Tianya is listed on the New Third Board: the last glory and splendor of BBS

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Since the advent of mobile Internet, Tianya Community has rarely received as much attention and mention as it has this year.

In March this year, it was revealed that Xici Hutong was sold by eLong to Zijin Huiwen for RMB 85 million. After changing hands twice, the style and temperament of Xici is far different from the original one. The development in recent years can be summarized as struggling. While countless netizens lamented the decline of Xici, they also mourned Tianya Community. Later, the resale of Tianya Community due to the disclosure of the NEEQ listing documents made many netizens fall into a mood of remembrance and regret. The closure of Daqi.com on July 28 made netizens sigh: Daqi.com is dead, can Tianya be far behind?

Seeking change: Listing on the New Third Board, ***'s hopes and dreams

As a representative website of BBS community, Tianya community has always been at the top of the BBS contempt chain. At that time, WeChat and Weibo had not yet appeared, so Tianya, as a Chinese community with highly active netizens, has always been an important source of public opinion. The "melamine" incident, the "naked death of Daiyu" in the New Dream of Red Mansions, the "Tang Jun's academic fraud" and the popular Xiao Yueyue incident all started from the popularity of Tianya to the point of almost evolving into national events. However, today, when Weibo and WeChat have become the main online social platforms for netizens, although Tianya still stands at the top of the BBS contempt chain, with the overall decline of BBS communities, major revelations and events are rarely triggered by Tianya, so it has unknowingly fallen to the bottom of the public opinion contempt chain and become a representative evidence of the bad-mouthing of BBS. If it were not for the closure or change of many BBS communities, Tianya community itself would have hardly appeared in mainstream news reports. Nowadays, when many once-famous old BBS communities such as Xici, Mop, Kaidi, Xilu, etc. are all struggling to survive, Tianya, which is in a slightly better situation, has become the last straw for the Chinese BBS community to collapse. If Tianya community really collapses, it will almost mean that the hope of BBS development will be completely gone and there will be no hope for life.

At the height of the topic of BBS bad-mouthing, on the evening of July 31, Tianya Community updated the "Public Transfer Instructions" to the official website of the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ). This means that if nothing unexpected happens, this old-fashioned community, which once dominated the Chinese Internet and is now the last hope of Chinese BBS, will officially land on the NEEQ in the near future. Earlier, after 16 years of vicissitudes, Tianya had planned to go public overseas and on the domestic GEM, but both failed. Unlike other markets, companies listed on the main board must be profitable for three consecutive years, and even if they are listed on the GEM, they must be profitable for one year, while on the NEEQ, they only need to provide the financial data of the last two years. For Tianya, which has been losing money for years, this listing on the NEEQ is the best choice after repeatedly lowering expectations.

There is no need to describe too much about the past glory of Tianya Community. Almost every netizen can tell one or two major events and celebrities that have appeared in Tianya. Unfortunately, that was only in the past. As for the dilemma it is facing now, many people analyze and comment on it from the perspective of the overall decline of BBS. Some analysts have not even used Tianya and have begun to shout that the BBS era is over and where Tianya Community should go. This also proves to some extent that Tianya is almost equivalent to half of the Chinese BBS. In fact, although BBS is gradually being marginalized, the greater challenge facing Tianya is not the changes in the Internet era, but its own response under this background. This listing on the New Third Board represents a glimmer of hope and dream not only for Tianya Community, but also for the entire Chinese BBS community. If it cannot be reborn from the ashes, Chinese BBS will suffer the most serious blow.

Dilemma: Problems are too deep to be solved, and the only attraction is sentiment

The reason why Tianya is criticized is not only because the BBS product itself has lost its advantages in the new media era, but also because of some problems that exist within it. These problems are not just the pain caused by the so-called transformation. As a representative BBS website, the problems faced by Tianya are also the problems faced by all traditional BBSs.

1. Attitude

When Tianya was at its peak, it was a utopia in many people's minds. It represented the most open and free side of the Internet. The charm of the words "open" and "free" was a fatal attraction for Chinese people who needed to follow many rules and mechanisms. Tianya's Guantian Teahouse brought this attraction to its extreme. Due to its popularity, a large number of public relations and online trolls also poured in. Coupled with some political risks, the content gradually became watered down, which accelerated Tianya's fall from the altar.

In Tianya, from the top officials to the netizens, everyone likes to talk about the past glory of Tianya. Netizens talking about it can be regarded as a kind of sentiment, but the officials talking about it over and over again feels a bit like Lin Xiangsao. To put it in an extreme way, the official did not play a decisive role in the glory of Tianya community in the past, and it relied more on the power of netizens, but this power is sometimes not supported or even suppressed, such as the Dangnian Mingyue incident. What Tianya should do is to reflect on its behavior during the glorious period and launch a series of measures to avoid the repetition of wrong behaviors, rather than just indulging in the halo of memories on the surface, but ignoring its own shortcomings under the halo.

2. User

As a senior Tianya user, I have joined dozens of Tianya-related WeChat and QQ groups for netizens to communicate, and the members of these groups are almost all duplicated. When I open Group A, these people are popping up, and when I open Group B, these people are still chatting. Even in newly created groups, I can still see these people. It is a very strange experience to watch netizens wandering around in each different group and chatting with the same people. This indirectly reflects the difficulty of user updates and iterations faced by Tianya. As the core users of content production, these people are the ones who come over and over again, and an inherent network circle has been formed. It is difficult for novices to integrate into it, let alone rely on content to stand out among many old users who are already familiar with each other.

