Difference between revisions of "Baidu Tieba"

Revision as of 16:48, 11 February 2022

Baidu Tieba

" Baidu Tieba" Site Type Bulletin Board Service Launch Date December 3, 2003 Status Active Product Line Forums created by fans covering topics including celebrities, films, comics, and books Platform Commercial Online Forum Website www.tieba.baidu.com

Baidu Tieba (Chinese: 百度贴吧; pinyin: bǎidù tiēbā; lit. 'Baidu Post Bar'), hosted by the Chinese Internet services company Baidu, is the most popular communication platform in China. Baidu Tieba was established on December 3, 2003. It is an online community, but it heavily integrates Baidu's search engine as well. Users may search for a topic of interest forum known as a "bar". If a bar doesn't exist, users may create one. Baidu Tieba accumulated over 300 million monthly active users by 2015, and the number of its registered users has reached 1.5 billion in total. By the time of June 6, 2021, Baidu Tieba has over 23 million communities. Baidu Tieba uses forums as a place for users to communicate and interact. The slogan of Baidu Tieba is "Born for your interest". The millions of bars in Baidu Tieba, mostly created by fans, cover a variety of topics, including celebrities, films, comics, and books. More than one billion posts have been published in these forums. According to the statistics of Alexa Internet, traffic to Baidu Tieba makes up more than 10% of the total traffic to Baidu properties.^[1]

History

On November 25, 2003, Baidu Tieba began its internal testing. It was released to the public on December 3, 2003.

Baidu Tieba is a completely user-driven network service. The idea of the "paste bar" came from Yu Jun, Baidu's Chief Product Designer. Almost at the same time, Baidu Tieba was combined with the Baidu search engine, to build an online communication platform, letting people communicate with those who share similar interests.

On February 25, 2005, "Barzhu Bar" became an official platform of Baidu Tieba. It was used for communication between the owners from different bars. On April 15, 2009, Tieba Cloud was integrated into Baidu Tieba.

In 2012, Baidu Tieba updated its interface, switching from a simple reply-by-sequence user interface, into a more complicated reply-in-same-floor one. Along with the new user interface, new functionalities including rankings, more expressive pictures, and allowing administrators to change the background images of Tieba, were also implemented.On May 13, 2019, topics posted in Baidu Tieba before January 1, 2017, were all hidden. A Baidu official said that the topics are hidden temporarily due to “system maintenance”. The maintenance duration lasted for about 1 month.

Baidu Tieba has become a popular comprehensive forum in China, with a large number of users actively posting, replying to each other, and interacting with each other.^[2]

In mid-2015, Baidu Tieba had already reached 1 billion registered users. What's more, the number of MAU (Monthly Active User) hit 300 million, surpassing Sina Weibo with its 212 million MAU. With strong social features, people were expecting it to become a blend of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Yet, More sophisticated communities like Douban and Zhihu began to thrive. Compared to Baidu Tieba, these new competitors were more successful in delivering high-quality content and facilitating discussion. Those users who created the legend of Baidu Tieba began to move to other platforms. Meanwhile, Baidu Tieba has become more commercialized with some Tiebas being sold and spam advertisements appearing all over the place. The result for Baidu Tieba, as people generally commented, is a great loss of active users. Its current user base is mainly comprised of netizens of a very young age or a relatively low education level. More seriously, as competitors steal away their active users and top contributors, the content on Baidu Tieba has begun to deteriorate as well. Some also blame Baidu Tieba’s downfall on its inability to transfer users to its mobile platform. Among 300 million of its claimed MAU, their mobile users account for only 16.7%(50 million users), in sharp contrast to Weibo’s where 97% of its users access the platform through mobile devices. ^[3]

Special Features

Content-oriented and Interactive

The types of posts shared on Baidu Tieba vary a lot. There is no certain fixed format that you need to follow. But the key feature embedded in all hot posts is its interactiveness. Because of this, a successful post on Baidu Tieba can never be simply left alone once created. You need to interact with readers to keep your posts hot and on top.

Another important feature about Baidu Tieba is that it is content-oriented rather than user-oriented. This means that you don’t need to be a KOL to be influential on Baidu Tieba. What matters is if your post is special enough to trigger more discussion.

