Baidu Post Bar, will it be the last Chinese BBS？

In January 1978, two computer experts in Chicago, Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss, developed a small computer communication system named Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) in the cold winter. This is Pangu Kaitian.

It was not until 1982 that Buss Lane wrote a prototype program for IBM personal computer in Basic language. After several revisions, in 1983, through the efforts of members of Communication Special Interest Group of Capital PC User Group(CPCUG), the BBS of personal computer system was rewritten. After finishing by Thomas Mach, the first version of BBS system for personal computers –RBBS-PC is finally completed. The biggest feature of this BBS system is that its source programs are all open, which is conducive to future modification and maintenance. Therefore, it is used as a framework when developing other BBS systems, so RBBS-PC won the reputation of the originator of BBS. This time, Nu Wa made a baby.

In 1984, Tom Jonning of the United States developed a bulletin board system program FIDO with electronic functions. Because the software has the functions of connecting lines between stations and automatically transmitting information to each other, the stations can transmit e-mails at a common scheduled time, which makes BBS networking have a chance. This is the beginning of civilization.

The flame of civilization reached China in 1991. The first BBS station started in China. Until 1995, with the sharp price reduction of computers and their peripherals, BBS was gradually recognized by people. In 1996, it developed at an alarming rate.

According to its nature, BBS stations in China can be divided into two types: one is commercial BBS stations, such as Xinhua News Network; The other is amateur BBS stations, such as Paradise Information Station.

Because the use of commercial BBS stations requires a fee, and the services provided by commercial stations have no advantages compared with amateur stations, so the number of users is small. Even in 1997, it was still in the era of chat rooms, and the forum based on WWW had not yet become a climate. Most early netizens in China still used BBS under TELNET. However, due to the simple TELNET interface and cumbersome operation, most users were professionals, and there were no massive users, so the traffic could not be realized.

It can be said that the earliest commercial BBS in China are worried about traffic, and they are looking for tools that can quickly start up.

Sports has its own traffic attribute, which is the same as the logic of LeTV.

In 1997, Stone Lifang Sports Salon (the predecessor of Sina) gathered a group of sports fans. The netizens who were active in the forum included Lao Rong, Sydney Scout, Wei Yixiao, Wang Xiaoshan, Beijing Cook, Diao Deyi, Lijiang Yanyu and so on. Later, most of these people entered the sports professional media and completed the transformation from bandits to regular troops. This process also won the popularity of Sina. com, which started with a sports salon. But now, Sina. com can only rely on Weibo. Weibo ate 300 million active users with online celebrity and entertainment stars, but lost more than one cheetah in one night.

This situation is similar to the mystery of Sina.com in 1998. After the establishment of Sina. com, which started as a sports salon, the original netizens left one after another, and the sports salon went into decline. Today’s sports salon is as famous as the Minsk, but it has only an empty shell.

The difference is that the sports salon declined because there were no people, but the price of Weibo declined because there were too many people.

Why does the stock price still fall with traffic? One kind of analysis thinks that Weibo’s share price is too expensive to break through the security boundary, which is a reasonable rebound in the capital market. In fact, Sina may be afraid of poverty, so it quadrupled its profit margin last year.

These people lived as pit investors in the era of Internet idealism.

In 1997, NEED Studio, founded by NESO and RED, established Jiaxing Forum. They recruited a group of excellent bamboos, three-legged cats, Dr. Tea, Ears and Fei Fei, and quickly became a famous forum in China after Sina Forum in 1998. Just one year later, due to the disorder of development and poor management, coupled with the money-burning movement of the network at that time, under the impact of the network bubble, the scene of online forums as the spiritual home and ideal country of netizens no longer exists.　

All this happened in the last century.

Since then, commercial websites have made rapid progress and excavated a large number of well-known online text brokers. When Caishen Ning was writing Tianya this rotten place, he never imagined that Netease community Sohu community had closed down and Tianya was still alive.

In March 2017, Huaxia Happiness privately subscribed for 1 million shares of Tianya for 22 million yuan, accounting for over 1% of the shares, with a valuation of 2.2 billion.

There may be many reasons. Xing Ming said frankly, "In the most difficult time, we restrained the desire to burn money to keep warm, controlled the cost and saved the fighting capacity. You must take the initiative to adapt to this industry, which can be described as a narrow escape, and the’ leftover’ is king."

