Using Apple’s translate function I was able to read many of the posts - very interesting to see the differences between American and Turkish social media.
There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that
There’s a theory that cats mostly domesticated themselves; human settlements and their large grain stores proved to be a reliable source of rodents for them to hunt, and the humans tolerated the cats because they kept the rodent problem in check, but these cats would have lived a semi-domesticated lifestyle around human settlements without initially being kept as household pets. Maybe the feral cats of Istanbul are the closest modern approximation to this.
When I was a kid, that still used to be the norm on farms. There were farm cats and house cats. The farm cats were there to kill rodents and otherwise minded their own buisness. You could not just take them up, they would have bitten you. I think this has gotten out of style, as I have not seen the division nowdays and all cats seem to be gotten tame.
Barn cats are still a thing, but they are typically still owned and kept whereas I was talking more about free roaming cats that live around human settlements. The early free roaming cats would have been about as tame as barn cats; my impression is that the cats of Istanbul are more friendly.
Would love to see that implemented here in USA. People in places like NYC love to catch and spay every cat they see, then go on to complain about too many rodents around.
I'm very glad to hear that it's readable using a translator!
In fact, the community dynamics resemble Reddit a lot despite having significant differences in layout and format. Irony, sarcasm, harsh criticism are common yet tolerance of differing viewpoints is relatively high compared to other platforms where people just flock to their own bubble or just block everyone else who they don't agree with.
It's fun too, has a rich history spanning a quarter century, and has been quite influential.
Don’t forget to archive it with responsible parties, like for future history and anthropological research. It would be a shame to loose so much of public discourse, especially if it’s so influential.
It's been subject to many academical research projects[1], I lost count now. It even made it into books[2][3]. We used to provide raw text dumps to researchers, or they would crawl the site themselves. One interesting paper claimed that Eksi Sozluk users were able to detect earthquakes very early and reliably[4]. Internet Archive also hangs around the site, archiving here and there. But a proper and full archive should be preserved, I agree.
There were many posts about cats and their livelihoods and protection. Love that