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)