The cat that loves each other and kills each other marries a thousand oaks early. The website that invented human flesh search was originally a game website. Now this field belongs to 17173 people. Chen Yizhou, who bought the Puff, has no love for forums. He has a Renren network that is more suitable for the web2.0 era. At this time, Sun Suojun, the founder of Maopu, became a chess player of the beautiful legend of Thousand Oaks. This company mainly engages in e-commerce.

The model of content plus e-commerce is not a new business, nor is it necessarily a good business. In 2012, he said that he would go public in the next three years, with a valuation of 30 billion. The ideal is full, but Chen Yizhou, the boss, is obsessed with stock trading, and everyone and the cat flutter are abandoned. It’s piercing.

Chen Yizhou was also stabbed in the heart.

In 1999, he founded chinaren. It took the company a year to spend 10 million dollars on investors and attract 1 million users. According to the exchange rate and CPI at that time, it was equivalent to a user’s acquisition cost of nearly 300 yuan, and there was no profit model. Compared with the investors who are distressed by spending a little money to promote it now, and the founders who have racked their brains to get customers at zero cost, China’s Internet was even more domineering than it is now 18 years later.

In 2000, catch up with the Internet bubble. Chen Yizhou sold chinaren to Sohu. Zhang Chaoyang made him vice president of Sohu at that time. A year later, Chen Yizhou fired Zhang Chaoyang with the fantasy of "starting a company is worth 10 billion yuan" and went to the United States to dig for gold. As a result, he met with "911" and lost his money. At that time, he said: I am too poor to be poor in America.

In 2002, when he returned to China to start a business, he found that the wind had changed. At that time, Sohu Sina, which survived by SP, had left the former Internet ideal behind. In the SP era of cheating, pornography and drug gambling, China Internet, which was about to go bankrupt collectively, was saved by fraudulent short messages and telephone charges traps, but Chen Yizhou missed it.

One view is that he can’t and really can’t do it, and the other view is that he thinks SP’s business needs to be closely related to Internet content. By way of digression, can it be regarded as another form of SP business, from paying for the knowledge of APP, to the sky-high advertising fee of the Queen of Poisonous Chicken Soup, from Weibo Q&A to Zhihu fraud? Think carefully and be extremely afraid.

In a word, by chance, he took aim at the cat flutter. Puff also lived up to its mission, making a splash in the first decade of the new century, and finally reaching its peak in the June 9th Jihad in 2010.

The incident originated at the World Expo. The unfair treatment of the armed police brothers who maintained order by female fans of a Korean men’s team made netizens angry. Now that I think about it, all the anger is slightly blind, but the starting point is correct and should not be blamed. They assembled a team at the end of the world, and went to Baidu Post Bar to explode, human flesh DDOS attack.

However, Baidu Post Bar directly banned the jihad-related post bar, revoked the related bar owners and sealed the ID, but failed to give reasonable guidance and persuasion to the angry netizens at that time. In the end, this self-proclaimed best technology company in China was attacked by netizens, and a large number of post bars collapsed, asking for it.

This biased behavior exposed the ambiguity of Baidu’s management in the value orientation, and then some wonderful events, such as selling post bars, sending advertisements indiscriminately and setting KPI for bar owners recently, came down in one continuous line with the spiritual core of this incident to some extent, and they also suffered consequences.

Post bar used to be different.

Both Chen Yizhou and Yu Jun believe that the community can provide enough content, and now this function is replaced by two micro-terminals. At that time, Jun Yu was faced with the dilemma that Baidu’s search performance was strong enough but there were not so many things for it to search.

Jun Yu said: "This inspiration comes from the fact that many people are searching for the same keyword when I search the log. I think if these people with common interests get together and exchange their common interests, wouldn’t they contribute more information that is not available on the webpage?"

In 2005, because of this feature, with the popularity of Super Girl, Post Bar became a gathering place of fan culture in China. After the Korean Wave hit, Post Bar became a distribution center for fans’ support groups, rather than registered users of local Korean star websites. This is the right time.

With the rapid development of Baidu search, a considerable part of the pain points of this BBS product, such as poor communication timeliness and difficult content screening, have been fully solved. This is the right place.

In the era when everyone watches news through search engines, people find that the content uploaded to the post bar will have a high weight, so good content is naturally diverted to the post bar by Baidu traffic plus blocked carrots and sticks, but it is helpless. In addition to self-made by netizens, there are also copyright content grabbed from online websites such as the starting point and major publishing houses, which has caused a lot of lawsuits.

