Produced by Radar Finance and | Zhang Kaijing, editor| deep sea
Douban's history may never have been rectified so frequently as it is now.
On March 29, Douban announced that due to business adjustments, the private group will be fully deactivated on April 18, and the private group function will be officially stopped on June 30. Prior to this, the group leader can submit a request to convert the private group to the public group.
It is understood that a private group is a group that can only be joined by accepting the invitation of the group member, and can never become public after creation. Radar Financial Test found that at present, after Douban applied to create a group, there is no option to create a private group.
Also in March, the Cyberspace Administration of Beijing sent a work supervision group to Douban to supervise rectification and disband 15 douban problem groups; further back, in 2021, Douban was fined more than 10 million yuan by the Cyberspace Administration of China for repeatedly appearing information prohibited by laws and regulations, of which in December alone, Douban was repeatedly named for collecting personal information beyond the scope and commenting ahead.
Radar Finance has learned that Douban is highly concerned by regulators and is related to its internal entertainment group. Today, this once small community in a quiet corner once evolved into a battlefield where fanatical fans tore at each other and provoked confrontations, while the founders of "rule by doing nothing" Abei and Douban officials did not take effective control measures.
Nowadays, under the action of external forces, abandoning private groups, where will the future of Douban go?
What is the concept of a private group?
According to the latest announcement released by Douban, the company has created an entrance for the offline private group on March 28, and the public group no longer supports the transfer of privacy.
From March 29 to April 18, Douban will open a private group to open a public channel, the group leader can send email to the designated mailbox to apply; on April 18, the private group will be all deactivated (team members can only browse the history discussion); on June 30, the private group function officially stopped service (the group history discussion is all turned to only their own visible, the group members can only view the group information), and no longer accept private transfer public email applications.
Radar Finance noted that after the news came out, the relevant topics immediately rushed to weibo hot search. Some netizens shouted "Putian Tongqing", and some netizens lamented that the measure was somewhat "one size fits all".
Why did Douban's handling of private groups arouse such a big response?
In fact, at first, the Douban group was just the product of the company's founder Abei's "unintentional willow insertion" in 2005, which was originally a marginal product of a community ecology. At that time, Internet forums such as Tianya, Maopu, and Tieba were very hot, and Ah Bei naturally wanted to set up a gathering place for like-minded Douban users.
In March of that year, Abei created a group called "Python Programming", which was also the first group in the history of Douban. The next day, the science student, who loves to read, set up the "Yuhua Readers" group, and his only requirement for this group is to "talk about the topic, please remain rational and restrained, and abide by basic Internet etiquette and human ethics!" ”
At that time, netizens who liked entertainment gossip were also concentrated in the Tianya forum with lower threshold and higher openness. The utopia located in literary and artistic youth was the first to form a scale on Douban, and it was still a book and video group that became active; but with the passage of time, forums such as Tianya and Cat Flutter have gradually declined, and netizens who love gossip have gradually shifted their positions to Douban.
It is worth mentioning that from the day of its birth, the Douban group has allowed and encouraged the group leader to set a threshold, which can be knowledge reserves, codes of conduct, or values, in order to protect and maintain the safe distance between the group and the outside world.
From this, the difference between public groups and private groups has been derived. Qin Lan (pseudonym), who registered as a Douban user in 2016 and has been using it so far, told Radar Finance that the Douban group has a variety of states.
"Public is to be able to see; temporary suspension is to prohibit posting and replying; snow storage I remember can be searched, but can not go in; private is that public channels can not even search, only group members can see." 」
Take douban's well-known private group "We represent the moon to eliminate ill-intentioned musicians" as an example, the current number of this group is nearly 500,000, of which the revelations are endless, once became an important birthplace of entertainment headlines.
"This group has long been very early on, and only the members of the group can invite and then manage the review, so the management authority is very large." After putting people in, you must follow the rules of group speaking, otherwise you will be kicked at any time. Qin Lan said.
From this perspective, the openness or privacy of the group is not static. Another Douban user said that joining during the open period of the group is also known as "buying a house", and the so-called "house" in which group is the meaning of joining the group, because the later group may lock the group and tighten the review.