The Vertical Structure

Baidu Tieba is a platform consisting of numerous specific Tiebas, and each of them is an individual community. Although they are all under the same platform and have a mainly identical web page layout, each Tieba is rather self-governed, with their own Tieba Host as the main coordinator. Each Tieba has little to no interaction with one another and can be considered as a highly independent website on its own.

Important Concepts

Experience Point:

The experience point system is a measurement to determine your seniority in a certain Tieba. Ways for you to boost your experience points include:

1) Logging in to the Tieba for consecutive days 2) Initiating a post 3) Replying to a post 4) Organizing a poll 5) Participating in a poll 6) Receiving replies from others.

Just like your knowledge and experience gained in one area of expertise cannot be transferred to another one, your time and effort spent on one Tieba, measured as an experience point, is not shared with any other Tiebas. You have an independent level of experience points for each Tieba.

Level:

As your experience points in one Tieba accumulate you will “level up” to the next level of seniority at some point. As illustrated in the graph below, each level-up is accompanied by a special privilege as a reward, including exemption from verification codes, authorization to insert multimedia and voice memos in your post, and so on. There is also another feature of a “status badge” with your level and title shown on it. Each Tieba member has their title corresponding to their seniority, all of which are named by the Tieba Host and unique to each Tieba. The names of the titles are usually closely related to the theme of the Tieba.

Tieba Host:

Selected through an election and nominated by Tieba webmasters based entirely on a candidates’ contribution and commitment, the Tieba host has the highest level of authority over the Tieba he or she is in charge of. You can understand this role as the owner and head administrator of a Tieba. The responsibility of the Tieba Host includes coordinating and regulating activities and posts, attracting new members, and establishing relationships with other Tiebas if needed.

Add to digest:

To improve the quality of Tieba's content and encourage outstanding posters, posts that are particularly informative and influential will be added to the digest. The impact of these acknowledged posts can last for years without being submerged by flooding new posts given that users can choose to only view posts under the digest.

Tieba Rules:

Each Tieba is like a small kingdom overseen by the Tieba host, who keeps all posts within a Tieba under his/her surveillance. Therefore, Tieba host needs to establish and announce rules and standards for all community members to obey, and these are called Tieba rules. Tieba rules are usually specific to each different Tieba. They establish criteria for banning posts, blocking accounts, and featuring posts on the Tieba digest. Remember to read them through before you start posting in the Tieba to avoid getting into trouble and being punished. ^[4]

Functions

For each Tieba, there can be up to three masters, thirty vice-masters, and ten video-masters to manage the uploaded videos within it. Each user can post, at most, ten pictures and one video quoted from certain broadcast websites. Users cannot edit any published posts. However, users can delete their own published posts and comments from other users on their posts. Beyond regular text posts, Baidu Tieba allows for the use of polls. Every bar has its own 2GB space for members to upload videos. If a bar is ranked within the top 500 of the official rankings, it has its album.

In the past, Baidu Tieba once allowed anonymous posting, displaying only the IP address of the poster. After 2010, users are required to have a registered account to post on any Tieba. It is illegal in China to publish rumors that "threaten the social order", a crime punishable by up to 7 years in jail. The onus is on service providers to police and remove such content. Baidu Tieba is no exception and warns users against the dangers of spreading false information, suggesting it is done for notoriety as well as commercial and political gain. ^[5]

International Development

Baidu Tieba has an international version. To expand its commercial domain, Baidu Tieba has been introduced to several foreign countries, including Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. However, in late 2011, the Japanese version of Baidu Tieba was shut down. Since May 2015, all logins are disabled on the Vietnamese version of Baidu Tieba. ^[6]

Ethical Issues

Paid Posts Deletion

After a letter revealing that the company's employees were being paid to delete Internet posts was published online recently, Baidu is now in big trouble. The news revealed that a number of the employees had been arrested in connection with the claims, and it has attracted the attention of Internet users across the country. "Four members of staff were accused of involvement in the deletion of posts for money. Three of whom were suspected of accepting bribes." Yang Chuntian, director of Baidu's Professional Ethic Construction Department, confirmed that there had been a letter revealing how a number of Baidu staff had been detained following suspected paid post deletion. "One of them was an administrator at Baidu Tieba, which is an online community bound tightly with Baidu Internet search services. This employee had an administrator account. When he took the money, he authorized an outsider to delete posts. Numerous posts were deleted," Yang Chuntian explained the details of one of the cases. "The employee confessed to accepting 67,400 yuan( more than $10,000) in bribes. We know the actual figure involved in the profit chain could be a lot higher, much more than that," Yang said.