When Mr Cang was still in the sea, Post Bar was a wholesale center where pornography and gambling were rampant. These seed wholesale centers are nsfw of reddit made in China, but this is China.

Almost when Xin Wang was arrested, Baidu Audio and Video, which was once the target with him, was hastily removed from the shelves, which directly affected the work of the workers who posted the code. However, at that time, Post Bar had become the largest BBS in China with 1 billion registered users. Kick down the bridge after crossing the river, Post Bar began to focus on cleaning up pornographic related post bars, and Baidu main station also banned a number of pornographic websites. Nowadays, the work of satisfying the people’s "love and hear" has been handed over to short videos and major live broadcast platforms, such as the female anchor event of eel broadcast live by a pepper yesterday. It’s just that their 1 billion registered users don’t know where they are, and the supervision stick has already been waved.

Another example of Post Bar is 4chan, which is known as "Internet Asshole". The difference is that one is behind the ass and the other is in front of the ass. Baidu Li Yiba founded diaosi, a religion. Yes, it means literally.

Baidu Graphics Bar founded the same-sex dating title of Kaba Gay, and quickly turned it into a powerful commercial force, becoming the guest of honor that Huang Renxun of NVIDIA will invite every time he gives a speech. This is many years earlier than Lei Jun, who bragged about Xiaomi’s fan economy all day.

However, when Lei Jun was at the lowest ebb of Jinshan, he did more than 300 posts every day, or he told it himself many years later. This is the wisdom of the witnesses, Huawei can’t learn it, so their pollen will inevitably become a pile of dust, and they have to rely on channel advertising to do business.

The success of Baidu Post Bar has a good time and place, and the core is human harmony.Jun Yu, the father of Post Bar, gave two catch-ups when designing Post Bar:

One is that creating value for users is the origin of all products.

Jun Yu did a good job on this one. It can be said that in the wap era, Post Bar is the best community that mobile phones can visit, and there is no one. Rich in functions, simple in page, fast in loading and very traffic-saving. Jun Yu was as restrained as Zhang Xiaolong at that time. For example, you can set it so that others can’t pay attention to you. In the face of the era of fan economy, this function is the continuation of Internet idealism and the last conscience of Post Bar.

The second is: the essence of product design is the distribution of benefits.

After Jun Yu left, it’s obvious to all what the Post Bar looks like. Needless to say. In fact, no matter whether it’s Chen Yizhou, Jun Yu, Zhang Xiaolong or Tang Yan, community products or even social products are just a tool. No one replaces anyone, but one thing remains the same, that is, they are just a tool to get customers on a big business model.

After having users, it is the right way to divert to the real money-making business, such as games, such as live broadcast, and the burgeoning data business.

You can add some advertisements appropriately, but a good product manager will definitely resist the impulse of realizing advertisements, because whether it is a large Banner or an open-screen advertisement, or a time stream advertisement born on the mobile side, no matter how scientific the advertising words are and how indifferent the pictures are, it is a kind of interference for users. Some people will say that it is not that users don’t like advertisements, but that the advertisements must meet their own needs. This is a false proposition.

According to the scene theory, the reason why I went to the post bar was to read the post, and the reason why I used WeChat was to communicate. I will go to e-commerce to buy things, play games and download TGA. Cooking in the bedroom and taking a shit in the kitchen are the natural incentives for users to dislike advertisements, because this scene can’t stand anywhere.

In other words, as long as there is a fly circling around you, it looks like a canary and it is still a fly, which will not change. There is always a critical value for users’ tolerance for advertisements, but they won’t tell you, they will only angrily delete it.

Tencent understands this very well. Tencent’s total revenue last year was more than 150 billion, and WeChat’s effect advertising revenue was only 5.168 billion.

Netease is half-understood. Its Netease cloud music is clean and tidy, which has won a large group of young artists and has become Ding Lei’s own mobile Internet ticket. On the other hand, his free mailbox is full of his own advertisements, but it is surpassed by QQ mailbox. But from the income model, his e-commerce and games are still growing strongly, so Ding Sanshi lives comfortably.

Separating the user system from the profit system is the way for platform companies to survive. Personally, I think this is a more reasonable income model. Although Weibo, who inserts blog posts in advertisements, and today’s headlines with advertisements between articles can also make money, it is also very desperate to have to drink the northwest wind without advertisements because of its single business.

