How young we were

What VKontakte was like before: retro review TJournal

On October 10, Pavel Durov turned 29 years old, and the social network VKontakte he created entered its eighth year. TJournal decided to remember what one of the main Runet sites looked like before.

The alpha version of VKontakte has existed since the summer of 2006, but it was on October 10 that the first functions were introduced to the resource . Even then, VKontakte allowed users to talk about themselves, find friends, upload photos, and join communities. In the first months, as is known, the resource was closed to outsiders - it positioned itself as a platform for graduates of elite universities.

At first, almost all public communication between users was built around their own pages, or rather “walls”. As now, you could share your own thoughts and write on the pages of others, but commenting on other people's posts appeared much later. You could only respond to a friend’s status (or not) on your wall—and you could view the resulting dialogue using the “Tete-a-Tete” button, which subsequently lost all meaning.

on VKontakte A few months after the launch, the first serious “pussy meter” appeared - a rating that was displayed under the user’s avatar. The rating was a logical continuation of the page occupancy scale: having reached the maximum in the “usual” way, you could artificially increase your “capital”. At first, the rating depended on the mention of “Who am I here for” in other people’s settings, then on the number of SMS messages (votes) that fans dedicated to the person. Particularly vain users voted for themselves. The practical meaning of the rating was simple: for users it was a way to appear above others in the search, and for the resource it was the first means of monetization.

At some point, the rating was simply canceled, greatly angering the users who spent their hard-earned money on it. However, it was far from the largest innovation, which the VKontakte administration subsequently abandoned. Another commercial service on VKontakte is advertisements. They made it possible to sell, buy and serve people without leaving the social network.

VKontakte also launched, and then closed, a wish service, in which users could put in a separate section on their page the products they were interested in from third-party sites (and other users could buy them these gifts directly on the social network).

There were also purely entertainment functions, which the resource administration subsequently abandoned. For example, “Suggestions” is a service where you can ask a question that requires the answers “Yes” or “No”. Users were not always able to fully express their imagination.

A similar fate befell the service of anonymous opinions - those who seriously told a person everything that he thinks about him turned out to be much less than those who simply liked to joke or sling mud with impunity.

All these changes were introduced in the first years of the existence of VKontakte, when the administration of the resource reported on innovations almost every week. In the summer of 2010, the most dramatic change in the social network began - it began to be transferred from “The Wall” to “Microblog”. First, “Status 2.0” appeared , in which they finally allowed leaving comments. True, the negative reaction to the innovation was so strong that Pavel Durov had to arrange a general vote. The majority spoke out against the innovations, and the design had to be rolled back.

However, Durov left everyone with the opportunity to switch to the new style, and over the next couple of months, 70 percent of users came to him. In October, the administration of the resource forcibly transferred everyone to the “Microblog” mode, leaving no right of choice this time. Users gathered in huge communities of hundreds of thousands of people, in which they demanded to “return the wall.” There were stories in the media. There were calls for a boycott.

This time, Durov did not follow the lead of the conservatives and left everything as it seemed right to him, and “return the wall” has since become a Russian Internet meme. Over the next three years, the social network developed much more smoothly, without sudden shocks. But this is a reason for a separate story.

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