Szánalmas.hu

» see szanalmas.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The last post on szanalmas.hu was two lines long. The author had finished forever, said goodbye, and signed off with one word and a pair of empty parentheses: voltmár(). That was 17 August 2016, and nothing else was offered, because everybody reading already knew what the word meant.

The site had opened in the autumn of 2002 under an administrator who went by Bateman and who never published a name. It was a community blog in the pre-social sense: readers sent in whatever was funny or strange enough to be worth looking at, an editor picked, and the comment section did the rest. There were about fifty categories and registration was optional.

Three years in, an audit run by Econet and the pollster Medián made it the largest community blog in Hungary. Its readers skewed male, between eighteen and thirty five, and earned better than the national average, which in 2005 described most of the Hungarian web anyway. In the same year it took the audience prize at the Goldenblog awards.

~ the record ~

~ voltmár ~

A site like this generates its own dialect, and Szánalmas produced a durable one. Voltmár, literally already was, was the comment you left when something surfaced that the site had already seen. Hungarian internet slang absorbed it and it outlived the source.

The parentheses in the farewell are the part worth noticing. Written as voltmár(), it reads like a function call, which is exactly the register of a community that spent fourteen years teaching itself to speak in shorthand. The admin closed the site by flagging the closing itself as a repost.

~ what it was made of ~

The material was pictures and videos collected out of the wider web, sorted and captioned, with the comment thread underneath doing the work of a magazine's letters page except faster and much meaner. Index, writing the obituary the day it closed, called it a phenomenon of the 2000s internet that shaped a generation of Hungarian bloggers.

That model died everywhere at about the same speed, and not because anything replaced the content. The audience moved to Facebook, where the same pictures arrived without a site attached, and a one-person editorial operation found itself competing with an algorithm that never sleeps and never gets tired of the job.

~ the reason given ~

Bateman told Index it was burnout. There had not been enough time in recent years to do the editorial work the site required, and the site required a great deal: fourteen years of reading submissions, most of which were bad, to find the handful worth putting up.

This is where I have to say plainly that I could not have been a reader here. Szánalmas ran in Hungarian, on a humor register built out of local reference and a private vocabulary, and that kind of site does not survive translation by even one step. What I can recognize is the shape. The Turkish web of those same years had its own versions, kept alive by a handful of people doing unpaid editorial work late at night, and they ended the same way this one did.

szanalmas.hu does not resolve today. The domain is gone rather than parked, which is what usually happens when the person paying for it stops.

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