Spoiled intimate groups
At first, the private group was established for protection, and the atmosphere within the group was peaceful. "The earliest people are talking about gossip, not talking about gossip with emotion," a user who joined the predecessor of the Douban Goose group in 2012 said in an interview. However, with the increasingly large user group in Douban, the temperament of the private group has gradually changed.
In 2014, internal entertainment entered the "traffic era", and with the popularity of stars such as Li Yifeng, EXO, TFBOYS, yang yang and so on, the group of traffic fans also came into being. In order to maintain the reputation of idols, they will organize large-scale "centralized output" and then occupy the high ground of public opinion.
In the same year, because of the cooperation with the Douban Office activities, the eight groups (the predecessor of the goose group "Bagua is coming") opened the door of the group, and as a result, they were slaughtered by the fans of the "four top streams", and the administrator was forced to set the names of several traffic stars as prohibited words. In 2015, Li Yifeng also sued Douban.com and The Eight Groups for violating the right to reputation.
This is just the beginning. In 2018, the talent show "Idol Trainee" brought a wave of several years of drafts, and the Douban group also poured in more "new immigrants". Since then, the audience of each talent show has been keen to build a group on Douban, which has brought raw traffic to Douban and completely changed the portrait of platform users.
In 2012, according to iResearch survey data, Douban accounted for 52.4% of men, slightly more than women; first- and second-tier cities accounted for 70%, 39.64% of people under 24 years old, 38.3% and 16.9% of people aged 24 to 30 and 31 to 35 years old, respectively.
Today, Analysys Qianfan data shows that Douban has become a platform dominated by female users, and the proportion of male users has dropped to 36.71%; not only that, Douban users have a sinking trend, with users in first-tier cities, new first-tier cities, and second-tier cities accounting for a total of 66.36%; in addition, people under 24 years old account for 29.30%, and people aged 24 to 30 and 31 to 35 years old account for 24.81% and 25.64% respectively.
In addition to changing the user structure, new immigrants have also disrupted the long-lasting book and video scoring system, and they can give five or one-star extreme ratings at any time, even if they have not read it at all.
What is more noteworthy is that when the emotionally dominant, binary thinking mode is combined with a private, closed group, the users in the group have been unconsciously wrapped in an information cocoon woven by homogeneous information, and for them, the important thing is no longer the truth, but the search for identity.
In 2018, the gossip came to the group to announce the closure, and the members then moved to the Douban Goose Group en masse, but due to the loose management of the group and the "unlimited autonomy" given to the group by the Douban official, the insults and suspicions of fans in the group on various stars intensified, resulting in the Goose Group also experiencing temporary suspension and snow hiding.
After the goose group was rectified, other entertainment groups continued to rise, but the huge influence of the goose group was difficult to shake. On idle fish, the "house" of the goose group can even be sold for thousands of yuan.
In this context, many celebrities, including Zhao Lusi, Jing Bairan, Zhang Yixing, etc., have sued the main body of Douban Company in court on the grounds of online infringement liability disputes.
Entertainment groups are just one part of the private group. A zhihu user revealed that he had been exposed to an extreme group of people and suffered a great mental shock. Behind the group is a tightly organized group that has even carried out human flesh and offline violence against netizens who oppose them.
"I have reported the speeches of those groups of extreme thought gathering places", Qin Lan said, there are thousands to tens of thousands of people in this kind of group, of which the scale of speech is larger, and he even reported it with several netizens he knew online, but in the end Douban did not deal with it.
In Qin Lan's view, this part of the group is actually an "important user" of the platform due to its high activity.
"Personal feeling, Tieba posting is the need for continuous follow-up, precipitation a week may have hundreds of thousands of replies; know better, but also relatively long; but Douban as long as the user said, less than half an hour post can get up, although closed, but get feedback time is much faster than Zhihu and Tieba bar. If there is a response, you can get hundreds of likes in about ten minutes, and thousands of more in a day. But even if it is a hot post, it will almost sink in three days. ”
However, for these situations, the low-key Abeibei rarely responds in public. Many Douban users, including Qin Lan, feel that the management is a bit too conniving, "These extreme traffic has caused a reaction to Douban." ”
Repeated regulatory penalties
The chaos of Douban has also aroused the attention of regulatory authorities.
From January to November 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China instructed the Cyberspace Administration of Beijing to impose 20 disposal penalties on Douban, and repeatedly imposed a fine of 500,000 yuan on the top grid, with a total of 9 million yuan in fines.
