Nairaland Part Deux
If you’re unfamiliar with the universe of Nairaland you are missing out on some serious internet pleasure.
Good morning.
It 9am again on a day we don’t usually come here, but last week topic was bigger so we needed to spread it out.
The last couple of days have been emotionally draining. As you read this, please take a moment of silence/prayer in support of civil rights protests all over the world. # blacklivesmatter #endrape
Nairaland, as we know was created by @Seun Osewa in March 2005. It is targeted at Nigerians both home and abroad
Nairaland has over 2,000,000 registered accounts (May 2018), however, Nairaland does have a considerable number of unregistered users, as registration is only necessary for posting.
Nairaland is ranked as the 9th most visited site in Nigeria as at April 2018,(and the 4th most visited indigenous site) according to Alexa.com. Nairaland reportedly has over 55 million Internet users, corresponding to 32.9% of the entire population. With Nairaland having a considerable but unconfirmed number of users based in diaspora, this statistic suggests that a maximum 3% of Nigerian Internet users are registered on Nairaland compared to Facebook's 11 million Nigerian users which corresponds to approximately 20% of the Internet population. Nairaland, however, does have a considerable number of unregistered users, as registration is only necessary for posting.
Figures published by Nairaland in June 2013 suggest that they had 16,668,654 visits from 6,845,453 unique visitors and 60,031,356 pageviews in the 30 days of that month. In March 2018, Nairaland witnessed 28,481,197 visits from 6,053,091 unique visitors, totaling into 219,077,675 pageviews, which is nearly four times its monthly traffic years back.
Who is Seun Osewa?
He is an indigene of Ogun state, where he currently lives and has refused to move to Lagos, the “happening capital” of Nigeria. Seun enrolled as a student of Obafemi Awolowo University to study electrical engineering in 1998, but he did not finish. No, he wasn’t rusticated. Too brilliant to be. But an account has it he left to do the “Bill Gates” thing.
According to the Seun “All my business projects before Nairaland were failures, except the one that became Nairaland. My web hosting business failed after just 3 months because I ran out of money, while I couldn’t execute many other projects I researched due to shyness and lack of capital. My blogs and the mobile phone forum that preceded Nairaland were successful but not profitable. However, it was on that foundation that Nairaland was built.”
Further he narrated
“About 2 years earlier (2003) I had attempted to start a web hosting business, but after 3 months I could only boast of one customer, so I ran out of capital and the business died. It would probably have succeeded if I had managed my capital more wisely or raised more money as I got many hosting requests I couldn’t satisfy later that year.
After that first failure, I was encouraged to get certifications and a regular job, but I couldn’t go back to that kind of path after tasting creative freedom, so I kept researching business ideas and presenting them to friends and family, but no capital was forthcoming to carry any of them out. I did this for less than 2 years. (The last idea was a site for sending SMS messages. I picked up Python to implement it.)
Eventually, I decided to start a web forum, because it was the only idea that required no additional capital: I already had Internet access and a $15 per month VPS graciously paid for by a family friend. I created 3 forums in November 2003 (one for higher institution students, one for IT discussions, and one to cover the emerging GSM industry; the Mobile Nigeria Forum at MobileNigeria.com).
The Mobile Nigeria Forum took off, so I relaunched it in February 2005 with the assistance of Mr. John Sagai Adams, who posted a link to the forum on his mailing list and participated enthusiastically in those early days. Other mobile enthusiasts like Mr. Yomi Adegboye pitched in to make the site a success. In a month or so, the forum had about 300 members, but the growth potential didn’t satisfy me.
I decided to start Nairaland when I noticed two odd things about MobileNigeria:
(1) Despite its narrow focus, it was the only Nigerian community that gave a voice to Nigerians at home. Most other Nigerian sites were owned and dominated by Nigerians in the US or UK. They covered only issues of interests to Nigerians abroad.
(2) The off topic section of the forum, covering topics outside telecoms, like romance and jokes, was becoming more vibrant than the Mobile Nigeria Forum itself, suggesting the need for a more general-purpose Nigerian forum.
This gave me the confidence to take forums like Naijaryders and Talknaija head on by starting a general purpose discussion forum with a strong bias towards issues of interest to Nigerians at home. I felt that such a site could attract enough traffic to make enough money from Google adverts. That’s why I started the Nairaland Forum.”
The hack attempt.
According to Wikipedia, Nairaland went offline briefly on the 22 June 2014 due to a successful hacking attempt. Three days later, it was back online after some data had been recovered from a remote backup. Also, it was reported that a good number of user data were lost during this event.
Distributed Control (The Secret sauce).
Nairaland is a site of multiple paradoxes. It uses a simple, seemingly outdated design. Yet, its daily traffic is immense and its noise continue to spill over and multiply in Nigeria and beyond. It is a discordant bricolage of humor, geek cultures, fierce debates, in–jokes, hyperbolic opinions and general offensiveness.
Nairaland’s popularity and persistence is even more remarkable when contextualized. Over the past decade, the vast majority of popular Websites have moved away from anonymity. Major social media sites, like Facebook, are fundamentally rooted in one’s real life identity. There are hordes of GPS mobile phone technologies to mark one’s actual location in virtual world programs.
Numerous newspapers have eliminated comment sections or are implementing credit card registration to verify and mark identity. This general closing of the gap between online and off-line personas marks a dramatic development in the structure and experience of the Internet.
