THE TURKISH HITCHERHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Sedat Kapanoğlu (known as Kapanoglu on Ekşisözlük) is a software programmer who founded
Sourtimes.org on the 15th of February 1999. The website was intended to be the entertainment
portal for his envisioned business venture, Sedat Software Group (Kapanoglu). Kapanoğlu is an
interesting character to note in that as an entrepreneur, he had quite a few failed business ventures
prior to founding Ekşisözlük, including one venture which involved selling software for optimizing
elevator schedules in tall buildings. Despite working at Microsoft as a software programmer for a
number of years during the mid-2000s, he was not interested in doing anything asides from
computer programming and never completed his university degree. Essentially put, the character
portrait of Kapanoğlu is of a typical generation Xer, full of personality and intelligent ideas but
having a slightly slacker attitude to life. The name of the website - Sour Times – which he founded
with his girlfriend and co-editor at the time (kler), is a reference to the Portishead song from the
1994 Dummy album. In an interview, Kapanoğlu claims that he developed Ekşisözlük out of
‘boredom' with his girlfriend of the time and some friends from hitnet, a Bulletin Board System
(BBS) based online community which was popular during the mid-1990s in Turkey. Initially he had
envisioned Ekşisözlük as a relatively minor product on Sourtimes.org, the entertainment portal he
had founded in 1999. According to Kaplanoglu, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was one inspiration behind his motivation to host user generated content on Ekşisözlük. After
reading the book, Kapanoğlu envisioned that the roles of the participants would resemble the nonprofessional
field researchers who made the contributions to the Hitchhiker's Guide. The slogan he
developed for Ekşisözlük, “kutsal bilgi kaynağınız” (your holy source of information), seems to be a
direct reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's slogan - the “standard repository for all
knowledge and wisdom”. Drawing from this, one can tentatively argue that Douglas Adams has
shaped Sedat Kapanoglu's understanding of contribution and hence his motivation to host user
generated content.
The other inspiration for Sedat Kapanoglu was drawn from his experience as a participant
in Turkish speaking Bulletin Board System (BBS) communities throughout the mid-1990s. As an
amateur software programmer Sedat Kapanoglu extensively relied on the information provided by
others on Hitnet, a Fidonet style BBS network popular in Turkey between 1992 and 1996 to
become a software developer in Turkey (see Furman 2015b). For him, the exchanges on Hitnet
were extremely valuable as they helped him mature as a programmer. Growing up Eskişehir, a
relatively small town in Anatolia, Hitnet functioned as a space for Kapanoglu to meet other coders
and participate in the wider coder subculture active in the bigger cities of Turkey. In fact, a few of
the coders he met during this period became his life-long business partners. Kapanoglu himself
explicitly states in interviews that he wanted to design an application that could capture the wealth
of human knowledge in a manner similar to what he had experienced on Hitnet.62
The design process that would facilitate the formation of a Turkish version of the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be characterized by trial and error. At first, Kapanoglu
experimented with novelties such as a visitor guest-book and a web chat applet to encourage synchronous forms of communication in the early versions of his website as sourtimes.org. One of
the results of Kapanoglu's coding experiments was an application named Ekşisözlük. Soon, the
popularity of Ekşisözlük outpaced all the other applications he had designed for Sour Times
Entertainment.63 Once Kapanoglu began to notice that the number of visitors using the Ekşisözlük
application far exceeded the number of visitors using other applications on the website, he decided
to to jettison the other content on sourtimes.org and focus on developing Ekşisözlük. A few years
after the founding of the sourtimes.org, Kapanoglu would write the following definition under the
subject-header 'Ekşisözlük':
“a masterpiece that can make up for the loneliness caused by time zones. (...)
since going online [link to 15 february 1999] until today [link to 2001], more than one 1000 writers
who helped develop this small and simple program, which has managed to form it's own subculture,
challenge the very definitions of what is 'true' and demonstrated how knowledge has so many
different angles. The seeds of this program were sown years back [link to hitnet notes] and has now
become a gigantic knowledge treasure thanks to technology [link to internet]... (...)”64
Over time, Ekşisözlük has evolved to become a platform hosting one of the most influential Turkish
speaking online communities worldwide and the design of the platform as well as it's peer
production mechanisms have become a model emulated by other community hosting sözlük
websites.65 It's community remains to this day, a key actor in the sphere of dissent present within
Turkish cyberspace.
62 From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDjmrn68s1I
63 It is quite humorous to note that a national lottery number predictor was amongst the less successful applications that
Kapanoglu experimented with during this period.
64 https://eksisözlük.com/entry/452
65 Online or virtual communities can be defined as groups of people with shared interests or goals for whom electronic
communication is a primary form of interaction (Dennis, Pootheri & Natarajan 1998). This type of computer-mediated
communication allows people to find and socialize with others that share similar interests, thereby forming and sustaining
virtual communities (Hiltz & Wellman, 1997). Perceived affinity between social actors creates the preconditions
necessary for the aggregation of collective identities, communities or neighbourhoods online. Drawing from this, it can be
argued that the most concise definition of an online or virtual community is one that embraces the elements discussed
above: “groups of people with common interests and practices that communicate regularly and for some duration in an
organized way over the Internet through a common location or mechanism.” (Ridings et al. 2002, p. 273).