The Baidu Professional Ethic Construction Department is responsible for dealing with issues relating to professional ethics and investigating and handling rule violations. The letter circulating on the Internet was penned by a Briefing of Professional Ethics Construction issued by this department. When searching on the Internet, tens of thousands of companies claim they can delete online posts for a number of websites such as Sina, 163, ifeng; popular Internet communities such as mop, Tieba, and microblogs such as Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, charging between 600 and 5,000 yuan. An employee of the website called "Internet crisis PR" said many of these Internet so-called PR companies had connections with administrators and editors of a number of websites, which enabled them the authority to delete posts via simple interest exchange.

"The deletion of posts can only be achieved via illegal techniques, just like hackers attack servers. The only other alternative is that they have insiders working at the website who are able to delete posts," said Gao Zelong, assistant to the Secretary-General of iTrust League in the Internet Society of China.

Besides employees in Internet companies, moderators of major BBS or Tieba are also significant in post deletion. Le-Shuai-Bu-Shuai has been the moderator for a column called "Chinese Women's Volleyball Team" in a BBS for the past six years. However, he is not the only person working for this site -- there are also two other moderators and 10 deputy moderators who have the power to delete posts. "Although moderators have a lot of power, some websites, such as Baidu, fail to play an active role in the supervision of its site," said Le-Shuai-Bu-Shuai. "If deputy moderators delete a post illegally, moderators will be able to know this. However, if the moderators delete a post themselves, no one would ever find out. It's the moderators who are responsible for the successful deletion of posts."

On the other hand, Baidu Tieba doesn't have any detailed regulations on post deletion, therefore moderators are required to make their judgments on what should be deleted. Le-Shuai-Bu-Shuai said that the procedure for deleting posts is quite straightforward, and any Tieba user can inform Baidu of an inappropriate post. They simply log in to the Tieba report center, fill in the provided report forms and submit the report. Once the rule violation of a certain post is confirmed, this post will be deleted.

The profit chain of paid post deletion in online communities has exposed the existence and prevalence of Internet corruption. "Externally, we can use laws and regulations to prosecute these misconducts committed by illegal Internet PR companies," said Zhao Zhanling, counselor of Credit Appraisal Center in the Internet Society of China. "Internally," Internet companies should optimize the management of their companies. The power employees have should be restricted and supervised. Also, companies should guide their staff through establishing company values and ethics."^[7]

Hemophilia Community Sold to Fake Experts

The commercialization of Baidu Tieba produced an ethical scandal. The Tieba of hemophilia online community was sold to unqualified hospitals. This community was founded by a user with the nickname "Mayicai". According to "Mayicai", there were about 5,000 netizens using this Tieba as an online community to discuss and share effective treatments for hemophilia.^[8] The new owner of this community with the nickname “hemophilia expert” posted that he had formed a consulting team with "a number of experts related to hemophilia to accurately answer the questions of patients". He made up explanations of his previous behavior of deleting posts of other people and claimed that he was entrusted by Baidu company to manage the Tieba. Most of the medical staff in the consultant team of "hemophilia experts" come from a medical institution in Xi'an. One of them is “Professor” Shanxi Liu, the president of the hemophilia Research Institute of Shaanxi Medical University, who was reported by hemophilia Tieba netizens many times in April 2014. “Professor” Liu was later proved to be a liar and a fake professor.^[9]

Tieba is a product of Baidu, and the real economy market does not have the law to stipulate that Baidu cannot sell its own products. However, the volume of the Tieba is too large -- it has hundreds of millions of users. When such a large product appears, it will produce uneconomic behavior. It is called internal in economics. Internal uneconomic refers to the asymmetry of information caused by the strength of one party during the transaction. The cost outside the contract caused is borne by the party without information, which is not in line with the principle of equality of market economy. During the commercialization of Tieba, Baidu acts as the seller, because it controls the management right of the Tieba, and the users of Tieba do not have this right. This difference forms information asymmetry, such as the actual controller of the Tieba (Baidu knows who is the controller, while the users do not). This information asymmetry makes the users of this community bear additional costs, such as medical risks, and Baidu Tieba should be responsible for it.

