Nigeria’s social network Nairaland is the most visited site in the country and has experienced rapid growth since it was founded by Seun Osewa in 2005
HumanIPO caught up with Osewa to discuss its conception and some of the issues that continue to make Nairaland a popular talking point, as well as a popular community.
Nairaland recently crossed the one million member mark. How do you feel and what is the secret to the success?
I feel so blessed to be in charge of the Nairaland Forum. I feel extremely fortunate. I don’t think Nairaland has any secrets.
Nairaland is what it is today because Nairaland members have chosen to stick with us for the past eight years.
We have loyal and passionate members of all ages who continually enrich each others’ lives by sharing information freely on our platform.
How did you strike the idea to create Nairaland?
I used to be active on various discussion forums online, so I recognised their value. But the Nigerian forums available at the time were dominated by Nigerians abroad. They focused on topics like US politics and inter-racial relations.
In 2005, after a mobile phone forum I created, because GSM phones were trendy at the time, started taking off, I noticed that the discussions were dominated by Nigerians at home.
And it was wonderful. I also noticed that the “off-topic” section – where people discussed topics like romance and politics – was doing better than the on-topic sections.
These observations led me to believe that a general-purpose Nigerian forum with a local focus would be successful.
So I built Nairaland and closed the mobile phone forum. As expected, Nairaland’s local focus appealed to Nigerians at home, including many who didn’t know anything about forums.
But it also appealed to many Nigerians abroad because it made them feel as if they were back in Nigeria. So we got to eat our cake and have it. We were very fortunate.
Is it true that some topics interest you more? And what’s the standard rule for getting a thread to the home page?
You’ll have to ask our able super-moderator, mukina2. She is in charge of posting topics to our home page. We try to please most people, but we can’t please everyone.
Do you think banning members for making garri-related comments infringed on on people’s right to freedom of speech?
Do you honestly believe we should not have taken any action against the so-called “garri activists”, who were derailing every thread by asking irrelevant questions about garri?
Is it not worth halting the censorship and allowing visitors on a thread to moderate themselves?
Two hundred innocent people died in November 2002 because a journalist made a comment about the Miss World contest. 16 innocent people died February 2006 because a newspaper in Denmark published an inappropriate cartoon.
If it is a crime to try to discourage people from posting comments that could lead to lost lives, then we are certainly guilty.
