Privet.ru
» see privet.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
the russian-cyrillic web stayed on the other side of the bosphorus from where i was. i could pick out vkontakte and odnoklassniki by name from passing references in tech press. i never logged into either. privet.ru sat one tier below those two, in the layer that even a russian-speaking user might have skipped over on the way to the bigger network.
the site started as comby.ru in spring 2006. it was a friends-and-interests network built around blogs and small interest groups, with photo albums and a friend graph stacked on top. by mid 2007 the operators had decided that comby did not read as welcoming enough for what they wanted to build, so on june 10 2007 the brand was changed to privet.ru, the russian word for hello. the existing two hundred thousand comby accounts were migrated under the new domain and old links redirected forward.
the rebrand worked for a while. the two-millionth user registered in 2010 and by 2012 privet.ru sat inside the top ten russian social networks, well below vkontakte and odnoklassniki but ahead of a long tail of regional sites. it never broke into the top three. the gravity of vkontakte was already too heavy for a small independent operator to compete with.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | spring 2006 as Comby.ru, renamed Privet.ru on 10 June 2007 |
|---|---|
| Peak | 2010 with two million registered users, top ten Russian SNs by 2012 |
| Killed | 2014, the year admin contact and content updates went quiet |
| Lifespan | about 8 years as a working social network |
| Made by | the Comby team, later sold on to private operators |
| Killed by | VKontakte and Odnoklassniki absorbing every Russian SN that was not them |
~ the decline ~
some time in 2014 the platform went quiet from the inside. user reviews on irecommend.ru describe the same sequence: site administration stopped responding to messages, blog posts stopped appearing on personal pages, support tickets sat unanswered for weeks. the site did not announce a shutdown. it just stopped doing the work of being a social network. by 2016 user groups were being deleted off the platform without warning.
the domain changed hands more than once through this period. each new operator reshaped what privet.ru was supposed to be, and the social-network features were stripped out in pieces. by 2018 the domain pointed at what amounted to a dating site that re-used the privet.ru name without re-using anything else.
~ what it became ~
this is the standard fade pattern for russian-internet small social networks. the audience moves to vkontakte for the network effect or to odnoklassniki for the older-user space, and the original operator runs out of revenue to pay for hosting. eventually the domain gets sold to someone who wants the seo equity of a ten-year-old name. that someone then runs a different service under the brand for as long as the old traffic sticks around.
the social network that privet.ru used to be is gone. the domain still resolves. those are the two facts that close out the story of what 2014 did to it.
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