Banciyuan

» see bcy.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

二次元, the second dimension, is the Chinese term for the flat drawn world of anime and manga, and by extension for the people who live inside it. 三次元, the third dimension, is the real world, used by those same people and usually with a sigh. Banciyuan took the half. 半次元 is the half-dimension, the strip of ground in between where a real body carries a drawn character, which is to say cosplay. No company statement explaining the name survives, so that reading is the fan one rather than the official one, but the site plainly owned the framing: one of its top-level channels was literally called 三次元.

It described itself as the number one Chinese-language community for COS and drawing, with fiction third on its own list, and it ranked its creator classes in the same order. The organizing unit was the 圈, the circle, built around a source work rather than an individual character, so the 2017 front page carried circles for Onmyoji, Honor of Kings, VOCALOID and Fate/Grand Order. Underneath those sat verticals for Lolita fashion, JK uniforms, hanfu and ball-jointed dolls, and one for 橡皮章, the hand-carved eraser stamps that Chinese fan culture treats as a craft in its own right.

I have no standing in this one. It ran in a language I do not read, for a fandom I was never in, and it reached me only because a domain probe came back saying the nameservers had stopped answering. What is worth describing from the outside is the economy underneath it: 约稿, paid art commissions, running through an in-app wallet, and leaderboards for drawing and for cosplay that Chinese coverage credits as the starting point for a good number of working illustrators.

Hangzhou Wangyao Network Technology, Wang Wei's company, took an angel round from Innovation Works in July 2014 and a Series A the year after. The business registration was amended on 22 January 2018, and on 7 February 36Kr broke the story: the new shareholder was Beijing Shanxing Technology, a wholly owned ByteDance subsidiary, and the legal representative had changed from Wang Wei to the Toutiao partner Zhang Lidong. No price was ever disclosed. None has surfaced since.

~ the case file ~

~ what bytedance did with it ~

The Chinese press framed Banciyuan as China's answer to Pixiv and then added the caveat that turned out to matter. Jiemian's line was that focusing on core hardcore 二次元 users capped any further growth, and the monetization problem was never solved the way Pixiv solved it. An intensely committed audience of a couple of million people is a wonderful thing to be part of and a difficult thing to sell against inside a company the size of ByteDance.

So the strategy became video. The parent pushed an image-and-text community toward multi-format video to compete with Bilibili, and by 2023 the site's own metadata was advertising video and 弹幕 channels. Long-time users read that as the platform ceasing to be the thing they joined. There was regulatory damage as well: in October 2020 Banciyuan was named in a rectification campaign over vulgar and pornographic material in its comics sections and certain circles, which cost it app-store availability and brought repeated criticism in official media.

Sohu's post-mortem reports leadership describing hard orders from ByteDance for annual revenue in the billions of yuan at roughly 300 percent gross margin, with the team on 996. The ByteDance team departed in the summer of 2022. After that the parent judged the platform unprofitable and not worth reviving, and the following June it published the notice.

~ the thirty day window ~

The shutdown notice went up on 12 June 2023, signed by the 半次元团队, and it laid out a staged wind-down with dates. That same day new registrations stopped and the app came out of the App Store and the Android stores. On 30 June posting and commenting were switched off, leaving the site readable but frozen. On 12 July login and all page access ended and the servers were closed.

The notice offered a personal data download and a wallet cash-out, both open for the same thirty days, and both reachable only through the app. The app had been delisted from every store on day one of that window, so the export was available exclusively to people who still had it installed or had kept a sideloaded copy. Anyone who had cleared it off their phone at some point in the preceding nine years had no path to their own archive. The stated reason for all of it was 因公司业务发展上的调整, adjustments in the company's business development, which is the Chinese corporate formula for declining to give one.

The sign-off was better than the notice deserved: 祝各位万事胜意，每种爱都很有爱, roughly "may everything go as you wish, and may every kind of love be full of love."

~ the nameserver says offline ~

bcy.net resolves to nothing today. The delegation points at NS-OFFLINE1.XZDOMAIN.COM and NS-OFFLINE2, a pair of nameservers whose hostnames announce the condition and which do not answer queries in any case. The domain was created on 15 November 2001, thirteen years before Banciyuan existed, so the three-letter name was bought rather than registered. It sits with the Chinese registrar eName Technology and the registry expiry is 15 November 2026.

Where the people went is not cleanly answerable. The contemporaneous reporting names Xiaohongshu as the destination artists were already drifting toward before the shutdown, for the larger audience. Jiemian declined to name a successor at all and described users forming 难民群, refugee groups, while hoping for a revival that has not come. Nothing absorbed the archive: nine years of cosplay photography, fan art and fic that was never mirrored anywhere, and a self-service ZIP file you could only get from an app that had already been taken out of the stores.

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