive goes quiet for sixteen months. The next capture is 24 April 2016 and it is 546 bytes of Sedo, the parking service, with the title kahkaha.com is for sale. It stays that way for the next eight years, occasionally growing a page of keyword links about laughter, until in 2025 the parking host starts refusing the crawler outright.

So the date on this stone is a judgment call and it is worth saying so. There is no announcement, no press coverage, no farewell page, and no captures at all during 2015. What is certain is that a site that had been answering since 1999 stopped some time between that December front page and that April listing, and that the last thing anybody did with the name was put it up for sale.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »