There are at least two reasons why the proud editorial office of your beloved “IT-Murzilki” decided to talk with the creator of Habrahabr about the history of this unique project. On the one hand, of course, this is an unparalleled platform, which has formed around itself a huge audience of IT-professionals. And on the other hand, one of the few successful examples of the very “new generation publication” that everyone has been waiting for since the word “blog” came up. Why are geeks able to create media for themselves that ordinary people cannot make?

Webplanet

I have no higher education. Like many, after two years of university, I realized that this is "not mine." I was and is interested in the Internet. I like to do Internet products, dig into the device sites and other things. Therefore, I left everything and went to Moscow, where I began to gain experience in this field.
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In 2001, I founded Webplanet. There were only two publications on the Russian Internet business on the market. Netoscope is the most popular and well-known project at that time. There was also Internet.ru, which was in a strange and incomprehensible state.

It was interesting for me to follow how Yandex grew, how Rambler fell, how floundering and Mail.ru tried to survive. Then Mail.ru was two separate companies: NetBridge and Port.ru, which owned the postal service.

I met famous people from Internet companies, gained experience and began to understand how everything works in the Russian Internet business.



Do you want to be objective and write about everything? Be prepared for the fact that you have to turn a lot out and not everyone will like it. Of course, this is not everyone likes. You come to people and say: “Buy advertising from me”, and they answer: “No, we will not buy advertising from you, because you wrote about it, and you were asked not to do this”. So I brought myself to the pen and sold the project, before I even managed to leave it.

But Webplanet has become my school of life. This is completely my project, which was made from scratch. I made the design myself, I made it myself. The programmers just wrote me an engine so that I could not publish texts in manual mode.

The classic content project did not scale. Everything was strongly tied to the human factor. And I wanted to do things that would work on their own. So that you calmly deal with the product, and everything inside it boils and boils. So I was thinking of trying to make a project where anyone could be a reporter.

About half a year, I panked: I wove up dreadlocks, walked a lot, took pictures, read, clubbed ... In general, I rested and refreshed after acquiring five years of experience in online journalism. Reconsidered everything that happened to me. And in my head the first features of the project with people's journalism began to emerge. The scheme of the future Habrahabr.

Habrahabr

The puzzle Habra has developed from different pieces of LJ and Digg. No editors, but there is a large audience of readers, each of which can be a reporter and a source of information. In some ways it looks like a LJ. There it was possible, in one way or another, to set up your tape so as to read journalists, having received some media for yourself. But there was not what I had in mind - the ability to somehow assess people, influence their karma and position in this community.

The word “Habrahabr” does not mean anything, it just appeared in my head. At first, I even came up with a legend, where it came from, and everyone believed in it (see the editorial note). I have a good idea with the names. I also invented “Autokadabru”, they thought how to name an autosite, and such a name was born.

One programmer wrote me the first engine in Perl. But all the perlists are slow, and we didn’t work well. And once at night I wrote Bobuku from Yandex. He asked if he had a good, fast and capable developer in mind. He said that there is one - Sergey Korovkin, who is currently doing a Promo DJ. We met, and I quickly told him what was happening. And literally in some two weeks we wrote a completely new PHP engine. It was a real marathon, complete madness. We sat around the clock, I painted mockups, something imposing and gave him, and he “revived” all this. So pretty quickly we rewrote the already launched project in the new language.
At first, Habr was open. Moreover, for about half a year after the start, it was constantly changing and reworking. Until I felt that we had found the very balance of the necessary components needed for this thing to balance itself.

8 million users visit Habrahabr monthly

The very first karma-war happened between doorwayers and Yandex. Only six months after launch. A lot of Yandex.Is came to the site, which the project seemed interesting, and there were also portal builders. And they became minusovat all Yandex. Those united and began to minus in response. It was interesting.

Every time after such karma-wars we set up a mechanism for evaluating karma in order to balance all this. This is similar to how search engines are constantly improving their algorithms. It seemed to us, only we, unlike search engines, try to rank not sites, but people.
This period of youth Habrakhabr was interesting, when he was not yet stable and stable (and he was constantly shaking back and forth). The site was constantly hacked, Black Lords appeared on the main page, and so on.