Baidu is different. It has hundreds of products and services, but online advertising is still the main source of income. For Baidu, advertising revenue is the curse of resources. For Post Bar, advertising is a poison that you know you can’t do it.

Since the commercialization of Post Bar was started, basically no step has gone smoothly. The most fundamental problem is that Baidu has not figured out its position.

Post bar is not a portal. The secondary pages of the portal are sold casually, and users will not care. Because its technology and content come from the portal, at best, the content of the portal is getting worse. Just go.Post Bar is different, its value is the content, relationship chain and interest collection provided by bar owners and netizens, not the post bar template provided by Baidu.

In fact, it is precisely because Baidu provides the service of Post Bar that users will come to camp. In other words, services and users are exchanged at equal value, and what content users produce has nothing to do with who has established contact with the service provider. If the platform wants to share the benefits with users, especially bar owners, it can talk about authorization and sharing. If it doesn’t agree with each other, revoking bar owners is a hooligan act and a robbery.

Second, it is not impossible to sell the post bar. The key is who owns the property right. If it is a community officially operated by Post Bar, it can be commercialized as much as it wants, and if it doesn’t like it, it will never lead to a public relations incident. A series of marketing events that look like funny expressions at the beginning of the year, one of which is that users can no longer send this expression for a few days. But users didn’t complain, because the right to interpret this expression belongs to Baidu. However, users have created their own stickers and invested a lot of energy, manpower and even financial resources. In principle, Baidu cannot dispose of them at will.

If it weren’t for the Wei Zexi incident, Post Bar might go further and further on the road of "selling and selling". Baidu also realized that the product realization ability of BBS form is not strong, so Post Bar opened a long road of headless fly revision. When I saw the headline fire, I changed it to the headline. When I saw the live broadcast fire, I saw the live broadcast. What other services are there in the same city? Voice chat rooms, expression shops, and "one hair" and "drifting bottles" with strong moon throwing.

Post Bar is possessed by WeChat, Momo, 58 City and Sina Weibo at the moment, but it has nothing to do with BBS.

To say the least, how much can these new functions promote its main business? No, even the basic diversion ability and distribution ability have been lost. To be a news client, there is no hematopoietic capacity and timeliness. bar owners, originally a kol, can provide a steady stream of content, but Baidu has to cancel them and bother to make a hundred names. The merchants who bought it advertised a lot, and the user experience was extremely poor. Finally, they forced their friends to find another way out. After all, it didn’t take long to build a group on QQ, and it would take less than a minute if they had the spare capacity to build a forum on Sohu Express Station.It’s unheard of that the cost of getting customers is so expensive now, and it’s necessary to catch people in a different way by posting them.

The weak interactivity of BBS has existed since its birth 30 years ago, but Post Bar has to abruptly turn it into a social application.

The advantage of BBS is that it can precipitate the content, but the post bar has inserted countless advertisements in the content, which has turned the user’s content consumption into content suffering.

The little yellow chicken in Douban is to enliven the atmosphere, because it is cute and looks like Kawaii. Post Bar has built a robot with Li Yanhong’s version, and I don’t know what to do.

At the beginning of Jun Yu’s creation of Post Bar, the two catch-up rules were all forgotten by his successors, and he didn’t make any money and offended the users. It was not until this year that Baidu announced the establishment of a new assessment standard for bar owners that it finally angered the last batch of adherents. ACGDOG sent a message to complain about the evil of posting it. Title book: "Dear Post Bar User, I am your ancestor".

After the chicken flies and the dog jumps, we finally find that Chinese business BBS has come to an end. But has BBS disappeared? Not necessarily.

Drawer Network ranks 11th in the latest ranking of Chinese forums. It has accumulated a considerable number of users by relying on reddit-like alternative information, what is worth buying and Dragon Loan, and has a good development momentum. Tiexue Community ranks 8th, and has been listed on the New Third Board since 2015. Reddit and 4chan are alive and well, especially the latter. 4chan and 2chan merged to become the largest ACGN BBS in the world, and they have no rivals on the road of acting as Internet asshole. ZREONET, a decentralized network based on P2P technology, was just established last year, and the first edition provided BBS function.

In the final analysis, communication is to share each other’s information and feelings. Either add information, or let both sides experience some kind of emotion.

As long as human beings are born lonely, BBS will exist forever.

Ghost in the shell, ghost out of the shell, what an electronic bulletin board can solve, you don’t have to plug the data cable into the back of your head.