The world after the A station crash: What’s the point of calling it a subculture if there’s no fighting?

At 13:33 on the afternoon of August 4, AcFun, the pioneer of domestic barrage videos, crashed again. This crash lasted for a total of 37 hours. The result at this stage is that the entire AcFun site has been rolled back to the backup at noon on June 6, and a large number of functions have failed.

The previous article of the downtime announcement is from June 6

AcFun's downtime is simply a historical problem. If AcFun hadn't been down so badly, there might not be a Bilibili now. AcFun was founded in 2007 and quickly established its influence in the ACG circle. In July 2009, due to a computer room failure, Bilibili became inaccessible, and the problem was not resolved until August. During the downtime, Xu Yi, an old member of Bilibili, established another video site "mikufans" (Hatsune Miku fans) as a backup for Bilibili at the time. It was launched on September 26, 2009 and renamed bilibili the following year.

If you don't agree, you'll start a fight

There are many different opinions about the reasons for the A station outage this time, but there is one point that bystanders, including A station fans, basically agree on: the management of A station is only concerned with internal fighting, and as for technology and users, let's put them aside for the time being.

Internal fighting at A站 is a problem that has a longer history than downtime. The data that can be verified here include: A站 has changed hands four times from its establishment in 2007 to 2014. In March 2014, Simon, the old webmaster who was deeply loved by A站 users, left due to differences in ideas with investors. And 2014 years later, with Youku's lawsuit against and investment in Aofei, and the investment in Youku, accompanied by management shake-ups and purges of middle-level employees, you can see the very lively Zhihu question for details: Are the rumors of large-scale layoffs at A站 and B站 true?

Under this question, there was an answer from that year that directly pointed out the chaos in Station A’s technical department:

Wang Nima said, "In order to maintain rapid innovation, we have half of our staff turnover every year." Someone just said that AC changed 5 technical executives in a year, with 500% executive turnover. AC's technology must be very "innovative", right?

According to some media reports last Friday (August 5), the reason for the outage was still an old debt: acfun.tv had been included in the blacklist of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and could not obtain an IDC operating license, so it could not officially connect to the operator. According to the provisions of the "Notice on Establishing a Blacklist Management System for Domestic Illegal Internet Sites" (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Liandianguan [2009] No. 371), companies on the blacklist will not be approved for filing again, and qualifications and licenses for Internet information services such as cultural and audio-visual program services cannot be issued, and those that have been approved will have their approval revoked.

AcFun, which was unable to access the operator, could only access the service through a "black computer room" and was therefore sealed off by China Unicom.

The world after the replay: young people who like to take sides

AcFun rolled back to June 6 and began to slowly restore its functions.

Radicals on Station A, such as users in the article section and anonymous AC forum, believe that using the black machine room is a last resort, and that the media and other people are "setting the tone" - distorting the facts and guiding public opinion in a direction that is unfavorable to Station A. They generally jokingly call Station B "Yiguo", named after Station B's webmaster Xu Yi, and call Station B users "bog", a word with a clear sense of ridicule.

Screenshot from Island A

They even believe that the rollback of A station to before June is related to the events between June and August, such as Zhao Wei's use of pro-independence artists and the South China Sea incident. During these events, A station officials had deleted posts and banned accounts on a large scale, deleting comments accusing Zhao Wei. After the rollback, the IDs that were banned for "illegal comments" were also released, which became "evidence" that competitors were leading the trend.

The earlier established ACG forums, such as S1 and NGA, often focus on research and jokes about the dispute between Station A and Station B. Common comments about Station A being blocked include:

Big victory for station b.

Okay, you guys keep complaining about station a being finished, now it’s really over.

ACFUN’s annual blockbuster—"I Love My Family".

I can't believe they can still make trouble even after such a situation.

If A-station is finished, those psychopaths at A-station will run all over the world.

What are you worried about? The young players in the article area have dominated the outfield (note: S1 forum water area) for half a month, so what if there are more?