On July 7, 2016, Baidu officially announced that it will no longer sell forum moderation rights for its online discussion platform, Tieba, in response to this whole event.^[10]

Literature Tieba Threatens Privacy

Baidu Tieba, the online community forum under China's search engine Baidu, will gradually close its online literature forum over concerns of piracy amid the government's move to launch a crackdown on illegal copying of online texts. Baidu has set up two channels to accept tip-offs from the public, saying it will remove pirated content within 12 hours from Baidu Tieba, the largest Chinese communication platform, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The move of Baidu came in response to Xinhua's reports in late March accusing Baidu Tieba of being the biggest source of pirated literature online. An official from the National Copyright Administration of China said it endorsed Baidu's move, adding that the administration was taking the matter very seriously. Having launched inter-departmental special campaigns against online piracy for 11 consecutive years, China this year will launch a campaign focusing on piracy of online literature, the administration added.

^[11]

Overseas Casino Recruitment

Another scandal of Baidu Tieba has been revealed. There are many Tieba about Abroad Career Information, recruiting casino promoters to trick mainland Personnel participation Cambodia Internet gambling in other countries. Recently, some netizens reported to Lu Media, Baidu Tieba that there is a lot of casino recruitment information in "Cambodia Tieba". This type of recruitment utilizes the method of "selling heads and taking commissions" to transfer from the Internet mainlander Defrauded them to engage in gambling-related work in Cambodia. The report stated that most of the gaming companies in Cambodia are run by mainlanders. Some netizens suspected of participating in the deception work said that his passport has been detained by the company, preventing him from returning to China.

According to the report, there are more than 28 thousand followers in Baidu "Cambodia Tieba", and there are currently millions of posts in Tieba. In the Tieba, posters often use jargon such as "spinach" to replace words such as "gambling". Similar situations exist in other Baidu Tiebas such as Phnom Penh Tieba in Cambodia, Westport Tieba in Cambodia, Job Tieba in Cambodia, and so on. The Paper Journalists released job search information as "candidates" and received nearly 100 replies within one day. These kinds of replies were mainly based on "let me know", "how to contact you", "group mode, the company provides resources", and so on.

Some posters who claimed to work for a Cambodian gambling company said that the people they recruited on Baidu Tieba were mainly engaged in "promotional" work, that is, through online chats, mostly in the name of talking about male and female friends, to lure domestic personnel into online gambling. "The more the gambler recharges, the higher the achievement will be. If you don't win this thing, you will only lose. You just come to the net." The poster said.

Baidu admitted the existence of the content described by Lu Media a few days ago. Some netizens reviewed in a post that Baidu can be called a place where dirty things are hidden within. The mainland search engine "Baidu", which is at the helm of Robin Li, has been plagued by scandals. In addition to its software bundled with too much junk software, and the deletion of posts by staff members, the "Wei Zexi Incident" in 2016 detonated the "Baidu bid ranking" scandal. Baidu has also repeatedly exposed pornographic scandals.

At the beginning of this year, an online article "Search Engine Baidu Is Dead" criticized the results Baidu's search engine provides. Most of them were Baidu's own products, full of marketing and low-quality content. The article also directly uses "drinking poison to quench thirst" to describe Baidu's practice, saying that Baidu is no longer planning to be a search engine, but only wants to be a marketing account platform, "turning all people who want to search for content into their own traffic, and then realizing it.".

Baidu has also been accused of intruding on the personal information of users for many times. Some Baidu Tieba users gave negative review messages after their online purchases in 2017, but they did not expect their personal information to be leaked to the seller. In addition, Baidu's apps "Mobile Baidu" and "Baidu Browser" were revealed to monitor phone calls, and the Consumer Protection Committee has filed a civil lawsuit.

See Also

External Links

References

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