During the IDBYTE conference, Ken Dean Lawadinata, CEO of Indonesian giant forum, Kaskus, shared his thoughts about communities in the country and how Kaskus facilitates them. As the nation’s biggest community forum, Kaskus has become a form of social media, as well as one of the largest online trading sites in Indonesia.
Current internet trends in Indonesia are triggered by community movements. Social issues in the country become the center of attention by spreading online. The people spoke their minds more than ten years ago, when the old government regime changed into a new reformed governance, and the internet became one of the most favorable ways people to express themselves.
Small cities in Indonesia often use the net as a window into happenings and trends in big cities like Jakarta. Through internet cafes or mobile phones, people get more information and stay connected though community forums like Kaskus.
The Kaskus forum started in 1994, the name originating from the words “kasak kusuk” which means ‘gossip’ in Indonesian slang. Its content is highly local with 98 percent of its users from Indonesia.
People are actually connected to each other not just online, but also engaged in various offline gatherings through communities on Kaskus. From politics, education, celebrity gossip, to trading — people here make new circles of friends through discussions in the forum. There are more than 400 segmented communities with 21 million unique visitors per month who spent average of 37 minutes each on the website.
Ken Dean Lawadinata, CEO of Kaskus. Credit: IDBYTE
Lawadinata said:
People in Kaskus community are actually interact with each other, and they actually made a lot of activities such as concerts, gatherings, etc. . . Kaskus is going to be a platform where the content is the community.
The most popular forum in Kaskus now is FJB, which stands for ‘Forum Jual Beli’ or ‘Trading Forum.’ It has helped the website rise to the seventh most popular in Indonesia (according to Alexa), and it has also become one of most popular online shopping destinations in the country. People are allowed to sell anything in this free platform, as long as it’s legal.
The forum is now growing into a large ground for Indonesians where they can share almost anything with the community — not just as social media, but also as a social commerce platform with strong local flavor.
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