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)