At some point, a rather large hyip appeared around the project. People who were not connected with the Internet industry began to seep through there. They just heard that there is a site where everyone hangs out, and there is a move. As soon as there were a lot of such people, we decided that it was time to close the registration. It was the only way to regulate them somehow. So the site became closed.

At first, we simply closed the registration and gave everyone an invite. Then they introduced other mechanisms - for example, you gain a certain amount of karma and you are given another invite. I wrote a topic that collected a certain rating - another invite. Then there was a sandbox and the opportunity to get on Habr without invite. We offered everyone to write something in the sandbox and show that you have the necessary knowledge to be in the community. Now it is the main mechanism for people to enter the site.

There was a period when I was tired of Habr, and even for a while I was completely distanced from him. But when I returned, I found a completely different site, not the way I wanted to see it. And I had to put it in order for a year and a half.

On the site there are a lot of strangers. Some silly trolling began. Someone even used Habr as a means to get traffic to your site. The project has become unstable. Now they often ask “not to rock the boat”, so Habr was the very same swinging boat. Someone continued to wave the oars, and someone fell - in a word, there was a certain confusion.

I thought Habr would regulate himself and everything would be fine. But no. This does not work. Anyway, there should be a person who looks after the system and keeps it in the required condition, when you need to turn up the gadgets and levers.

I always wanted Habr to be a hardcore site, interesting for programmers. I didn’t want people on the site to tell how to paint the walls in the office (there were such posts) or how to cook borsch. But such things still began to appear, and I was very upset.
For a year and a half, I sat and cleaned up this whole mess, translated into read only people who were engaged in some garbage, put things in order.

Then they wrote letters to me, threatened me, tried to hack my mail, wrote all sorts of funny stuff on Lurka about Habr. In general, the dissenters tried to troll me, break the mail, spam ... the guys were funny, and it was hard to stop them. But this did not last long.



DDoS attacks were also. At one point we were tired of fighting and just left under the protection of Highload Lab. Since then, we are no longer DDoS'yat. Sometimes, of course, they try and see that we have an umbrella.
After all these attacks, we have completely rebuilt the infrastructure, and now for us to shut down from DDoS is just to enter one line into the configs. But there were periods when we were DDoS'or for two or three days, because of this, a lot of people fell into the black lists, and we came to the senses for two or three weeks.

I brought Habr to the state when I felt that the order was established and then I just need to keep the chosen course, keep it in a stable form. Then I invited Bumburum, and he became involved in this.

This is a really cool story. Because I took a person who grew up within the community, became a leader there. He already knew everything from the inside, he did not need to explain anything - he understood what was needed and how, and very quickly joined the work. At some point, I even relaxed a bit and began to engage in other projects.

Now Habr does not require any hard, daily work . We practically do not apply any sanctions, do not ban anybody, because everyone has already understood what the rules are. You just need to maintain a sandbox - this is a key component, the entry point through which new people arrive. And if only those people who understand what it is about, get into the current Habr, then there can be no problems with it at all.

At the same time, we have a desire to remake Habr, but we do not yet know how to approach this. The fact is that the site has several "sores" that upset us. Let's say a big and tall hat. When you enter Habr, the text starts almost in the middle of the page. This is problem. This is a beautiful and interesting design, but the space is used inefficiently.

Attempt to scale number 1

Initially, the investors plan was as follows - we tried to clone Habr into other areas. On athletes, party-goers, car enthusiasts. But it did not go. Largely because we were mistaken. And in many respects because the crisis broke out and we failed to bring all this to the end.

Geekies are people predisposed to sharing knowledge with each other. Neither the athletes, nor the motorists, nor the party-goers are interested. Motorists are even more or less suitable, but ... They are more interested in something else, like: “I drive a Volkswagen Golf and want to communicate with dudes who also ride a Golf. And now we will have a party and we will hang out. ” To force disparate people to come together and make it so that they (like geeks) communicate with each other, did not immediately work out.