On December 1, the person in charge of the Cyberspace Administration of China again interviewed the main responsible person and editor-in-chief of Douban, and ordered Douban and its accounts to repeatedly appear information that was prohibited from being published or transmitted by laws and regulations, and ordered them to immediately rectify and seriously deal with the relevant responsible persons. The Cyberspace Administration of Beijing also fined Beijing Douwang Technology Co., Ltd., the operator of Douban. So far, the fines imposed on Douban in 2021 have exceeded 10 million yuan.
From 0:00 on December 2, 2021 to 0:00 on December 17, 2021, Douban temporarily suspended the use of the "group" reply function and the content update of the group's "selected" channel.
On March 15, 2022, CCTV News reported that in response to the serious network chaos that currently exists on Douban, the Internet information department has sent a supervision team to station, and as of now, Douban is still in a state of removal from some app stores.
In addition, Douban launched the "Qinglang· In the special action of 'chaos rectification' in the rice circle, a lot of effort has also been made.
For example, three months after the start of the action, Douban deleted 14665 illegal and bad information on the platform, banned a total of 594 accounts, disbanded 3 problem groups, and the goose group was deactivated for rectification for two months; according to incomplete statistics of a moment of business, since 2022, Douban has handled and deleted 396777 illegal and bad information under the guidance of various guidelines; 7962 illegal accounts have been banned and closed; 306 problem groups have been shut down; and 31 problem groups have been dissolved.
Can the "niche" of Douban still be maintained?
In the eyes of industry insiders, as long as Abei is still at the helm of Douban, the answer to this question may be yes.
Douban has always been regarded as an "atypical Internet company" by the outside world. In the 17 years since its establishment, the company has not only been very restrained in commercialization, but also has almost never "rubbed" any outlet, and has always been partial to the graphic content of youth culture.
This led to the company missing out on too many opportunities.
As reported later, around 2012 and 2013, when talking about business in a café, Abei once told a former Douban product department about an idea of using algorithms to output content, "a bit like today's headlines." But unfortunately, this idea "only flashed in Ah Bei's mind."
For another example, Douban has "I love cosmetics", "does this dress look good" and other grass and sharing groups, which have every opportunity to make a small red book; Douban's kitchen group has become an independent App, the founder is still a former employee of Douban; Douban's film team has also rushed the movie ticket market share to the second place in the market with a scale of 20 or 30 people, stepping on the cat's eye, but Abei stopped this business on the grounds of "not making money".
In fact, these outlets may even be missed by Abei "actively". There was a multinational PE with a large asset scale who asked Abei friend to introduce Abei and hoped to invest in Douban and make the company larger. But Abei is "obviously not interested."
Douban also has advertising marketing, content monetization, e-commerce and other businesses, but a former Douban employee believes that the premise of the company's operation of these is that they must meet the "way Ah Bei wants".
Compared with the industry, Douban's advertising scheme is very restrained. Its daily open screen only opens 1/4 of the traffic to advertisers. Users can also find that the same page usually stays only one advertisement. The infographic advertisement of the APP port generally has only one advertisement on the same page.
In terms of content payment, official data shows that after the first anniversary of the launch of Douban Time, the revenue of all content payment products reached 10 million. However, since the beginning of 2019, content payment has gradually receded, and in the recently launched courses, there are not many comments on 10, and there is no longer a "grand scene" that has been commented on by hundreds of times before.
In terms of e-commerce, douban sells goods limited to small commodities such as calendars, favorites, and ornaments, and in the view of an industry insider, this part of the business can only be regarded as a commercial supplement.
Perhaps it is also Abei's personality that makes Douban form a highly autonomous community culture.
However, now Douban has reached a crossroads. Under the pressure of supervision, the company wants to avoid the frequent occurrence of negative public opinion, it is necessary to strengthen the review of the community, and invest more costs for this, B station, vibrato, Zhihu and other app with community nature, are equipped with a large number of auditors. But the rapid expansion of manpower and investment in labor-intensive industries is obviously not the usual style of Abei.
Industry insiders believe that Douban has stood at a crossroads, and how to balance user autonomy and content moderation will determine the future development of Douban.
Note: This article is the original of Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.