Can Douban, which is the center of public opinion, continue to become a "utopia" in the hearts of users?

Image source: Oriental IC

"Douban does not target any specific group of people, and strives to include Baiwei. Whether you are tall, fat, or thin, you can help you find like-minded people through what you love, and then find more good things through them. ”

This is the platform that Douban founder ABei (real name Yang Bo) hopes to build, and it is also what Douban users have hoped for in the past seventeen years.

Here, a group of literary and artistic young people are keen to discuss and rate books and videos, while another group of people gather in different Douban groups to talk about the gossip, food, hobbies and lifestyles that they are interested in.

Different groups coexist on a platform where there are only 10 million people alive this month, and this is their spiritual corner and their "utopia".

However, in the past two years, Douban has encountered storms such as banning groups, being interviewed for rectification, and being fined and removed from the shelves, and has recently been named by the regulatory authorities due to network chaos and untimely complaint handling.

Can Douban, which is frequently at the center of public opinion due to negative public opinion, continue to become a "utopia" in the hearts of users?

"Highly free" Douban

All along, Douban has been a magical existence in the Internet era.

Unlike other platforms, the development of Douban has always been slow. In the first year of its establishment, Douban was only a person, Abei, who was both a founder, a programmer, and a content producer of the platform.

The next year, Douban ushered in the addition of the second employee. By the fourth year, that number had become 40.

In the same year, Douban accumulated 3.3 million registered users, with more than 600 million monthly hits and 30 million monthly visitors. At the same time, the platform has also gained the favor of capital and has received two rounds of financing.

In China, it is even difficult to find a product that is benchmarked with Douban, so that the outside world has such a rich and diverse definition of it.

It is a tool application that can provide scoring information about books, movies, music and other works; it can also be a life sharing platform where users share their interests and hobbies; at the same time, Douban is also a social platform, providing services such as group discussions and offline activities in the same city, so that like-minded people can talk and make friends.

"Douban is losing its center of public attention in the process of diversification. That's good, and we're wholeheartedly contributing. ”

Abei wrote on his homepage that the first use of Douban is to help you discover the unknown. This is a challenging thing: Douban, which is completely free of squares, limits our vision to the circle interests of individuals and friends, and a square shared by all is becoming useless.

People-centered Douban provides users with a decentralized, relatively closed and fair platform for speaking. Here, everyone speaks freely, expresses their opinions, and presents themselves.

The existence of private groups gives users a high degree of freedom to choose their own friends, become the group leader and operate the community, and form a unique user ecology with independent groups.

A group where traffic and controversy coexist

However, the decentralized distribution mechanism and light operation management, although giving users a high degree of freedom, the growing traffic and the mixed crowd of people, so that user speech gradually becomes unfettered.

According to official statistics, from January to November 2021, Douban has accumulated 20 disposal penalties, and has been fined 500,000 yuan by the Cyberspace Administration of China for many times, with a cumulative amount of 9 million.

In December of the same year, due to the problem of collecting personal information beyond the scope and not rectifying it as required, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology removed the Douban App from the app store, and to this day, xiaomi huawei and other app stores are still on the shelves.

This year, the interviews continue. The Cyberspace Administration of Beijing directly dispatched a work supervision team to Douban to supervise and rectify its serious network chaos.

At the end of April, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology mentioned in the notice on the quality of telecommunications services in the first quarter of 2022 that the timeliness rate of complaint handling by 10 enterprises such as Douban did not meet the 95% target requirement, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has urged relevant enterprises to improve and improve.

A series of interview penalties forced Douban to change. According to the reporter's understanding, in the past two years, Douban has issued more than ten penalty announcements to further strengthen the special action of "rice circle" chaos control, shutting down or disbanding more than 100 problem groups, including the Douban Goose Group with the largest traffic and emma garden group.

The remaining groups, on the other hand, face stricter scrutiny, limit the number of posts, and prohibit users from initiating discussions about sensitive topics. "After playing a long paragraph, I found that there were forbidden words, I couldn't find which one, and over time, I didn't post a message." User Kobayashi said.

Douban's drastic rectification quickly caused dissatisfaction among users. Many users believe that the platform ignored the user experience in the process of cleaning, did not take a fair screening of the group, and only did "subtraction" but did not consider the user, which seemed to run counter to the original intention of Douban.

The increasing vitality of the group, the strict restriction of user speech, and the increasingly serious differences between users and the platform have all exacerbated the risk of Douban user loss.

A number of senior users told reporters that from the previous habitual browsing times a day, to now many days do not open. "Happy Hometown (referring to the Douban group) is gone, and I have no need to stay in Douban."

Douban station on the intersection

In the eyes of industry insiders, the withering of the Douban group will not really affect the platform ecology, and the book and audio scoring system is still the core competitiveness of Douban.

However, as the scoring tool that has once been the most vocal inside and outside the industry, it has also fallen into many controversies in recent years.

Many media have reported on the brushing phenomenon of Douban. The price of a "package display short review" is 15 yuan, a package shows a long review (drama review) price is 20 yuan, a "like / useful" price is 1 yuan, the price of "report" is 3 yuan, voting, group posting, scoring, scoring, rating maintenance and other situations need to be specifically negotiated.

In December 2021, CCTV released a report entitled "Film and Television Drama Encounters "Advanced Comments" and "Water Army" Control Comments disrupt the market", saying that two popular dramas have successively appeared in Douban with the absurd phenomenon of "advanced reviews".

The fate of the official media made Douban respond rarely. Douban said that there has never been, and will not be, any cooperation related to ratings. At the same time, Douban apologized that there are still deficiencies and room for improvement in product display and external communication.

However, chaos still exists, and over time, the fairness of the Douban score continues to be questioned by the outside world.

What Douban relies on for survival is the scoring system. The Douban group brings traffic and heat to the platform. Today, both sides have problems.

At the same time, Douban's restrained and slow commercialization process also restricts the development of the platform. Some Douban insiders said that like most communities, Douban relies on advertising to monetize, and the brand is more.

"The platform can be profitable, it does not buy much, it does not do money-burning business, cash flow should still be able to maintain." Obviously, Abei does not do Douban to monetize.

Some people believe that the conservative attitude towards commercialization and the maintenance of niche circles are the root of Douban's deep user cohesion, which is also an extremely precious attitude in the impetuous Internet environment.

Whether it is the road of content ecological governance or commercialization, Douban still has a long way to go. Nowadays, Douban has stood at a crossroads, and whether it can maintain its own rhythm in the future and continue to become a "utopia" in the hearts of a group of people can only be answered by time.