JP/Anissa S. Febrina
In his simple indigo-striped shirt, he looks just like another boy next door. His baby-face might even lead people to believe that Andrew Darwis is just one among thousands of computer-freak college students in the country.
But, if you’re the type to spend at least a couple of hours online, you’ll know that this young man nicknamed Mimin — short for web administrator — by his friends should not be taken for granted.
Indonesians have been sharing various kinds of information and have even made a living on the website he created a decade ago. Some have dubbed him the godfather of Indonesian websites; some have even named him the Mark Zuckerberg of the country.
Whatever title you want to give him, one thing is for sure, Andrew is the juragan (boss) of Kaskus.com, a web portal that lives up to its tagline: Indonesia’s largest online
community.
“It started as a school project in 1999. We were asked to build a website. Back then, most [of the students] built narcissistic websites containing their personal bios,” says the 30-year old, recalling the beginning of his lifelong project.
“The three of us [Andrew along with his friends Budi and Ronald] thought of making a news portal about Indonesia. You know how Indonesians suddenly love their country more when they’re abroad.”
Ten years ago, he was among those Indonesians abroad, studying multimedia and web design at
Seattle University.
“I was already enrolled at Binus [Bina Nusantara university], but I was interested in web designing and there were no school for it [in Indonesia] at that time. A friend suggested that I went to the US and so I did,” Andrew says.
Back then, he used to browse for Indonesian news on CNN and Reuters, translating them into Indonesian and uploading them to the website. It might seem like nothing new nowadays, but this was a decade ago when the internet was barely a necessity for most of us.
“After several months, we’d grown tired of this model of manually copy-pasting the web content. So we shifted to a Web 2.0 approach, inviting user content,” Andrew says.
Little did he know back then that the user-generated platform would propel his brainchild into one with almost 1.2 million Kaskusers today.
From a school project, Kaskus grew to be an online community of various interests, from hobbyists to supernatural aficionados, from online sellers to porn addicts. The last category, an adult one popularly known as BB17, has now been relegated to its past.
“A day after I returned to Indonesia a year ago, the government issued UU ITE, which bans adult content on websites,” Andrew said.
“As a good citizen, we have to obey the law. And so we took out that chat category.
“A day after we announced that we no longer provided that chat room, Pos Kota wrote in its headline: Porn site Kaskus has shut down its service.
“Whoa, it was like saying porn is the only thing we do,” he complains.
Kaskus is more than just that.
“It’s about building an online community. One with freedom of speech,” Andrew says.
The first online community that was accommodated in Kaskus helped gamers to seek a more open-minded forum. A gamer friend of Andrew who was banned from a gaming community website for having “too much to say” asked him to build an alternative forum.
From the not-so-serious game chats, the forum grew into talking and sharing more serious informal information on politics and current affairs. With most of its users being male, the adage boys will be boys slowly grew on Kaskus.
“Those were the days when college students recorded nude was a trend. You know men, we like those kind of things. But then postings with adult content went into news threads and other lounges,” Andrew recalls.
“We decided to ‘localize’ them. That was how BB17 was created.”
Shutting down that particular service has actually increased instead of slashing down the number of Kaskusers, Andrew pointed out. From around 350,000 members in early 2008, its users have more than tripled, adding more and more work for the Kaskus team.
How does it feel to maintain such a large-scale website?
“It’s like running a country, only the citizens are more demanding and powerful. Any change we made to the website will surely spark lots of negative and positive comments from users,” Andrew jokes.
Investment-wise, it’s increasingly becoming a challenge.
If initially Andrew made use of US$7 per month web hosting, he now has to add in a couple of servers every three months or so. The two initial partners who co-created the website gave up long ago.
“For them, business students, one project should have a return on investment. For me, it’s a hobby. I didn’t mind doing it for free during the first several years,” Andrew said.
While at first his pocket money went into maintaining the website, later on, as he got a steady job as a web developer for US-based lyrics.com more and more funds were allocated to adding servers.
Seeing the potential of the site, two other friends talked him into going back home to manage it more seriously.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked them. I was already able to rent an apartment and buy a car from my job in Seattle. Would I survive in Indonesia?” Andrew recalled his instant reaction to the proposal.
“But then I thought if I could do something at home, why spend my time and energy maintaining other people’s websites that were not my own creation?”
His creation is something that he can rightly be proud of. It’s success led him to meet Craig Newmark, founder of US online ad site craigslist.org, three months ago.
“One day he dropped by at Kaskus and the next day his Facebook page was visited by hundreds of Kaskusers. We met and he asked what he could do to help out in Indonesia. After all, our websites are similar, just with different audiences.”
Within a 10-year span, Andrew has grown from a nephew who tweaked with PHP (short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, a widely used, general-purpose scripting language) to build a website for his uncle’s furniture company to one who owns his own internet business.
“You should see the website I built for my uncle. It’s very old-fashioned by now, but then I was so proud,” he says, laughing.
Today, his mother and three siblings who used to complain about him dominating the telephone line for connecting to the Internet take pride in how his hobby and passion has turned into a serious business.
“They used to sabotage the phone so I would get disconnected when I was using the dial-up connection. Now they are proud of me.”
On its 10th anniversary, with the help of his two partners Ken Lawadinata and Danny Wirianto, the founder of Kaskus promises that there is a lot more in store for its online community.
Nice work, Gan!
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