Another typical example is that Tianya likes to invite those netizens who had influence on Tianya in the early days, the so-called core netizens, to its annual meetings, even if they have long forgotten their Tianya account and password. Because for the official, they think this is an honor. But they have not considered that this honor is unfair to some excellent new netizens. Because before newcomers become well-known in the community forum, even if you create excellent posts, it is difficult to get this opportunity.

Three: Products

At that time, Xici focused on social networking with real relationships and directed online traffic to offline merchants (O2O). At the same time, it made many very advanced product innovation reforms, but this advancement made users and the market not have time to prepare for this transformation, which led to the fundamental decline of Xici. Tianya Community is extremely conservative in product innovation. Netizens often ask why Tianya’s interface has not changed for more than ten years. In fact, Tianya’s interface has been upgraded a lot, but because the changes are very small, netizens can’t even notice it. If a new change in a Tianya product is discovered and criticized by netizens, Tianya’s usual practice is to change it back immediately. This behavior is also supported by very strong public opinion internally: it is difficult to satisfy everyone. The most important thing for Tianya is to maintain the atmosphere when Tianya was the hottest. Any changes that make netizens dissatisfied are likely to destroy this atmosphere, so it cannot be changed easily.

This fear of trial and error is equivalent to suppressing Tianya's innovation ability in disguise, forming a culture of following the trend. It also led to Tianya blindly following the trend after being impacted by mobile Internet social media such as Weibo and WeChat. First, it launched Tianya Weibo, and then Weilun. Weilun, a widely mentioned product, can hardly be called an independent product. It is just a user-managed section that integrates Tianya's original tribe. And there is no independent application on the mobile terminal, just a function button on the Tianya client. This kind of product that is highly overlapping with the Tianya community actually only has the effect of diverting Tianya's own netizens, leaving netizens at a loss. This time it is truly destroying the atmosphere of Tianya. Moreover, Tianya's repetitive products have almost no appeal to the outside world and cannot attract fresh blood at all.

IV. Operation

Tianya Community's operations are divided into two major systems: community operations and website management. Its website management system has become the reference standard for almost all BBS communities. However, the presence of these two major operation systems in Tianya Community is too strong, which is not a good thing for a user-centric platform. Have you seen operators of Weibo, Douban, and Zhihu being active on their platforms as officials? How to remove the traces of official operations is the primary issue for Tianya's operations.

Secondly, for BBS, the moderator system is somewhat similar to the patriarchal system and is somewhat outdated. On the one hand, this role is being hollowed out by the community operation and editing system that is increasingly active in the front, and on the other hand, it is increasingly superior to ordinary netizens, which is equivalent to establishing different power classes in a section, which is contrary to the current concept of equality and freedom on the Internet. This is also a reason for more netizens to leave. If Tianya Community wants to regain its vitality, it may be a good idea to establish a system where the operation and editing are absolutely behind the scenes, and to study the method of everyone being a moderator to replace the patriarchal moderator.

These problems are not only a reflection of Tianya's own current situation, but also the same problems faced by most BBS communities. As a major Chinese community, despite facing various problems, many netizens still continue to wander around in this former utopia while cursing Tianya. Supported by this utopian sentiment, everyone is waiting for Tianya to set an example again.

Opportunity: Hope and redemption require more perseverance than courage

The listing of Tianya Community on the New Third Board is a rare opportunity for Tianya, and also an opportunity for the Chinese BBS Internet to break through. Tianya Community is tilting, but has not collapsed yet. How to stop the tilt? After this time, I am afraid there will be no chance again. Bill Gates said: "Microsoft is always only 18 months away from bankruptcy." Tianya may only be 3 months away from bankruptcy and success. Xing Ming is one of the earliest Internet people in China, and Tianya Community is one of the earliest Internet companies in China. Some industry insiders think he is too conservative, while others think that Tianya is in a corner of Hainan, and it is not easy to achieve such success. However, in the high-speed update and iteration of the Internet, it is difficult for any Internet company to avoid the world. Once it is hit by the tide of the Internet and falls, it will be difficult to rise again.

At present, Tianya Community still has more than 100 million registered users, and mobile traffic accounts for more than 60%. As an old BBS website with a traffic ranking of 65th in the world and an average daily IP of nearly 10 million, the reason why it has not launched new products that can catch everyone's eyes is that it lacks the courage and perseverance to innovate. According to public information from Tianya Community, Tianya is currently transforming into community games, community e-commerce, Internet finance and other businesses: in 2013, Tianya Online Travel Co., Ltd. established subordinate branches in Guangxi, Guizhou, Sanya, Singapore and other places through mergers and acquisitions and new establishments to create a community-based tourism e-commerce platform business service system; in 2014, the agricultural product e-commerce division was established and the "Uncle Ya Farm" brand began to operate, providing agricultural and sideline products to Tianya users, generating a total of 18 million yuan in platform transactions last year. However, in the eyes of many people, these so-called transformations have not played to Tianya's own advantages and genes, and are even a bit too conservative and still have a bit of the meaning of blindly chasing hot spots. What the future path will be like is still difficult to judge.

What a netizen once said should be very appropriate to put at the end: When strangers are occupied by Weibo, when acquaintances are occupied by WeChat, when keywords are occupied by Tieba, when hookups are occupied by Momo, when interests are occupied by Douban... Tianya, when its influence fades, it is indeed necessary to find a new keyword. But it should not be to follow the trend.