For us, “Avtokadabra” is still a hobby. Many people use motor vehicles here, and many are passionate about their cars, let's say everyone knows everything about valves and the like. And although we were repeatedly offered to buy it back, this is our hobby, we decided to leave it. For us, this is a kind of experimental platform. Separate things that appeared on Habré, we first ran in there. The audience is less there and the cost of the error is not so high.



One of these chips was personalization. Previously, Habr consisted of the main page, where everything fell. It didn’t matter if you needed it or not. One of the problems that caused us to storm here and there was the fact that the project had an increased audience. There were various groups of people - one is interested in programming, others would like to read about startups, while others need to do everything in a row.

At first they began to clash with each other and sort things out. Type "zadolbali startups, Habr not a cake". And someone infuriated posts about programming.

Then everyone wrote to me: “Deniskin, you killed Habrahabr!” I asked why, and they sent me a link to the analysis of the algorithm and said: “What is this nonsense, I cannot read it, I don’t understand anything, I used to be better! "And this began to happen regularly.

Finally, from what was happening, I finally lost my ability to sleep and stay awake. I consulted with colleagues, and we made a Solomonic decision. We decided to decentralize Habr, which was previously tied to the main page.

Now the company employs 20 people. And about ten more work remotely

The new system allows you to customize your tape and read what you want. If you do not like something, please remove and do not read.

This, of course, was also perceived with hostility. There were many posts where Habr was buried. That's just after these changes, the audience of the site has doubled.

Geeks are our everything

Soon the idea to build an “ecosystem of geeks” appeared, in which it would be interesting and convenient for them to rotate. For this it was necessary to surround Habrahabr with useful satellite projects.
The first was "Toaster" - our attempt to hold a conference. We wanted geeks to love us even more and to use the full range of services and products that we can provide. There were no gains in this. Conferences are not a business that will make a lot of money and at the same time work on its own. There is a strong daily routine - the organization of visas, negotiations, food, and so on. But in the end, we realized that there are simply no normal sites in Russia. We decided not to contact conferences anymore, rather, we will help others to hold them.
Soon we will reanimate the “Toaster” and at its base we will launch our Q & A service for developers. We want to do something like the Russian Stack Overflow. Of course, in his understanding and in his interpretation. Now we are actively testing this product.

Another project was “Huntim”. It became an absolutely organic development of the “Work” section, which at some point turned out to be very squeezed inside the large Habr and did not develop at all. Many would like to publish job offers, but for this it was necessary to go through registration, invites.

The moment to start "Freelance" was not chosen by chance. Free-lance.ru was just at the center of the scandal, when they decided to act as intermediaries in any transaction and read the correspondence of users. Literally in a month, we made “Freelance” from scratch. The global hackathon was arranged in its own style - everyone did something, analyzed, programmed, wrote. We did well, but now we already understand that we could have done better. Nevertheless, Free-lance.ru has about 30 thousand active users, we have 15. That is, we have already eaten half of the audience.

With the launch of "Freelance" began the story of Brainstorage. We realized that there is a great demand for a person to conveniently imagine what he can and accumulated. But not in some LinkedIn-style. So that despite the fact that you draw pictures, and I write code, we could show and tell about what we can do. On career sites you will not be able to beautifully show your repositories on GitHub or show what texts you write. But we did it in Brainstorage.

Now there are already 50 thousand people, mostly developers. We ourselves have recently closed a couple of vacancies, simply by finding people in this chaos, analyzing what they have presented about themselves. Of course, then you need to meet, conduct interviews, but it was the search there that allowed us to find the candidates that we needed.

We gradually render additional services to Habr in separate projects. Most likely, we will do the same in the “Events” section, where people publish information about all kinds of conferences and other parties. Not everyone can do this, many promoters and organizers again need a "visa" for Habr.

15 thousand freelancers visit Freelansim.ru every day.

A separate team of developers on Ruby on Rails ensures the rapid development of these new service projects. Although Habr himself, where a huge burden, written in PHP.

After all the perturbations, we concluded: we don’t need to go anywhere else. We'd better dig in the place where we were already entrenched. Our goal now is to dominate our niche, create and maintain services for geeks, and make them happy. Well, myself, of course.


First published in the Hacker magazine dated 10/2013.

Publication on Issuu.com

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