Mynet Sohbet

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

~ the obit ~

in the internet cafe years my chatting was MSN. a list of people i already knew, sorted into groups, one window per person. Mynet Sohbet was the other door in the same building, and you did not bring a friend list through it. you picked a room by city, walked in, and whoever was in there was who you talked to.

i was on the MSN side of that split. but you could not be online in Turkey in those years and not know what the rooms were, because Mynet was the homepage of the country. Emre Kurttepeli founded it in 1999 as the first serious Turkish-language portal, and it grew into the thing every browser in every cafe opened on: news, mail, horoscopes, okey and tavla, and the chat. the chat came early, though nobody bothered to write down exactly when.

what made it different from IRC was that it asked nothing of you. no client to install on a machine that was not yours and got wiped every night, no server address, no commands to memorize. you opened a page, picked a nickname, chose a room. on a shared cafe machine with a queue behind you, that gap between wanting to talk and talking was the entire product.

and it was supervised, which people forget. there were moderators with titles and real authority to throw someone out, an arrangement closer to a municipal building than to an IRC channel where the person with ops was whoever showed up first in 1998.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a room looked like ~

the sorting was the design. rooms by city, so you could find people in Ankara or Izmir. rooms by age band. rooms by subject for the people who wanted a topic rather than a postcode. some nights there were organized events and competitions inside them, run by the moderators.

the whole thing was built on an assumption that quietly expired: that the interesting person is someone you have not met, and the job of software is to put you in a room with them. within a few years the assumption flipped. Facebook came into Turkey and the premise became that the interesting people are the ones you already know, under their real names, and a room of strangers sorted by city started to look less like an opportunity and more like a risk.

~ the replacement ~

in 2011 Mynet closed the chat and pointed everyone at Smeet, a browser-based 3D world made in Berlin by a German studio, licensed and localized as Turkey's largest virtual world at smeet.mynet.com. instead of a room of text you got an avatar walking through a club, buying furniture with credits.

the accounts written at the time list the reasons in the usual order: user numbers falling, security and moderation getting harder under an internet law that had made hosts answerable for what their users posted, and management's appetite for a product that could sell something. the last one is the one that reads true, because a chat room monetizes badly and an avatar with a wardrobe monetizes well. it did not work. people who wanted a text room did not want a shopping mall with legs, and they left to find another text room.

~ the afterlife ~

there is no press release for this death. i went looking and what exists is user blog posts from august 2011, written by people who found the rooms gone, saying it has closed and asking where everyone went. for a product that carried a decade of the country's conversation, the entire documentary record is a few WordPress posts by strangers.

the stranger part is what grew in the gap. search for Mynet Sohbet in Turkish today and you get pages of chat sites with no connection to Mynet at all, trading on the phrase eski mynet sohbet, promising the old rooms back. an abandoned brand kept alive by squatters who correctly worked out that people were still typing the name into a search box years later. that is a kind of memorial. it is just not one anybody chose.

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