Remember Orkut? Its founder wants to bring it back

There's a certain poetic symmetry in Orkut Büyükkökten returning to take aim at the very dynamics that buried his creation. Orkut wasn't killed by a lack of users or a broken product; it was killed by Google's strategic drift and the gravitational pull of Facebook's algorithmic news feed. Now, more than a decade later, the pendulum has swung so far toward engagement-maximizing AI curation that the idea of a network built around *who you know* rather than *what the algorithm decides you should see* feels almost radical again. The irony is thick enough to cut. The anti-AI positioning is the smart part of the pitch. In 2026, "authentic human connection" has become a premium feature — a scarce resource in a landscape flooded with bot farms, synthetic influencers, and AI-generated comment threads. Büyükkökten is essentially trying to sell the digital equivalent of a vinyl record: a deliberately constrained, human-curated experience that trades scale for signal. It's a compelling story, and TechCrunch's coverage (https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/09/remember-orkut-its-founder-wants-to-bring-it-back/) suggests he's leaning hard into that narrative. But here's the hard truth: nostalgia doesn't ship a product. Orkut's original success was a function of timing and network effects in markets where Facebook hadn't yet consolidated its grip. Those conditions are gone. The people who remember Orkut fondly are now in their thirties and forties, and the teenagers who would need to populate a new network have no emotional attachment to a brand that died before they were born. Worse, every platform that tries to reject algorithmic amplification eventually faces the same dilemma: without algorithmic distribution, discovery becomes manual, slow, and — for most users — tedious. The deeper question is whether "anti-AI" is a durable product thesis or just a marketing hook. If Büyükkökten genuinely builds a platform that refuses AI-generated content, he'll need to solve moderation at scale without the very machine-learning tools that make moderation feasible. That's a contradiction he hasn't answered yet. Still, the attempt itself is a useful signal: the backlash against algorithmic and AI-driven feeds has moved from niche forums into the founding stories of new platforms. Whether Orkut 2.0 succeeds or flames out, it's a marker of how far the pendulum has swung — and how desperate users are for a social internet that feels human again.