I can only worry if the WeChatMP will become the next "Tianya"

This is a translation of an new article from a popular social media writer I often read. I post here because I always hope one day SSB can be the platform " to carry on the work of quality authors and let readers who enjoy reading continue to find and appreciate them."

Some backgroud. WeChatMP is Weichat media platform which is the most popular platform for the past 10 years in China for long and serious contents. Tianya is the former giant get shuts down recently.

Original article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/5L3p3fL7oXlxDkRJUpGB4g
Original author: CiceroByTheSea (海边西塞罗)

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Audio: Symphony No. 45 Farewell - Abschiedssymphonie: Finale: Presto -
Adagio

It doesn't matter if Tianya fades away, as long as it's not the "only one."

In the past few days, news that the once-popular Tianya community could not be accessed has spread across the entire network. Although the Tianya community had previously announced that maintenance would be carried out in the near future, this did not prevent many netizens from launching a "wave of mourning."

Indeed, the Tianya community carries many people's youthful memories. Sofa, bench, flooding, board-killing, and other internet slang still used today were initially derived from there. A website with such a significant influence is suspected of being gone, and people have to say a few words, just like lovers who are about to break up without saying "loved" feel incomplete.

I was just a little kid in elementary school when Tianya was thriving. I didn't recognize all the characters, so naturally, I didn't visit the website much. However, I still think that Tianya's popularity back then and its decline today should be a unique and very worthy research phenomenon in the history of the global Internet. Many people might attribute Tianya's decline to the changing times, and the BBS media form has become outdated.

But if you pay attention to the development of similar platforms worldwide, you will find that this phenomenon occurs only here. Reddit in the United States, Japan's 2ch, and other BBS websites still have considerable traffic in their respective language areas. Although they have also been affected by Facebook, Twitter, and other emerging websites, this impact is far less than what Tianya experienced with Weibo and WeChat, which had disruptive consequences. The entire BBS went from "jeweled silver combs snapped in tune, blood-colored skirts stained with wine" to "few saddled horses before the cold and deserted gate, the same old colors as autumn leaves and twilight depart."

So, the decline of Tianya and many other similar platforms cannot be simply attributed to missing the iteration of Internet technology. So what is the real reason for its decline?

I think the reason lies in why Tianya became a phenomenal platform in the first place.

(to be continued in the thread)

In my opinion, the biggest difference between the Tianya platform and similar foreign BBS platforms, or the reason for its unprecedented success, lies in the fact that it carried the task of the "highest quality expression" in the Chinese Internet and even the text media world for a certain period.

In any era and language, the top-quality texts and ideas are always limited and scarce. If a media can act as a carrier for such high-quality expressions, it will quickly attract attention and traffic and become a phenomenal platform.

For example, in developed countries such as Europe, America, and Japan, due to the cultivation and development of traditional media such as newspapers and publishers, these traditional media have long monopolized the high-quality expression resources in society. If you look at the top commentators, writers, historians, thinkers, novelists, and scholars in Europe, America, and Japan, they have long-term cooperation and even exclusive cooperation agreements with traditional media such as The Times, The New York Times, and Asahi Shimbun.

Newspapers and publishers compete for these high-quality expression resources to attract public traffic. There may even be full-time editors acting as "star scouts." Once they discover high-quality writers on the Internet or in society, they will immediately try to include them in their author resource pool and even attempt to monopolize their works.

For example, Ms. Sano Shino, who became famous for writing "The Story of the Romans," was invited to write a column for a newspaper as soon as she showed her writing talent. Then the publishers followed up, and under a relatively mature cultural business mechanism, such people would never be forgotten by traditional media, leaving no opportunity for them to become "grassroots authors" and be "picked up" by the Internet.

This is also the key to why many traditional media in Europe, America, and Japan can still stand tall in the Internet age - ultimately, the technological innovations of new media can only change the carrier. The readers' thirst for high-quality text content and appreciation for profound thinking and insights will never disappear. As long as the text media can grasp high-quality authors, it will have everything it needs to survive.
However, if the text media is willing to sacrifice its ties with high-quality authors in order to catch up with the so-called "new media wave" and invest heavily in its unprofessional "new media" business, it is abandoning the essentials and pursuing the unimportant, playing to its weaknesses and disregarding its strengths, and cutting off its own feet to fit the shoes.

As a result, with high-quality expression resources being competed for, deeply cultivated, sharpened, and monopolized by traditional media, the foreign Internet media has actually been operating in a low-level mode for a long time - the high-quality expression content of these societies has already been "sharpened" by traditional media with mature profit and revenue-sharing models.

So what is mainly presented on these overseas BBS platforms is relatively shallow, short expressions, and the content is mostly about exchanging practical information and chatting with each other. Many popular posts on overseas BBS platforms are even built by netizens one after another, like a collective behavior art.

Therefore, very few people abroad write serious long articles with thousands or even tens of thousands of words, profound thoughts, rigorous structures, detailed textual research, and strong readability on BBS, Facebook, and Twitter platforms like they did in the early days of Tianya.

The reason is simple - if you really have this ability, why not go to traditional media to become a columnist or a contracted author and get paid for your writing?

