Orkut Returns to Reclaim the Internet from Algorithms and AI
Orkut.com
Orkut Büyükkökten, who built some of the earliest social networks, is back with a new orkut.com. He argues that twenty years of optimizing for attention has left users lonely and anxious, and that AI now threatens the core of social networking: a real person on the other side. His answer is to rebuild the internet around authentic communities, not feeds. He invites people to join the movement by adding their name and sending a supporter card to a friend.
You know what AI can’t create? Joy. Hope. Gratitude. Wonder. Amusement. Inspiration. Love. That is what makes a life worth living.
- rafaelcosta
Orkut was HUGE. Google acquired it and it basically had *the* social media platform in Brazil pre-Facebook. IIRC, it also had a big-ish market share in some other countries. When Facebook came along, it was clear that Google was not doing as many updates as they needed to compete, so Orkut felt more and more "outdated".
They killed it after a while to replace with "something better". That was Google+.
I still think that it was one of the most impressive fumbles of a social media "monopoly".
- sajithdilshan
I think we're past the social media era. I remember using facebook to connect with highschool friends and keep up with them when I was in college. We used to play barn buddy together, update status and used to chat for ages on fb chat. But everything got ruined when fb allowed re-posting and pages which allowed non-personal and unauthentic repetitive stuff to be on top of the feed instead of the updates from my friends, and then came the influencers.
Further, nowadays nobody wants to update the status or share their personal lives on the internet because it's cringy and also again we don't want to go back to the phase where we start to compare our lives with a carefully curated set of photos from other people's profiles because as the age old saying goes comparison is the theft of joy.
- bsimpson
Even if I cosign the spirit of the letter, this has big 90s viral email energy to the benefit of… another company/service/etc that I have no connection to.
Sounds like his vision is to be a better version of Reddit. Could be good if done well. Not sure how doing his viral marketing for him plays into that. If I'm gonna send a friend a thing, I want it to be a thing I endorse.
- bingemaker
In India, Orkut was a massive success back in the day. We've had testimonials, and we used to spend a lot of time writing them. We used to spend hours hacking the corporate firewall to access Orkut during office hours!
- leoc
If this were built atop something that let me own my own posts (ATProto?) it would be interesting. You'd think that maybe Bluesky would be talking to people like Orkut Büyükkökten, the Friendster guy Jonathan Abrams and the Birches who founded Bebo, since it's a technically sound(ish?) and interesting platform and a somewhat-established social-media presence which is searching for a broader (and more agreeable) userbase, while a number of those old founders seem to have a continued interest in taking a run at having a social media platform.
- loosescrews
I don’t trust this guy after the hello.com debacle.
In the words of some people at Google at the time:
- thecaio
I was a big fan and heavy user at the time (Brazilian here!) but how does bringing Orkut back solve anything? Like or not people moved from mostly-text, friend-activity social media long ago
- aboardRat4
>Do you remember when the internet was human? When a message from a stranger on another continent felt like magic?
I remember the time when the only people on the internet were people who could pay for an expensive toy (a computer) with a keyboard, which they used in the evenings after their education-intensive jobs. Ah, and also naive kids of the same people.
This age is not coming back, because the reason it disappeared is smartphones.