If you are a person who is interested in music, reading, film and television, then it is estimated that you must have heard the name of Douban, as one of the earliest interest communities in China. Douban was founded in 2005, originally as a book audio-visual website is well known by netizens, on Douban netizens can easily find a book, a work of the introduction and netizen evaluation, with the increase of website users, Douban has gradually become the main gathering area for book and audio enthusiasts.
In order to meet the social needs of users, Douban added "group" and "interest" and other social functions at the beginning of its establishment, after 17 years of development, today's Douban is no longer a simple book, video and audio social networking site, but also a set of social, scoring, tasting and other functions in one of the platform.
Compared with the beginning of its establishment, today's Douban has significantly expanded in function and business scope, but the community atmosphere has been developing in a bad direction, so that in the past two years, there is always a Douban figure in the list of network platform remediation. Even after many rectifications and app removals, the rectification effect is still not ideal, and the fundamental group public opinion guidance problem still cannot be solved.
Douban itself for its own traffic pillar of the major groups is also a hundred maintenance, only banned a number of users and serious violations of the group, such as goose group and other large traffic groups in the end of the "snow" period have been retained, facts have proved that Douban's repeated rectification has not achieved good results.
On March 15, the supervision group of the Cyberspace Administration of China announced that it would enter Douban and take further measures against the problems that still existed after Douban's repeated rectifications, on March 22, Douban announced the dissolution of 15 problem groups, and on March 29, Douban issued an announcement that it would disable the function of private groups.
So far, Douban has made the maximum cut to the group function, not only shutting down a large number of popular groups, but also directly disabling the private group function. Interestingly, Douban's rectification plan has won the support of most netizens, and more netizens said that the group function should be completely disabled, making Douban a pure audio-visual book review website.
Why do netizens have such an attitude towards the closure of Douban's private group?
Why has the Douban group become the target of public criticism?
In the early days of Douban's development, thanks to the contributions of netizens, Douban quickly became the most complete website for domestic audio and video books, and even to this day, some other websites that are not included in the video book works can still only find relevant introductions and explanations on Douban. For lovers of audio-visual books, the early Douban is undoubtedly a "paradise" for enthusiasts to communicate, where you can communicate with netizens from all over the country, from different backgrounds but have common hobbies, and understand the good works that you don't know.
It can be said that the earliest batch of audio and video book lovers have achieved Douban, and at the same time, Douban has become one of the earliest knowledge Q&A communities in China, and many netizens will leave their own questions when reading books and watching movies in Douban, and then communicate with other netizens. The strong atmosphere of learning and discussion made the founder of Zhihu think of Douban for the first time when distributing the community invitation code.
In addition to the audio and video library, the most popular thing about Douban is the group function, and one interest group has become a space for netizens to communicate, discuss and ask questions, and everyone can think of the group as a post with more relaxed creation conditions and more relaxed management.
The management of the group is only the responsibility of the group leader, the speech in the group does not need to be reviewed, only need to abide by the group rules, the relaxed discussion environment is originally set so that users can speak freely, and some of the groups have gradually become the soil for the incubation of extreme ideas.
As early as ten years ago, when the public knowledge was still very common, Douban was already one of the base camps of public knowledge, the platform was full of a large number of extreme liberal ideas, and even some red works would be indiscriminately low scored by these users, smeared and added some wrong labels, I believe that many old Douban users should remember this vividly.
With the attention paid to Internet management and public opinion guidance in China, Douban also began to rectify non-compliant content and speech under the pressure of relevant departments, and standardized and sorted out the comments and label areas of works. After many efforts, the "cow ghost snake god" in Douban was finally less, but it did not disappear, but it was transferred to a deeper hidden private group.
The group in Douban is divided into two categories, one is a public group, any user can browse, but only group members can leave messages and posts, and the other is a private group, only invited users to use, the speeches in the group will not be public, only members can view. The representatives of the open group are the Douban Goose Group and the Melon Group, while the private group is numerous, and many groups that walk extreme ideas are hidden in the private group.
