Author |Chen Yuli.
Header |Visual China.
The coconut trees on Hainan Island were blown by the wind and were almost close to the ground, and they were able to survive. Tianya is also like the coconut tree on Hainan Island, tenacious and tenacious. ”
Seven years ago, the founder Xing Ming said this message to himself when he reflected on the loneliness of the Tianya community. Today, the "coconut tree" of Tianya Community is probably about to face its final fate.
At 11 o'clock in the evening on March 1, Tianya Community issued the "Announcement on the Restart of Tianya Community's Business, the Progress of Resuming Access to the Network Platform and the New Tianya Plan" on the official website.
According to the announcement, after nearly a year of persistence and never give up efforts, March 1 has become the start date for the resumption of normal operations of Tianya's business, and in the next two months, the business self-help with the core goal of resuming access to the Tianya community will be in full swing.
The announcement also pointed out that Tianya will launch a new business - to create a global travel and fashion consumption social platform.
In the past few years, Tianya Community has continued to face difficulties such as bank loan failure, transformation setbacks, and huge investment losses, and the company has been repeatedly listed as an enforcement target by the court, with a cumulative execution target of more than 100 million yuan. The founder Xing Ming was not only frozen Tianya's equity, but also issued a consumption restriction order, and the company entered a real dark moment.
With the issuance of this restart announcement, Xing Ming also set the tone for Tianya in an interview with **: "If it is not successful, it may be the last time." ”
As a strong stroke on the Chinese Internet,The failure of the Tianya community is the end of an era, and to some extent it announces the failure of a kind of "spontaneous, man-ruled" idealism.
Disillusionment with utopia.
In the past, Tianya Community was a well-deserved "top community" in China, which was not only the largest content creation and knowledge sharing platform in China, but also the enlightenment place for many Chinese netizens.
Back in 1999, when Tianya Community was founded, the entire Chinese population was as high as 1.2 billion, but the number of Internet users was less than 20 million, because computers were too expensive, Internet fees were not cheap, and those who could afford to access the Internet were often not ordinary people.
In the network environment at the time,Not only is the average quality of netizens high, but the content creation environment is also quite openYou can discuss almost any issue online, and all this has become the fundamental condition for the rise of the Tianya community.
With the registration of a group of ancient intellectuals (mainly ** people, writers and scholars) on the Chinese Internet, as well as the continuous expansion of the scale of netizens, the Tianya community has ushered in explosive growth, and well-known sections such as "Guantian Teahouse", "Dancing Texts and Ink", "Idle Books", "Cooking Wine and History", "Lotus Peng Ghost Stories" and other well-known sections have been established one after another, and well-known writers such as Mingyue, the author of "Those Things in the Ming Dynasty", Tianxia Basing, the ancestor of Chinese tomb robbery literature, and the first generation of Internet celebrities such as Sister Furong have also become popular.
Different from the BBS of the same era, such as Xici Hutong, Maopu.com, etc., the content discussed in the Tianya community is more serious and grander, and the mainstream posts cover four categories of politics and historyThe way in which issues are discussed is also more inclined to debate and inquiry.
Take "Guan Tian Teahouse" as an example, it was founded in November 1999, and the "Guan Tian" in the name comes from Chen Yinke's poem "Guan Tianyi learned by my nephew", which means "everything we learn is related to the will of God", and the person who founded the plate is named Lao Leng, and his identity in reality is Luo Xin, a historian at Peking University.
Regarding the original intention of the establishment of Guantian Teahouse, Lao Leng said: "The original Tianya was too petty bourgeoisie and too windy......So I put forward an idea, if we can talk about a little bit of academics, talk about the ideological issues that go beyond academics, not a specific professional academic, but out of the care of these academics, more consideration is the country or the world. This is the best portrayal of the idealism of the Tianya community. According to the young scholar and former moderator of the "Guantian Teahouse", "Oshisalom" recalled: "The 'Guantian Teahouse' is mainly a place where ideas are exported and ideas are exchanged, and all kinds of argumentative bars are abundant. At that time, the topic of the debate was almost forgotten, and I only remember the lively atmosphere. All topics are open to discussion, and people seem to find them really valuable. Later, the community opened up the "Tianya Miscellaneous" section, because of the ** gene flowing in the community, "Tianya Miscellaneous" has become a channel for the Tianya community to promote social issues, typical news events such as the *** incident and the Zhu Ling incident have spread from online to offline, triggering a wide range of public discussions across the country.