As a continuation of the phone freaker era, much early internet communication operated anonymously. This is not to say avatars and handles did not exist, and in fact, they rose to popularity rather quickly. Despite its frequent conflation with anonymity, pseudonymity (both traceable and untraceable) is a separate and distinct mode of being online. It is a communication mode reliant on a pseudonym or virtual stand–in. It can be as simple as having a nickname or as complicated as a 3D virtual avatar. Unlike an anonymous discourse, a digital persona is established, which can or cannot operate as an extension of one’s real world self. Thus, there is a level of accountability, traceability, and reputation associated and attributed.
With Web 2.0 and the rise of social media sites, pseudonymity is increasingly being replaced with what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg coins, “ultimate” or “radical transparency”. Zuckerberg goes as far as to state, anonymity embodies a “lack of integrity” This mode of discourse represents the closest bond between virtual spaces and the physical world outside networks. Many social media sites feature a person’s likes, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, habits, hobbies, friends, family, finances, health, and even actual physical location. Rather than having no connection or varying degrees of connection through an avatar, this personal turn conflates one’s virtual self and real world self. In social media terms: Facebook wants to know how you are, Twitter wants to know what you are doing. Social media relies on an articulation of a lived social self.
Compounding this effect, many social network sites extend beyond their URL, including options to repost, comment or indicate opinions on other pages ranging from news stories to videos to blogs. Concurrently, with the concentration generated by a single login, like Facebook Connect, radical transparency boils over into multiple sites and follows a user across networks. The resulting online experience is open to capital, as tracking personal data, usage data and taste surveillance opens up online advertising and individually targeted marketing campaigns. As personalized searches increasingly become the dominant mode of Web navigation, social, economic and communal aspects change.
The push to a ‘Web identity’ especially through social media attests to this shift. In the early days of the web, there was little corporate or brand presence beyond a single official web page; now corporations have Twitter feeds, Facebook fan pages, Foursquare profiles and YouTube channels. Users may be seeking the value aspects of sites like Facebook, but following the personal turn, the exchange value of personal information and communication becomes inexorably tied to these same online interactions.
Social media and the self
Would Facebook asking, “what’s on my mind” or Twitter asking, “what’s happening” present this same glimpse of alterity as >MFW? Could this not just be the discourse of virtual networks? The push of alterity through the contingent encounter of anonymity is not universal to all online mediated experiences. By framing the ontological experience of social media, the anonymous interfaces potentially radically nature is made all the more discernible. Unlike Nairaland, Facebook relies on individuals that one knows, or at least those that have been accepted as “friends”. Facebook’s tagline states, “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life” (italics added). This is a key step away from the experience of contingency, as those you interact with are necessarily approved; engaging with a truly anonymous stranger is rendered impossible.
Nairaland features a minimal interface, yet it is infinite in variation and possibility. On Facebook, you can update your status, read the status of others, upload or browse photos and videos, join or create events, join or create groups, send private messages, chat and edit profiles by revealing personal details, such as religion, political views, quotes, favorite TV shows and movies. In Facebook, this personal accounting occurs in real time. Unlike the randomness of refreshing Nairaland, what appears in your feed will always be consistent and persistent.
This is not to say you determine content, but rather you control the parameters of those who produce content in your feed. Identical “friends” lists will create identical feeds. This uniformity could only happen on Nairaland if multiple users all refreshed at the exact same moment and the packets arrived and loaded at precisely the same time, a very difficult task. Within controlled content, identification of voice is clear. If we wanted to become even more private, we could send a message or chat. We can move further and further away from contingent encounters into increasingly controlled discourse. Throughout these private messages, chats, or status updates there is a connection to singular, persistent and personal identity, which creates accountability and responsibility. Rather than dialectical dissent and experimentation, there are strict rules and social codes, which lapse into — and borrow heavily from — non–virtual spheres.
Hence, there are no amorphous strangers, just a narrow set of contacts. A virtual stand–in for non–virtual personal conversations replaces the happenstance of Nairaland interface and the variation and indeterminacy of memes. Rather than ephemeral contingency, we have ‘radical transparency’, all of which is reduced to its relationship to the self. However, responsibility and accountability are not inherently bad, but the parameters of this encounter do contain key ontological repercussions for being online.
Conclusion
Nairaland is simultaneously a simple forum and a complex community. It is a group of individuals, but one that always lacks cohesion. It has general tendencies, but it also has immediate objections and opposition to those tendencies. It has huge creative force and massive popular appeal, and yet remains at times crass, abhorrent and unpleasant. It is a productive fun factory, yet at its heart, it is a space of idleness. Beyond or perhaps through these contradictions, Nairaland presents a mode of being online enveloped in anonymity and shaped by contingency. It stresses otherness, dissent, creativity, variation and plurality.
It seems clear that the web is continuing to become more and more personal, self–rooted and narrow. Rather than utilizing basic virtual elements of the Internet, we are looping towards a replica of our lives in networks, open to capital and closed to experimentation. Indeed, instead of creating a mirror of reality, we might use these elements to facilitate a culture of creativity, modification, dissent and free discourse. Through this prevailing anonymous interface stems a deeply unique sense of contingency and alterity, which stresses a common world (unattributed actions, pool of words, shared affective states) and simultaneously a radical otherness. By thinking through not just what it is said but how it is said, we gain insight into different modes of being inside networks. We may not find Nairaland appealing, but anonymity and contingency prompt political and ethical ramifications.
What else do you think differentiated Nairaland?
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