You are talking a wall of shit, you bastards! You will burn in the fire of hell. (A smiling emoji)

As for the data recovery, they believed that there was no hope for data recovery at Station B, so they just bought a few foreign remote hosts from Taobao to run the basic functions of Station A - that is what we see now when we open AcFun.

Pinged, three IPs
161.202.38.26 IBM SoftLayer Hong Kong Data Center
23.248.160.250 South Korea C3 Network KT Telecom CDN Node
23.248.160.251 South Korea C3 Network KT Telecom CDN Node

This is a remote host purchased directly from Taobao. It's so funny. Such a big company doesn't have its own host and has to buy it from Taobao. It deserves to go bankrupt.

It seems that the data can never be recovered.

Another post, really a spirited Chinese.

I wish my life could go back to this time.

Zhihu is basically one-sidedly anti-A站, and there is basically no problem with it being on Zhihu whenever A站 has problems - many voices from within A站, where there is serious internal fighting, may be first-hand evidence of the chaos at A站. The question " What do you think of the ACFUN website crash that started on the morning of August 4, 2016? " also maintains this tradition and starts digging deep into it as soon as possible.

However, after several such big news, it is well known that your company is good at power struggles and not at work. Yiguo also has internal struggles, but Yiguo knows that fighting should not affect the normal operation of the website. Your website uses user sentiment as firewood for the undead bonfire. From King Gwyn to the undead army to the fireless ashes, your company's fire will eventually go out, so take care of yourself.

Recently, China Unicom Group has rectified large bandwidth and cleared out IDC optical cables. All 44 computer rooms of Beijing Unicom are under investigation. Anyone who has signed a contract with Unicom's second-level agent to host a machine in Unicom's computer room may be disconnected from the Internet. While issuing a performance warning of a "profit decline of 80%, China Unicom has begun to rectify its national IDC (data center) business. This giant with an annual revenue of 280 billion yuan can no longer afford the loss of profits due to management loopholes.

The first to be affected was ChinaCache, a well-known CDN company listed in the United States. On July 28, Maimai, an industry communication platform with 18 million users, was unable to log in for nearly 15 hours. Maimai issued a statement explaining the reason: its service provider ChinaCache's Beijing data center was disconnected during China Unicom's Internet cleaning operation. Maimai told reporters, "The most conservative estimate is that Maimai lost more than 1 million yuan, but ChinaCache refused to pay compensation.

As for Station B, which is next to Station A, since Station B itself has no discussion space, one can only look for relevant content in the official forum. The result is also very simple - posts related to Station A have basically been deleted, and it is peaceful and quiet. Of course, there will always be people who make fun of Station B, which is interesting.

Why is this happening?

Subculture is originally a niche hobby, but as the audience spreads, the original subculture fans will further form small circles, which may be different schools or different groups of people - and thus have different positions. Bilibili may be the most acceptable aggregation of two-dimensional content, so it also aggregates more users; there are many other people, such as those who are always looking at sales data or word-of-mouth reviews, those who are more homely than animation, comics, novels, games and other contents, etc., and they are all scattered in different corners of the Internet.

The same thing happened in music and other fields. Early rock music was also a typical subculture. At one time, "all music fans were one family." However, as the audience increased and rock music was gradually accepted by mainstream culture in the 1970s and 1980s, it became further divided, and there was also a clear gap between fans of different styles.

This kind of niche consciousness may be one of the cores of subculture, although this is just my personal speculation. But based on this speculation, we can draw a conclusion: any product that attempts to integrate subculture groups such as the second dimension may be a false proposition. When an investment manager friend gave me a second dimension community and content App and asked me to evaluate it, my first reaction was that "the tone does not match the second dimension otaku", and they said, "This is a product that hopes to create content for all young people." Maybe the problem lies here.

So, what do you think if you want to create a subculture community or start a content business?

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.