For example, Xiao Lei once met some private groups exposed by netizens, a private group called Auntie Xue, the members of the group all agreed with the arguments of a scholar of extreme reverse nationalism, and often discussed the "inferiority" of Chinese in the group, believing that only under the leadership of the Caucasians can China be revived (how xx is this remark, don't need Xiao Lei to say more? ）。
In addition, there are not a few private groups that promote extreme feminist ideas, create divisions between men and women, and even divide the country, but because they have been out of the mainstream sight, they have not attracted the attention of the state and netizens. However, secrecy does not mean that it does not exist, with the intervention and investigation of relevant departments, the problems behind the Douban group have also surfaced, and the private group has been directly banned and shut down because of serious orientation problems.
Some netizens believe that this is an infringement of freedom of speech, but Xiao Lei does not think so, the private group function is closed at the same time, Douban also opened a private transfer channel, all group leaders can apply, after the review of the group's speech history will be retained and the group status will be converted to public.
As an anonymous communication community, Xiao Lei does not think that there is any topic that cannot be discussed in a public environment, everyone does not know who you are, if it is a legal and compliant topic, why do not dare to discuss under the supervision of the network? To put it more bluntly, those who strongly oppose the private group's transfer to the public, except for some users who attach great importance to privacy, may have ulterior motives.
Synchronized with the shutdown of the private group function is the complete shutdown of some popular open groups, Douban popular entertainment groups goose group, melon group, boat group bear the brunt, these groups in Weibo and other platforms in the large-scale control and evaluation of the incident repeatedly appeared in the camera, there is a lot of evidence that the water army, control and evaluation and other behaviors often originate from the above popular entertainment groups, shut down these groups is the relevant departments to further rectify the action of the rice circle, at least Xiao Lei is supported by both hands and feet.
Although the group community is the main source of traffic and the guarantee of user activity of Douban, if it is not rectified, it will become the main cause of Douban's decline. It is not too late for a strong man to break his wrist. Little Ray doesn't want to see a website he once liked come to an end.
What will be the impact of Douban shutting down the private group function?
As one of the main traffic sources of Douban, how will Douban shut down private groups and block some popular groups affect the website? From the perspective of traffic, Douban will inevitably lose a considerable part of its traffic after this rectification, but it will not have a serious impact on its operation, but it is better to say that the cancellation of the private group will let Douban completely lay down a burden.
Xiao Lei believes that the existence of private groups does not actually bring too much traffic to Douban, and even in the traffic of the entire Douban, the proportion of private groups is minimal, but the harm brought by the existence of private groups far exceeds the value brought by its existence.
Some time ago, in the Hefei baby fall incident, netizens dug out that the murderer had exchanged extreme ideas with others in the Douban private group, and there had been a criminal declaration, but the other members of the group not only did not persuade, but instead supported and praised. Although the authenticity of this study is doubtful, according to the descriptions of some netizens who have lurked in similar private groups, similar statements are not uncommon in the "extreme feminist" group.
At least from this point of view, the cancellation of private groups is beneficial and harmless to Douban, which cannot bring much benefit, and may also produce social harm and lead to the emergence of extreme ideas, which will only drag Douban into a deeper abyss. Moreover, Douban's main traffic source open group has not been closed, although it has lost more than a dozen popular groups, but the foundation is still there, and the future is not without the possibility of recovery.
Of course, if no impact is impossible, at least in the short term, Douban's traffic will drop significantly, and the ban will make some users "flee" from Douban and move to a more secretive online community. But in the long run, if Douban still wants to gain a foothold in the Chinese Internet and maintain its position in the video and audio book website, this time the brave man broke his wrist is a must.
There are similar problems of interest communities in fact, not only Douban, Tiger Punch is also repeatedly on the list of rectification, but compared to Douban, Tiger Punch's self-rectification efforts are greater, and the commercialization of the community is more obvious. Therefore, hupu has repeatedly increased the intensity of self-regulation last year, and adopted a long-term high-pressure rectification attitude towards some communities with serious problems, and after more than a year of rectification, it has also achieved obvious results.
Tiger Punch as a sports started the forum, now is no longer a simple sports forum, the car, current politics and other sections of the popularity are very high, with the increase of users, the overall atmosphere development of the Tiger Punch Forum is also similar to Douban, gradually to the extreme development, but in the community atmosphere after the rectification has been much better.
With the results of Tiger Punch in front, Xiao Lei also hopes that Douban can regain its strength and start again, which is the biggest expectation of a former Douban user for Douban.