Looking back on history, the reason why Tianya Community has become an irreproducible Chinese community is not only the high-quality content of each section of it, but more importantly, the social impact of this hot post after another - the KOLs of Tianya Community, as the main promoter of agenda setting, continue to promote Chinese's attention to social issues, complain about unfair social events, and sometimes even have a great influence to promote the self-rectification of relevant departments.
At that time, the Tianya community, with the revelations of a large number of clues from netizens, became an important topic for reporters to explore topics. Slowly, the Tianya community has also formed a news report chain of user breaking the news, user spontaneous investigation, * follow-up, and central media follow-up, and the stickiness and vitality of its community users are amazing.
Looking back on these deeds now, I have to admit that the Tianya community did bring the spirit of rationality and humanistic care to the PC Internet at that time.
With the huge roar of China's huge "machine" shifting from a planned economy to a market economy, the friction and falling off of "parts" have become inevitable. Tianya, the first place of creation of the domestic Internet, like Adam and Eve, inadvertently tasted the "apple".It has had an indelible impact on China's modernization and legalization process.
In addition to the content, the reason why the Tianya community has been able to go so far along its characteristicsIt is also inseparable from the "inaction and governance" in the initial management of the community.
Absalom "once wrote an article in his *** recalling the end of the world's governance: "To a large extent, it is self-organizing. The moderators are just referees, maintaining basic order, and there is not much power to intervene in the topic. This is largely related to the lack of formal employees in the Tianya community at that time, and the "Ten Years of Chopping Firewood", who had served as the administrator of Tianya, added more details when talking to his own ** person Pan Chao: "At first, there were only a few sections, but in the process of constantly mobilizing the masses (senior users), various new sections kept emerging. "The rights of users are very large, and if any moderator does not like the user, it is common to be driven out. The spontaneous growth environment has undoubtedly stimulated more people's desire to create. At its peak, Tianya Community had a total of 482 sub-forums, with an average of 9.8 million unique IPs per day, more than 1 million posts per day, and more than 100 million people per month, which was called the "world's largest Chinese community" at that time.
But the good times didn't last long, with the rise of Sina Blog and the departure of the iconic figure "Mingyue of the Year", the Tianya community went downhill.
According to CNNIC data, 2009 was the year when the BBS community turned from prosperity to decline, and its usage rate declined for the first time (307%, compared to 30 in 20095%）。After 2012, Sohu, Sina, and NetEase successively stopped the forum project, and those masters of the rivers and lakes who made bricks and talked about it left one after another, and never looked back.
Then, the transformation of the Tianya community into the mobile Internet failed, and the community slowly disappeared in the noisy mobile Internet era. With a few "wails" from the body due to continuous blood loss, Tianya completely withdrew from the stage of history.
Missed an era.
Whether it is the founder Xing Ming or the former moderators such as "Absalom", when reflecting on the defeat of Tianya, they will mention one reason - money.
The "money" here is divided into two aspects, one of which is the money for financing. Over the years, Tianya has always maintained a low-input, low-output operation state, and the advantage is that it has escaped the global "technology bubble", but because of thisMissed the impetus and opportunity of grafting with capital.
At that time, Tianya was very famous, but it did not raise funds on a large scale, which was a major mistake. It took us a year to start bringing in external capital with our own funds, and many Internet companies had foreign investment on the first day of their establishment," Xing Ming said. Later, although Tianya raised some money, it prematurely changed the VIE structure to a domestic structure, resulting in the inability of foreign capital to invest, and the domestic RMB** was quite cautious about investing in Chinese Internet companies in those years, and the result was that the opportunity to become an entrance was lost in the early stage of the mobile Internet. Not to mention the possibility that Tianya can expand in other directions with its own huge traffic, just by benchmarking its direct competition with Weibo and Zhihu's mobile time, it is enough to see Tianya's sluggish response to the general trend: Weibo was launched on the mobile terminal on August 14, 2009, and Zhihu was on August 10, 2010.
