Close Taringa!: The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Community That Changed the Internet Forever

Talk about Taringa! This is a direct blow to the nostalgia of millions of people in Latin America and Spain. Yesterday the community announced that will close on March 24 next year, completing a 20-year journey. News that has caused all sorts of comments, given that the portal has become one of the most popular both among the public in Argentina, where he was born, and in most Spanish-speaking countries of the world.

In the announcement, those responsible for Taringa! They expressed their dissatisfaction with the decision, but said that “market conditions and the competitiveness of social networks” prevented them from moving forward with the project. They also promised to provide more details on how the platform will be deregistered closer to the aforementioned date.

It’s true that Taringa! It was no longer what it was before.. Before the news of its closure, the portal had already experienced a noticeable decline in popularity for several years. In fact, I dare say that many of those who used this site during its golden age, including myself, no longer even knew that it still existed.

In any case, this does not diminish the importance and relevance of Taring! has been produced for many years. We are talking about an innovative project and one of the last bastions of web 2.0 remaining in use. A community that, at its peak, marked a generation of teenagers and young adults, but whose flame eventually died out under the shadow of its own success.

Taringa! was created in 2004 in Argentina, as a personal project of a young man named Fernando Sanz. Although the site began as a kind of forum for communicating with friends, it soon grew until it became technically and economically impossible to maintain. At the end of 2006, 90% of the portal was bought by three partners –Alberto Nakayama and brothers Hernan And Mathias Botbol– in exchange for $5,000.

The Rise and Fall of Taringa!

With the change of owners begins the process that leads to Taringa! to become one of the most popular portals in Argentina. But with a growing presence in neighboring countries, the rest of Latin America and Spain. The fact that users could post almost anything they could think of was an attractive enough idea for the website’s popularity to grow exponentially.

Did you need notes or explanations for school assignments? You found them in Taringa! Did you want to know in the most visual way how to clean a toilet? You found it in Taringa! Have you been looking for memes, trolls, or any possible source of conflict that you could interact with? Taringa! Without a doubt, this was your place.

But how Taringa has truly changed! in Taringa! It was clearly pirated content. With the ability to share anything with little to no moderation, the portal became the perfect place to find software, video games, movies, TV shows, books, and an endless amount of copyrighted material that was available for free. clicks

Links to services such as Megaupload and FileServe litter the site, which has exploded in popularity since 2008. In 2010, Taringa! reached 4.5 million members, up 74% from the previous year, and reached 60 million unique visits. This allowed it to rank among the 200 most visited websites in the world.

At the height of the brutal expansion, porn also played a decisive role. To the point where it led to the creation Poringa!, the XXX version of the platform, which was also very popular. In fact, Taringa members’ accounts! and Poringa! They were the same, making it extremely easy to interact with both sites.

Community

Besides the fact that Taringa! is a favorite place for illegal downloads of entertainment programs, Taringa! It has become very relevant because of its user community. Famous “taringeros”. Beyond the fact that comments on posts were equal parts grace and horror, the platform managed to instill an important sense of belonging. Earning points, getting promoted, and being featured on the cover of the Month’s Top Users was a real source of pride.

Taring users! They stood out because they even developed their own jargon, being “Lynx” voluntary reference qualifier. And some unimaginable moves arose, such as the case when a young man entered the portal and said that he had made a bass guitar that he wanted to give as a gift Paul McCartney. The case became so urgent that it was brought to him in 2010, during one of the former Beatle’s visits to Argentina. An event that everyone on the platform was obviously following every minute.

Be warned though, it wasn’t all rosy. At the moment of greatest popularity, disputes began to flare up over theft or plagiarism of publications, as well as disputes between ordinary users and moderators, which could even reach a personal level. Moreover, the always turbulent political climate in Argentina was carried over into Taringa!’s posts and comments, fueling the confrontation.

Judgment and goodbye to illegal downloads: the beginning of the end of Taringa!

While the site was experiencing its moment of greatest popularity, its owners were dealt a blow. In 2009, Taringa! was condemned by several publishers, together with the Argentine Book Chamber, to allow the distribution of pirated books. Nakayama and the Botbol brothers were prosecuted in 2011 for violating intellectual property laws and ordered to pay $50,000. But they were also sent to an oral trial, although they were acquitted in 2018.

In the midst of this entire extensive lawsuit and after being pursued by the FBI in the Megaupload case, Taringa! put an end to illegal downloads. This happened in 2014, when the portal not only banned the publication of new posts with links to pirated material, but also deleted all old links with the same purpose.

Many people think this the beginning of the end of Taringa!, as the large amount of traffic generated solely by pirated content disappeared almost overnight. Since then, the platform has tried to transform itself into a social network and maintain a loyal subscriber base, but its relevance and popularity have fallen sharply. In fact, those responsible for the site implemented a cryptocurrency reward system for original content creators, but despite brief initial success, it did not produce long-term results.

End

To make matters worse, Taringa! In 2017, the company suffered a hack that exposed the passwords of 28 million users. Those responsible for the site found themselves in the spotlight not only because of the hack itself, but also because of the lack of a reliable security system. Let us remember that access encryption was carried out using the MD5 method, which was already outdated by that time.

Starting in 2018, the portal continued to operate in a format more similar to Reddit than the original Taringa! but with an increasingly smaller share of the network. Due to the focus on mainstream social media and the rapid development of the technology sector, the site has become almost forgotten. Even its sale to blockchain company IOVLabs in 2019 did not help restore its work.

Over the last three and a half years of Taringa! Essentially, he was running on autopilot. In the comments to the closure announcement, many missing users from the site decided to restore their accounts, just to say goodbye. A clear sign that, despite the passage of time and decline in popularity, the platform left an indelible mark on his community.

The heartfelt farewell of those in charge confirms this feeling:

“They can call us virgins, snarky, insufferable, antisocial, whatever. But we made history, and no one will ever be able to deny us this.

We were home to all kinds of stories, all kinds of characters, all kinds of feelings. We got into a lot of trouble and overcame it. We raised the flag of an identity that, even today, after all these years, remains relevant… “taringuero”.

[…] Thanks for everything, taringero. “What we have achieved together over these 20 years will forever be remembered in the history of the Internet.”

Announcement of the closure of Taringa!