Yandex.Aura

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

~ the last words ~

Yandex came to Turkey on 20 September 2011 and arrived as a maps company. The search product was up against a Google share above ninety percent and never really moved it, but Yandex Maps had street panoramas of Istanbul and Ankara before anyone else did, and for years afterward the Turkish answer to what Yandex is was navigation. The social side of the company stayed home. Aura was Russian-language, lived inside the Russian app, and was never something that showed up on a phone in Ankara.

It opened in March 2019 after internal testing through 2018, and it was the company's third run at a social product, after Ya.ru closed in 2015 and Moi Krug was sold off in 2016. The pitch was that the matching would be done by machine learning rather than by you: tell it what you are interested in, and it recommends people and interest groups near you. Real name required. Real photograph required.

The other half of the design was the moderation. Slang and profanity were banned outright, along with anything the filters read as offensive imagery. The intent was a place with no cruelty in it, which is a defensible thing to want from a Russian social network in 2019 and turned out to be the problem.

~ the record ~

~ how it matched you ~

You filled in interests and Aura's models did the introductions, suggesting both individual people and communities, weighted by what you liked and where you were. That was the whole differentiator. Everything else on the Russian market at the time worked on the old logic of people you already knew, or of a feed that showed you whatever kept you scrolling, and Aura was betting that a recommendation engine could manufacture the acquaintance itself.

For the first sixteen months it was mobile only. Desktop beta testing did not begin until late July 2020, which is under a month before the whole thing was called off.

~ the fall ~

The numbers were not catastrophic, they were flat in the way that kills a platform product. 50,000 registered users in March 2020, 85,000 by August. Tsarev described that himself as good growth but not exponential, which for a network whose entire value is the number of other people in it means the curve was never going to arrive anywhere.

Asked afterward what went wrong, he pointed at the tone. Users found Aura boring. The insistent positivity and the tight moderation had made it feel unlike every other place they used, in the wrong direction. A network where nothing bad can be said turns out also to be a network where not much gets said.

~ who owned it at the end ~

Aura stopped being a Yandex department in December 2019, when it was carved out into an independent company called AI-Technologies. At closure the register showed Yandex on 49 percent, German Tsarev on 48, and two colleagues from the original team, Konstantin Lekh and Andrey Babaev, on one and a half percent each.

So the last six months of its life were run by the people who built it rather than by the corporation that funded it, and the decision to stop was theirs. The announcement went out on 17 August 2020 and the service was switched off on the 21st. Tsarev's public framing was that it had been a bold experiment and that the experiment was over.

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