Looking back at 2013, Weibo had already won the war with Tencent Weibo, with nearly 300 million users, and was independently listed in the United States the following year. Zhihu also opened registration this year, and the number of registered users increased from 400,000 to 4 million, and the number of users began to grow rapidly.
Unexpectedly, in 2014, Tianya once again encountered "Waterloo". According to a report by Nanfang***, the land for its ABP was told that it was a public green space and had already been planned, half of the land was taken away, and the 10,000-square-meter building invested in it had not been used for a day. The strategic cooperation agreement signed when settling in Chengdu Jinjiang also had problems, not only did the tens of millions of subsidies not be fulfilled, but the 50 million yuan of supporting investment was still "famous stocks and real debts". In 2019, Tianya Community was sued in court, and all account assets were frozen.
It's quite unfair, the key is that I think the sharp decline in the later four years is the direct cause of this incident," in an interview with Nanfang***, Xing Ming pointed out that the direct loss caused by this incident is hundreds of millions, but the indirect loss is immeasurable: "Once the entire transformation of the mobile terminal fails, it will miss an era." ”Another aspect of "money" is the poor commercialization of the Tianya community, it can neither bring benefits to creators, nor can it achieve a virtuous circle of its own commercialization paradigm.
From the creator's point of view, the Tianya community can neither help them accumulate fans, nor help them build a personal brand, and the commercial value of the individual cannot be judged, so they lose the possibility of monetizing advertising.
Absalom believed that people have an instinct for profit: "When there is no choice, they will idealize themselves to continue to output, writing and writing in a chattering manner." But once they have other choices, of course, they can't stand it, and gradually abandon the end of the world. "And from the perspective of the community,The Tianya community has never found a benign hematopoietic mechanismAs a result, small ads can only be allowed to spread all over the community, and the consequence is that the user experience plummets.
The last group of authors who are willing to 'generate electricity for love' can't stand running away, and without good content, they can't attract more readers, and if they don't pay attention, they don't have traffic, "the former Tianya user" Kafka is very busy" wrote in his own ***: "Tianya is just like your unreliable boss, pua every day, arrogant comparison, and even bother to play cakes." "It should be pointed out that it is a fact that the commercialization ability of Tianya community is poor, but Xing Ming does face management difficultiesTianya's genes are very fatal is that it is not sensitive to business and even somewhat repulsive, which is the tone set by the initial group of core users.
At that time, I wrote things in order to meet more people, make it easier to find a job, and realize it through traditional **, and I didn't want to make money through Tianya," said "Ten years of chopping wood". A typical example is that when the Beijing News was founded in 2003, several departments, including the Comment Department and the Ministry of Culture, could almost be regarded as a gathering of Tianya netizens, "At that time, if you mixed well in Tianya, you only needed to report your Tianya ID, look at your past posts, and you could go to work directly, which can almost be regarded as 'exemption from inspection'." Du Zijian also added a background of the times in his conversation with Pan Lan: "Those writers all came out of the group of people who 'have a vast world and great achievements', and they did write content with inner discipline, and their sense of morality at that time was much higher than now." In addition, the objective conditions (that is, the Internet monetization logic in the PC era) do not support Tianya to do more commercial exploration, although later made an attempt to make Tianya coin, wanting to feed the author through readers' rewards, but according to many Tianya netizens, "it is more difficult to put forward the existing conditions."
At the root of it,The failure of Tianya's commercialization is that the senior management team does not recognize the value of "people" itself.
Xing Ming once revealed that users on Tianya have accumulated more than 8,000 books in the past, and publishing houses and film and television companies are looking for themes on Tianya, but Tianya has not taken a penny from it. Looking back now, even if Tianya does not have a good monetization model in the publishing and film and television industries, after some attempts, there is a high probability that it will be able to find a hematopoietic mechanism with the core author's content as the core, which is not very difficult.
Moreover, for the departure of opinion leaders such as Kong Ergou, Xiong Dun, Mingyue and many other super IPs, perhaps due to their own limited resources, Tianya has not taken substantial measures to retain them, which has led to the continuous expansion of Weibo's power.