So we can see that Twitter only introduced long-form reading features similar to WeChat Public Accounts and long Weibo posts this year. Many overseas media indeed rarely feature the high-quality online text expressions we are accustomed to. The Chinese Internet really does lead in this aspect, and it is not an exaggeration to say that "Qidian Literature is 20 years ahead of Japanese light novels."

The reason why Tianya was able to rise as a phenomenal platform back then is also rooted in this secret of success - at the time of Tianya Community's establishment in 1999, good authors and high-quality expressions in the Chinese-speaking world were not fully cultivated and explored by traditional media such as newspapers and publishers. This provided an unexpected blue ocean for the rise of Tianya and Internet literature.

Looking back today, those "first-generation" Internet masters who would regularly update thousands or even tens of thousands of words on forums like Tianya, attracting a large number of followers and realizing their "grassroots rise" with their high-quality content, may have taken a grassroots path and used grassroots online names. However, if you remove their online identities and look again, many of them are actually journalists and editors for newspapers and publishers, scholars and students in academia, or independent researchers and experts in related fields in reality.

(to be continued in the thread)

The high-quality expressions of these people should have been fully absorbed and utilized by traditional, professional media and publishers. However, due to the incomplete absorption, they accumulated excess expression impulses, which led them to use BBS platforms to post long articles online, writing thousands or even tens of thousands of words of commentaries, book reviews, and novels. This contributed to Tianya Community becoming a cultural high ground in the Chinese media circle for a time.

One man's loss is another man's gain. Precisely because traditional media failed to grasp and make full use of high-quality expression resources, Internet BBS platforms like Tianya accidentally "picked up" the opportunity to become the carrier of the highest-quality expressions in the Chinese-speaking world and consequently achieved phenomenal success.

However, one thing cannot be ignored: the BBS system was not originally designed for this purpose. Its mechanisms, rules, and rewards for high-quality authors are such that the model is not sustainable in the long run. In the end, Tianya's explosion in popularity thanks to these high-quality contents is somewhat like forcing a duck onto a perch. This is destined to come to an end as the times progress and the feast that never really belonged to Tianya in the first place.

Indeed, with the widespread use of smartphones in recent years and the further expansion and penetration of Internet users, two changes have constricted Tianya's living space from both directions, eventually leading to its decline and that of similar forums.

First, with the influx of a large number of new netizens, users browsing Tianya began to exhibit a "mixed" knowledge structure and worldview. In the early days of the Chinese Internet, the act of "going online" itself had certain barriers, so users browsing Tianya tended to have a certain degree of homogeneity in terms of knowledge and social strata. In this state, authors could express themselves without hesitation and with high efficiency. In the history section, you didn't need to start from the most basic common knowledge and explain that "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is not real history, but instead could directly begin your own discussion; when talking about economics, you didn't need to introduce who Hayek and Keynes were first, but could immediately evaluate the merits of their economic theories.

At that time, Tianya truly practiced its motto "having confidants within the seas, the ends of the earth feel like neighbors," serving as a platform for authors to find like-minded people and resonate with them.

However, as a large number of new Internet users poured in, the threshold for the audience was lowered, and the writing cost required for knowledge popularization actually increased. Moreover, many opinionated articles no longer received universal resonance like in the first few years. I remember that around 2008, Tianya and other websites began to see a frequent emergence of "controversial posts," verbal battles between readers with different views and knowledge structures, which greatly consumed the writing enthusiasm of authors who insisted on niche expressions and were powered by love, causing them to gradually fade from the platform.

The "crowded and diverse" nature of Tianya, with its increasingly blurred image, has been a prominent issue in recent years.

On the other hand, if a writer is still willing to persist in producing content in such a crowded, frequently criticized, and unprotected environment, they are most likely seeking to gain some economic benefits from their content output or, at the very least, make a living from it. However, on this front, Tianya's ability to directly monetize is quite weak, far inferior to later platforms like WeChatMP, which have tailored article monetization systems specifically for creators.

Moreover, pursuing a popular writing approach requires authors to continually increase their followers, which, in turn, necessitates the platform to constantly expand its user base. As previously mentioned, this need is in direct conflict with the BBS technical foundation of Tianya and its early netizens' elite, high-end temperament. This, in turn, led to many high-quality authors who wanted to pursue a more popular route for monetization to gradually distance themselves and migrate away from the platform.

Thus, the influx of new internet users caused the authors who insisted on niche content and "powered by love" to lose the sense of camaraderie that they once gained from publishing high-quality articles on Tianya, leading to their silence. However, the insufficient influx of new users (compared to other emerging platforms) made those authors who pursued popular traffic for monetization feel that writing articles on Tianya was "not worth it," causing them to leave.

The double-sided attack from the downward trend of new internet users in the new era led to a significant loss of high-quality authors on Tianya, and the scarcity of high-quality content resulted in a decrease in readership. This created a vicious cycle, leading to the decline of Tianya.

In the future, domestic BBS platforms may still have some room for survival, but their specific functions will undoubtedly return to the basics, resembling the functions of similar overseas platforms.

The highest quality content in the Chinese-language circle, the "touchstone" that once made BBS forums like Tianya a phenomenal platform, has already left this platform model – and it will never return, as its initial arrival was merely a coincidence.

(to be continued in the thread)

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.