The Netease Forum is closed, how long can Tianya last? Is there really no chance for traditional BBS?
Text/Nan Shu 123
In the age when the Internet was just emerging, BBS was an important source of entertainment and information. With the rise of the mobile Internet, traditional PC products have gradually declined, and many products cannot escape the end of get out of class.
Netease Forum announced yesterday that it will shut down PC forums other than real estate and home furnishing at 0:00 on October 19. Before the shutdown, NetEase Forum provided users with a one-click package and download service; after expiration, user data will no longer be retained.
According to data, the NetEase community was established in 1997. Two years later, the NetEase Forum was established in 1999, which has a history of more than ten years.
The industry once commented that among the three major portals of the year, Sina was good at news, Sohu was good at search, and NetEase was good at community. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the first generation of netizens in China grew up with the NetEase community. However, the NetEase community was officially closed in 2012, and only the NetEase Forum remained until next month.
In fact, in addition to the soon-to-be-closed NetEase forum, Tianya, Maopu, Xici Hutong...
When it comes to forums, you must not forget Tianya and Maopu, which were once popular forums.
Taking Tianya as an example, the glory of the past is still vivid in my eyes. In 2014, Xiao Lizhi, a contributing author of Huxiu, once published the article "How is the Tianya community being forgotten step by step?" ", which details the prosperity and decline of the Tianya community:
Tianya Community was established in 1999.
In 2004, Sina and Sohu wanted to acquire Tianya, but Tianya community refused to take over and only accepted shares. The two sides broke up unhappily.
In 2005, with the rise of the concept of blog and WEB2.0, Tianya followed up with Tianya Blog and received investment from IDG and Zero2IPO.
In 2006, Tianya received joint investment from Lenovo, Google and Jiang Nanchun.
So far, the Tianya community has received a lot of funds and Google's traffic support, and has cooperated to create two products, Come and Ask. Tianya community has entered a period of rapid development, bringing in a large number of users, and with high-quality users and content, Concern for the people's livelihood has become a pole of Chinese public opinion.
There was a popular saying at that time: the topic of the whole people, made in the end of the world.
"Sun Zhigang Case", "Shanxi Black Brick Kiln Case", "Chongqing Nail Household", "Rural Teacher Xu Benyu", "Chen Yi Selling His Body to Save His Mother", "Zhu Ling Case", "Zhou Zhenglong Beating the Tiger". There are also many incidents where the protagonists changed their fates due to the end of the world, such as "Sister Furong", "Sister Tianxian" and later "Pornography".
In addition to some famous events, there are also many famous people from Tianya, Mingyue who wrote "Those Things in the Ming Dynasty", Murong Xuecun, the author of "Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight", the author of "Ghost Blowing the Lantern", Tian Ba Sing, "Chengdu, Please Forget Me Tonight". Kong Ergou, author of Once Upon a Time in the Northeast: 20 Years of the Underworld, as well as countless opinion leaders, internet celebrities and social events have all become popular in the world, but this website has not been able to find its own role in it. .
But the good times didn't last long. With the increase of popularity, a large number of new users have poured in. This is a good thing. On the other hand, many users have poured in, and the quality of users is mixed, which has caused a lot of noise to the original community atmosphere and caused old users, especially elite users. great damage. However, the Tianya community did not pay enough attention and did not take countermeasures, indulging in the joy of adding new users and content. This led to the loss of old users and the rapid decline of content quality. In the end, high-quality pages such as Guantian Tea House declined rapidly, and even entertainment gossip replaced Tianya Zatan as the first section. Especially after the rise of Weibo in 2009, the decline of Tianya became more and more obvious.
When Google withdrew from China in 2010 and terminated its cooperation with Tianya, Tianya's traffic dropped sharply and user growth was slow. At this time, the content of Tianya is already good, the products are far behind the Internet, and the technology is weak.
In 2014, Tianya's revenue began to show negative growth, a large number of users were diverted by Weibo and WeChat, and the product did not break through. The continuous decline has made Tianya unsustainable.
On August 26, 2015, Tianya Community was officially listed on the National Small and Medium Enterprise Board Share Transfer System (NEEQ), and there was no sign of the NEEQ listing process before.