Therefore, missing the opportunity of mobile terminal leads to the loss of more monetization models, in addition to competing with Weibo, the core competitiveness in the competition with vertical communities is insufficient, which in turn leads to the continuous loss of users.
As Xing Ming said, "If you raise more money at that time and consider the issue of profitability later", Tianya does have the possibility of becoming a large-scale content platform, but time cannot be turned back.
One must build on a firm foundation?
This "restart" of the Tianya community has been pulling for almost a year.
In the middle of last year, Song Zheng, the former executive editor of Tianya Forum, launched a charity sale called "Seven Days and Seven Nights, Restart Tianya" in the Douyin live broadcast room, hoping to raise 3 million yuan by inviting Tianya netizens and former employees to live broadcast and bring goods, which was used to pay for the cost of the telecommunications room, "Let Tianya restart after it is raised".
On the night of June 1, "how to go in the future of Tianya" became the topic that netizens were most concerned about. Xing Ming connected with investor Pan Haidong, self-leading person Pan Lan, and former executive editor-in-chief of Tianya Forum Song Zheng to call on netizens to make suggestions for the future development of Tianya, and there were still four or five hundred people in the live broadcast room until 4 o'clock in the morning the next day.
But when it came to the selling process, loopholes began to appear frequently: noisy microphones, chaotic pictures, inaudible anchors, incomplete products on the shelves and other chaos were staged in turn, revealing the haste of preparation and the unprofessionalism of the team everywhere.
Song Zheng said in an interview with Red Star News: "An MCN agency told me that at the beginning they paid attention to this matter and felt that our activities had a 'script', and this 'script' was too good, but when they saw the back, they found that we didn't know how to do it at all, we were very amateurish, and even went completely against the traffic password." In the end, the target fundraising of 3 million was only completed less than 200,000, and the goods were carried out in a vigorous manner, ending in the embarrassment of the audience's capitalization. Once again, it proves that old things will eventually be eliminated by the times, and feelings can be sold for a while but not for a lifetime.
Perhaps, what we are more worthy of asking is: is it still necessary to restart Tianya?
Looking back at that Tianya, it was founded at the beginning of the birth of the Internet, grew up after Chinese intellectuals touched the Internet, and finally exploded in tandem with the growth of the PC Internet.
Behind this is inseparable from the objective conditions of "time, place, and people"."Tianshi" is the explosion of the Internet, "location" is the lag of network supervision at that time, and "he" refers to the rather pure symbiotic relationship between opinion leaders and fans.
But to this day, is this "time, place, and people" still there?
The answer is obvious, in the words of Absalom: "If the Tianya community does succeed in transformation, then what? It's just going to be something I don't recognize, and the BBS will still disappear. He thinksBBS is an anti-information cocoon, a completely centerless self-organization** that relies on some kind of consensus among participants. Once this consensus ceases to exist, it collapses.
From another point of view, the entire history of the Internet is actually a process of people being constantly "domesticated", from active search to passive information flow, people are becoming more and more lazy, and more and more like to stay in the information cocoon room "entertainment to death".
The subtle thing is that even the threshold for advertising is also constantly improving, from patches to information flow to live streaming, consumption itself has been rooted in people's bones.
still remembers that in the live broadcast room of "Restart Tianya", in the face of Pan Chao's question about "why did users go to Weibo and didn't choose to stay in Tianya", Xing Ming always put the word "original intention" on his lips: he recalled that Tianya was concise and fresh back then; He recalled that at that time, Tianya gave users equality, rather than looking up to the big V; He recalled that Tianya gave the author a relaxed creative environment rather than a rush to change. He insisted that the defeat to Weibo was because the mobile terminal did not do a good job, not because the model of the Tianya community itself was problematic. Xing Ming said it from the heart, but it was not on the same line as the other three participants, like "chickens and ducks talking".
He is with a small group of staunch die-hard fans of the worldseems to be still living in the end of the world where a hundred schools of thought contended, looking for peace of mind with idealismEven if the era that belonged to the end of the world has long ended.
The heartbroken man is at the "end of the world".
I am mobile editor Chen Yuli, concerned about the Internet and business-related, industry people exchange plus WeChat: yl hpend, news clues can also be emailed to chenyuli@huxiucom
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