How networked public spheres die

The Internet has often been praised for allowing new, fluid and hard-to-control public spaces to emerge. Often, these new public spaces would help to bring attention to stories/developments that may go unnoticed otherwise.

This has certainly been the case in Russia, where the vast majority of journalists had to tone down their criticism of the government for fear of being fired or worse. LiveJournal, by far the most influential blogging platform in the country, allowed dissidents to express their views, share news that didn’t make it to the mainstream media, or bring public attention to important activist campaigns that needed funding or participants.

But how could one make sense of all these conversations? This is where blog search engines and especially meme-trackers – online services that track most popular blog conversations – came into play. Yandex is the Russian answer to Google and Yandex Blogs, its blog search engine – along with its excellent meme-tracker – emerged as an absolute leader in the Russian-speaking world. Every day they would run a list of 30 or so most popular stories – determined based on a complex formula that took stock of how many other bloggers have linked to this blog post, how many comments it attracted, and so forth. Thus, Yandex Blogs emerged as a kind of an alternative newspaper of the blogosphere: you could spend 5 min a day looking at the most discussed subjects and get to know the zeitgeist.

It was also obvious that, as a blogger, by linking to blog posts you like or consider important, you could push them into Top30 and thus bring national attention to them. And this is what many people did – and not just activists; nationalists, religious fanatics, spammers – all of them were taking advantage of Top 30. This produced some noise – every now and then an irrelevant posting will make it to the list of headlines – but the system seemed to work and was widely used, not just by Russian-speaking bloggers, but also by those who didn’t have time to look at thousands of Russian blogs every day and wanted to get a quick snapshot of what’s happening.

Well, goodbye to all that. On Nov 3 Yandex announced that they were going to shut down the service but opening its API, so that anyone can build their own meme-trackers using Yandex’s technology. The reason for this shut-down has little to do with money (even though Yandex does claim that this is at best a niche – rather than mass-market – service); the company is uncomfortable with the various political uses/abuses of the service. Here is a very telling quote from them (in my hasty translation from Russian):

We discovered that the service which had initially been developed to mirror the blogosphere has become an amplifier, a media tool of sorts. It started exhibiting the effect of positive feedback: many bloggers were  writing, commenting, and generating links only for the purposes of "pushing stuff into our top list". There appeared dedicated blog-bots, which were polluting the blogosphere with the same purpose: get into the list of most popular posts. To filter out the robots is a difficult but clear problem; we solved it. But what to do with the "social manipulation"? Particularly, when someone starts shouting "let’s get this into the Yandex Top" and bloggers start linking to a given post? We thought it was a natural activity of Internet users and didn’t put any hurdles when such items were getting into the top. We only put up a disclaimer: be careful, someone may be manipulating the links.

But more and more our service looks less than a mirror of the blogosphere and more as a tool of getting stuff "into the top" and then letting it spread through mass-media. Almost anyone who is not too lazy is using this tool: from people organizing fund-raising campaigns to all sorts of radicals. As a result, radicals of one variety started accusing Yandex of helping their enemies and vice verca. Journalists have also acquired a habit of checking our rating; getting stuff up there has become a paid service; and some people in power already treat it as "voice of the people".

Judging by the last sentence only it looks like the service is, indeed, very popular and very successful; most PR companies would probably kill for such audience. And yet Yandex decided to kill its child rather than continue playing an important social and political function. It’s as if Google Blog Search – which bears the closest resemblance to Yandex Blogs in the English-speaking world – decided that, well, they didn’t like the fact that there were too many rightwing bloggers or that most bloggers seemed to care more about the balolon boy than about climate change (to make the comparison work, imagine that most media in the US were under tight government control so Google Blog Search was, indeed, the only way to know what’s really happening/being said).

I can see why Yandex the company may be uncomfortable with such a political role; having any kind of media power usually doesn’t bode well for anyone in modern Russia. I guess it’s also a sign that the new public sphere in Russia just got a little bit too networked – and nobody really wants to be in charge of this monster. It’s, of course, good that Yandex also opened their API, allowing third parties to build their own meme-trackers. The problem is that it will almost certainly defragment national attention; when there are 50 competing meme-trackers, one doesn’t really know which one to trust/use. The charm of the old model was its serendipity: people looking for fun/entertainment would occasionally stumble upon posts about politics/nationalism/history – and get exposed to opinions that they disagree with. Under the new set up, there will certainly be "fun" meme-trackers and "activist" meme-trackers – I am just not sure whether their audiences will ever cross their paths online.