Taringa! is an Argentine-based social networking site geared toward Hispanophone users.
Taringa! consists of a 27 million registered user base, according with Taringa's own metrics who create and share thousands of daily posts on general interest topics such as: life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art.
The platform has a presence in every country in the Spanish-speaking world – its main markets are Argentina, Spain, Colombia and Chile. According to comScore statistics in 2013, it was the fourth most popular Latin American Social Network and the second one in traffic only after Facebook, since then the site's traffic has dramatically declined, dropping up to the 3898th place in the Alexa Ranking on December 30, 2020.
In February 2012, an article by Wired listed Taringa! as one of the foreign sites that "outshine Facebook", stating "there are still places where an also-ran or a homegrown alternative beats out the global hegemonies".
In September 2017, Taringa! suffered a database breach when almost 28 million database entries were leaked.
Structure
Posts
One of Taringa!'s most important aspects is the posts. The users create the content themselves and receive feedback from the community (except new users, being experts or not) in the form of comments, points, recommendations, and favorites. Top-rated content gets featured on a special section of the site called Tops. Posts can be about many different subjects. They can be created with text, images, gifs, videos, and/or links. Within the post section of the website there are a variety of categories, including art, travel, news, computers and technology, etc.
Home Page
Historically, Taringa's homepage had a main section of posts which were organized in chronological order, according to the most recent posts, as well secondary sections with Top Posts (the most voted by the community by week, month or year) and Post Highlights (selected using a number of different variables such as visits, comments, favorites, etc.).
In June 2014, Taringa! updated its homepage, making not only aesthetic changes but also by developing a new algorithm in order to highlight the best contributions made by the community. By the use of geo-tracking, each country can have its own personalized homepage, according to the most relevant local issues going on at the time. Currently, posts created by users can be seen on the homepage and are ordered in three main sections: biggest highlights, emerging, or the most recent: Highlights: posts which continue to be the most commented on, most read, most recommended and which maintain the highest score, over an extended period of time (by week). Emerging: posts that have started to gain momentum; they have received a lot of points, visits, comments or recommendations by the community in just a short period of time. These are subjects that start to become “hot-topics” on the website. Most Recent: Posts in chronological order of their creation continue to remain on the homepage but maintain relative prominence.
Communities
Taringa! has a system of user-created groups that are called "Communities." Communities are the space on Taringa! where users can interact and discourse with other users. There are many different categories within Communities, and within each category are a variety of subcategories. These groups are used to share interests, information, ideas, creative content, and others. When you create a Community, you are the owner and the moderator of that Community. There are more than 80.000 communities created by users in very different kinds of subjects, from Android followers to guitar player community.
My Taringa! This section of the site was released with Taringa! v5. In this section users can post quick messages, images, videos, and links. These messages are called "shouts". A user can view all of the shouts and activity from all the users he/she follows in My Taringa!
User ranks
In the Taringa! V5, the owners released a function called “Karma”. This is what determines your user rank. Troll: karma −1 Flamer: karma 0 Inexperto (Untrained): karma 1 Iniciado (Beginner): karma 2 Aprendiz (Novice): karma 3 Amateur: karma 4 Regular (Medium): karma 5 Experto (Expert): karma 6 Avanzado (Advanced): karma 7 Elite: karma 8 Silver: karma 9 Gold: karma 10 Platinum: karma 11 Diamond: karma 12