Baidu Tieba

Introduction

Baidu Tieba uses forums called bars (which are analogous to Reddit subreddits) for users to socially interact. The slogan of Baidu Tieba is "Born for your interest" (Chinese: 为兴趣而生). These bars covered a variety of topics, such as celebrities, sports, science, films, comics, and books. More than one billion posts have been published in these bars. Some Baidu Tieba bars are large enough that they are comparable in influence to independent forums, while others are much smaller, perhaps only having a few users, and more resemble a personal blog.

In many cases the topic of discussion on Baidu Tieba forums has little to do with the title of the bar.

According to Alexa Internet in 2007, traffic to Baidu Tieba then made up more than 10% of the total traffic to Baidu properties.

Functions

Every bar can have up to three masters, thirty vice-masters, and ten video-masters to manage uploaded videos. Users 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 own album.

Like Reddit, Baidu Tieba forms are moderated by unpaid volunteers, who are allowed to set the rules of the bar, remove comments and posts considered disruptive, among other functions. Moderators can be removed by Baidu staff at will for reasons such as lack of activity, failure to grow the forum, or for exploiting their moderator position for commercial gain.

Prior to 2010, Baidu Tieba allowed anonymous posting, displaying only the IP address of the poster. Since then, users are required to have a registered account in order to post on bars. It is illegal in China to publish rumors which "threaten the social order", a crime punishable by up to 7 years 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.

Baidu Tieba also has a consumer-to-consumer e-commerce sale function, which had led it to be likened to Craigslist.

By 2021 Tieba had launched a feature allowing approved users to upload short-form video content.

History

On November 27, 2003, Baidu Tieba began internal testing. It was released to the public on December 1, 2003.

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

On February 25, 2005, Barzhu Bar became an official platform of Baidu Tieba, and was used for communication between the owners of different bars.

At its peak Baidu Tieba hosted numerous passionate fan communities dedicated to various topics, such as anime series. During the summer of 2005, the popularity of Baidu Tieba was buoyed by discussion surrounding the second season of the popular singing competition Super Girl, with Baidu Tieba members organizing activity on Tieba to attract votes for their favourite contestants. A prominent feature of Baidu Tieba's culture is "forum bombing", where members of a bar/subform spam other Tieba bars with meaningless or empty to posts to disrupt them. Conflict between different Baidu Tieba communities/bars supporting rival Super Girl contestants resulted in efforts to spam/disrupt rival contestants bars over the next several years.

One of the notable and popular forums/bars on Baidu Tieba is the Li Yi Bar, originally created to mock Chinese footballer Li Yi in 2004 though it eventually broadened its topic scope. It had gained over 6 million users by 2017, and became for known for its distinctive culture and slang, as well as its campaigns to flood/spam rival Tieba bars and social media pages of people and organizations considered to oppose the Chinese government.

Tieba became notable on the Chinese internet for its numerous controversies. In 2008 users and moderators of the Tieba bar dedicated to the video game Audition Online was accused of mocking the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, resulting in the forum being temporarily locked by Baidu. That same year, the Tieba bar dedicated to the South Korean boyband TVXQ was bombed after rumors that one of their members had assaulted someone, resulting in the forum having to be made approved members-only for posting.

In 2009, the viral Chinese internet meme "Jia Junpeng" spawned from a post on the World of Warcraft bar on Baidu Tieba.

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 interface, new functionalities such as rankings, more expressive pictures, and allowing administrators to change the background images of Tieba, were also implemented.

By 2015, Baidu Tieba had over 1 billion registered accounts and over 300 million active users.

Despite the popularity of Baidu Tieba, for a long time up until 2014 Baidu Tieba was not profitable to operate for Baidu, resulting in Baidu searching for ways to increase revenue from the platform. In 2016, Baidu Tieba came under major controversy for Baidu's practice, which began in 2014, of selling moderator rights to individual forums without the consent of users or the original moderators. In January 2016, it was reported that a forum dedicated to the disease haemophilia was sold by Baidu to a hospital, which removed the original moderation team, and used the forum to post advertising, removing posts complaining about the change. Later that year, Baidu pledged to stop selling the moderation rights to forums. Sixth Tone wrote that selling off the moderation rights for bars made relatively little revenue for Baidu and resulted in many boards becoming "advertising spaces for commercial ventures".

In 2017, Baidu Tieba was investigated by the Beijing Municipal Cyberspace Administration because users were allegedly using it to "spread terror-related material, rumours and obscenities". It has previously been summoned by the Ministry of Public Security for concerns including "inadequate security management and prominent issues such as illegal information involving firearms and explosives, the sale of citizens' personal information, and pornography". In 2018, a man used Baidu Tieba to solicit a hitman for an unsuccessful plot to murder his wife. A 2025 Vice News article stated that Baidu Tieba "was often used for criminality", while a 2021 journal article stated that Tieba was known as a place where "victims can share their experiences of being victimized and warn other potential victims".

Baidu Tieba began to decline in traffic beginning in 2012. By 2019, its traffic had declined substantially relative to its heyday, having only tens of million rathers than hundreds of million of active users, with other platforms like Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu and Zhihu having gained prominence. By this time, the homepage of the website was "dominated by advertisements and live streams". On May 13, 2019, topics posted in Baidu Tieba before January 1, 2017 were hidden. A Baidu official said that the topics are hidden temporarily due to "system maintenance". By 2021, it had lost nearly 90% of its userbase compared to 2015, down to only 37.43 million monthly active users. This decline has been attributed to several factors, including competition from rival platforms, heavy-handed moderation by Baidu administrators, excessive demands of volunteer moderators (who at one point were demanded by Baidu to fulfil " a 2% daily increase in daily forum visitors, a 3% daily increase in the number of new topics, a 5% daily increase in the number of replies, and a 1% daily increase in check-ins." in bars/forums they moderated or face removal from their moderator position), and excessive commercialisation.

In 2023, the Tieba bar dedicated to controversial livestreamer Sun Xiaochuan was subject to a "special cleanup campaign" by Baidu following allegations of misogynistic comments made by some of its users.

International development

Baidu Postbar is the international version of Baidu Tieba.

In order to expand its commercial domain, Baidu Postbar has been introduced to several countries listed below:

• Baidu Tieba Brazil
• Baidu Tieba Thailand
• Baidu Tieba Vietnam
• Baidu Tieba Japan

In late 2011, the Japanese version of Baidu Postbar was shut down.

Since May 2015, all logins are disabled on the Vietnamese version of Baidu Postbar.

References

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