As someone from a younger generation who has hardly experienced the heyday of Tianya and does not have any particular attachment to it, my purpose in writing this article is not to mourn Tianya like many others or even analyze how it died. I am merely trying to gain a sense of alertness through this analysis:

After hearing all this, do you not feel that the current "decline" experienced by platforms like WeChatMP is somewhat similar to when Tianya was about to decline?

Yes, text and images are the most efficient, convenient, and least technically demanding form of expression, so I don't agree that short video platforms can kill WeChatMP. As long as humans can read, their need for reading and good articles will be eternal. The secret to the rise and fall of any text and image platform lies not in new technologies but in whether it can retain high-quality creators, provide them with a stable environment, consistently produce high-quality content, and thus retain high-quality readers, forming a good cultural ecology.

The reason why high-quality traditional media in developed countries such as Europe, America, and Japan continue to thrive in the new media era is that they have firmly grasped a group of high-quality authors. The early decline of Chinese traditional media is not due to the impact of new technologies, but because, even before that, they had already lost or even ignored the truly high-quality authors.

The reason and significance of the popularity of BBS forums like Tianya back then was that they first "introduced" these high-quality authors to the internet. Once the habit of online creation and reading of high-quality texts was formed between authors and audiences, the high-quality content in the Chinese-language circle never returned to the offline world, resulting in a more rapid decline of Chinese traditional media and the faster rise of various internet-based text and image platforms.

From Tianya BBS to blogs, to Weibo, and finally to WeChatMP, high-quality authors, along with their high-quality content, have attracted high-quality readers and have been "wandering" between one emerging internet platform and another. Each time they settle down, they ignite the corresponding platform, and their departure will lead to the gradual decline of the platform, like Tianya. This is a very peculiar but repeatedly successful phenomenon in the Chinese internet world.

The issue now is that, just as high-quality creators began to leave Tianya in large numbers back then, more and more WeChatMP owners are leaving WeChatMP for various reasons – have you noticed a decrease in the frequency of opening WeChatMP recently? Has a WeChatMP you used to read frequently not been updated for a long time? Have you lost interest in reading due to the departure of a particular author?

If the answers to these questions are affirmative, then WeChatMP are currently at risk of following in Tianya's footsteps. What is killing them is not new technology, but the decreasing number of interesting authors, interesting articles, and loyal readers on the platform.

What's worrying is that, unlike blogs after BBS, Weibo after blogs, and WeChatMP after Weibo, we cannot find an emerging platform to take on the traffic of text and image works after the decline of WeChatMP. After talking with many WeChatMP text and image authors, I found that many of them switched to other fields after discontinuing or taking a break from their accounts. Some transitioned to making videos or writing video scripts, while others started businesses or went back to writing books.

In other words, the river of Chinese internet text and image creation that began with Tianya is gradually "drying up" when it reaches WeChatMP, with both authors and readers disappearing like water and sand. Authors turn to making short videos, while readers immerse themselves in watching short videos. Together, everyone forgets the joy of reading and writing.

This is a saddening matter. We should not forget the warning given by Neil Postman in his book "The Disappearance of Childhood" - Writing and reading are essential disciplines that belong to adults and make people profound. When a society transitions from a culture of reading and writing to a culture of entertainment, it will not only lose the depth of adulthood but also the innocence of childhood.

And perhaps this is why so many people are collectively "mourning" Tianya due to an unexplained shutdown - at the end of the day, people are not mourning a BBS, but the reading and writing habits that are disappearing.

I saw a post from a middle-aged reader friend: "I truly miss those days when I stayed up all night on Tianya to catch up with tens of thousands of words in a long article, and after reading, it was dawn, but I didn't feel tired, but rather refreshed."

I think what this reader really misses is not Tianya, nor his vanished youth, but the increasingly elusive pleasure of reading high-quality articles that we are losing together. After all, the joy of writing and reading is irreplaceable.

I hope that on our internet, another platform can emerge to carry on the work of quality authors and let readers who enjoy reading continue to find and appreciate them.

It doesn't matter if Tianya disappears, as long as it's not "only this horizon". Because the joy of writing and reading is ultimately irreplaceable. End of the full text.

Today's accompanying music is a section from Haydn's "Farewell". I love writing, I don't want to say goodbye, as long as there are people reading, whether it's the main account or secondary, I will keep writing.