Ya.ru

» see ya.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Yandex arrived in Turkey on 20 september 2011, with a Turkish search page and an office in Istanbul, and the company made a point of it being the first market they had entered where almost nobody speaks Russian. That is the Yandex people here came to know, a search box and later a maps app that everybody's phone ended up with. By then Ya.ru was already three years old and already losing, and none of us had any reason to know it existed.

It was announced on 16 april 2008 as an invitation-only beta and opened to everyone that november. The name was the company's shortest domain, which tells you how seriously this was meant. You got a blog that took text as easily as photos or video, with the actual files living on Yandex.Fotki and Yandex.Video, so the platform was really a writing layer stretched across services Yandex already ran.

The design idea was points. Every comment or uploaded photo earned you a number of КУ, and your КУ decided what the site would let you do next. Clubs held the communities and a friend feed held the reading. Content could also be pushed out to other platforms rather than locked in, which was unusually relaxed for a company of that size.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

Russian blogging had a landlord and it was not Yandex. LiveJournal had been the default since the early 2000s, deep enough into Russian intellectual and political life that the abbreviation ЖЖ was ordinary speech, and by 2008 a new platform was not competing on features but on where the readers already were. Yandex knew this better than anyone, because it ran the search engine that indexed those blogs.

So Ya.ru filled up with a particular crowd. The Russian write-up notes that IT people were a visible share of the users, which is what happens when a platform's main advantage is that it is technically pleasant. In 2009 it held 723,604 blogs. January 2011 brought 5.4 million visitors in a month. By january 2014 the registered total was 3,503,130, and the number that mattered was not registrations, it was how many of those people had written anything that year.

~ the day it died ~

Yandex announced the closure on 26 june 2014 and switched the site off on 28 july. Users were given the month to pull their archives, and what came out went into Yandex.Disk as files, which is the polite version of an eviction: your writing is preserved, your site is not. The service had lost its argument years earlier, first to LiveJournal and then to VKontakte and Facebook, where people stopped writing entries and started writing posts.

Yandex kept trying at this shape. Zen came later and got enormous before it was handed to VK in 2022 along with the news service, which means the company has now killed personal publishing twice under two different theories of what it was for. Ya.ru itself did not stay dead as a domain. It is the address of the Yandex search page today, so the URL where three and a half million people kept a diary now answers with a search box.

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