The status quo of Maopu is not much better than Tianya. At the end of 2006, Maopu transformed into a portal and tried to sprint overseas listings, but failed. After Thousand Oaks Interactive Group acquired the school network (renren), its core position was replaced by the school network, and the development strategy was also swaying. It is reported that after 2011, Maopu’s strategy in terms of transformation and innovation was inaccurate, and users Activity dropped significantly. In addition to these two major forums, the original Xici Hutong, Jagged Forum and other famous communities are gradually declining, like a change of times.
Why are forums declining?
This is a topic that has been discussed a long time ago. The decline of the BBS forum is not only a problem of the forum itself, but also affected by external factors such as mobile social networking.
In the article on Tianya cited above, the author has summed up 14 reasons why Tianya is declining, users are king, traffic, products, environment, technology, etc., which are also of reference significance for the decline of the entire forum field.
And Baidu Baijia once summed up the decline of the forum as two reasons: internal and external:
Internal factors: In terms of information acquisition and communication, users cannot meet the requirements of immediacy, so users turn to mobile social media; in terms of operation, in addition to editing and publishing news, moderators need to spend a long time every day to maintain, such as deleting advertisements Posts, introducing fresh content to the forum, interacting with users, etc., but there is no clear performance; in terms of user experience, the community operation is not good, unable to meet the increasing user experience needs; due to various reasons, the user stickiness of BBS forums decline, the interactivity is getting worse and worse, causing its users to churn. According to the "36th China Internet Development Statistical Report" released by CNNIC, the number of users of the BBS forum is 12,007, and the utilization rate of the BBS forum has dropped by 7% in half a year.
External factors: With the rapid development of new media and self-media, especially the rise of Weibo and WeChat, it has attracted a large number of netizens, and the popularity of smartphones has changed people’s social and reading habits. The increasing dependence on the Internet, the rapid spread of mobile social networking, the popularity of the forum has been greatly reduced.
However, the forum is not completely without opportunities...
The traditional form of BBS shines in two areas. One is vertical forums focusing on market segments, represented by Hupu and Autohome, and the other is the back garden of commercial brands, with emerging Internet companies such as Xiaomi and Meizu. to represent. In general, the traditional BBS is gone, and it is difficult to become the mainstream of the times.
Concept supplement: What is the difference between a community and a forum?
Forums, communities, and post bars are, in the final analysis, a place for dissemination of online speech, bringing together people of the same type or with the same hobbies. Now, there is a form that can also gather these people with the same hobbies. Its name is called community, and it has various forms, such as QQ group, WeChat group, SNS, forum, public account, Weibo, WeChat or QQ interest tribe, etc. Become the survival platform of the community. So how is it different from a forum?
Bailue.com has summarized its concept:
From a structural point of view, the forum community is not a community, but a cluster platform of spontaneous communities. Countless spontaneous communities are attached to the platform of the forum community and use the platform of the forum community to exchange and share content.
Community members do not depend on the same fixed community platform, they can be independent individuals scattered in various platforms, connected by the same belief unity, and then cross-interact back and forth between various community tools form a loose-knit community.
Community and community have always been interdependent, but with the increasing diversity of social tools, community has begun to move from an independent community to the entire Internet, from a community under a community to a community. community. In the past, communities were formed on independent community platforms, with the help of the platform’s influence to find like-minded friends, and to form spontaneous communities.
According to the financial report released by Weibo in the third quarter of 2015, the daily active users of Weibo have exceeded 100 million, and the overall number and quality of Weibo users are showing a steady increase. The user value of the Zhihu Q&A community with only more than 20 million users cannot be underestimated. In recent years, countless great KOLs have also been born on Zhihu. In addition to Weibo, Zhihu, etc., Tieba, Momo, Douban, Tianya, and Maopu all have the soil for community users to gather.
This article was published by Nanshu 123 authorized by Huxiu.com and edited by Huxiu.com. Reprinting this article requires the author's consent, and please attach the source (Tiger Sniffing Network) and the link to this page. Original link https://www.huxiu.com/article/164458.html