画吧 (Huabar)

» see haowanlab.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

画吧 launched in 2013 out of a small Suzhou software company and did one thing that nothing else in its category did. When you finished a drawing and posted it to the community, the app uploaded the project file alongside the image. Anyone who opened your picture could press play and watch it get made, stroke by stroke, from the first line to the last. Eleven years of that produced a gallery where every work in it was also a recording of itself.

Around the drawing tool there was an entire site: a public gallery, personal pages, rankings, forums, picture books, a brush market, classes, a 3D model shop, and a currency called 画币 that users bought and artists withdrew. People sold commissions through it. The staged shutdown notice has to list all of it by name, and reading that list is how you understand the thing was not an app but a small economy.

On 12 January 2024 the company posted the plan. Payments through WeChat and Alipay would stop on 15 January, along with the live collaborative drawing. On 8 February every network service would go: logins, publishing, personal pages, the gallery, trading, rankings, the forums, the brushes, the classes, the withdrawals. The standalone drawing board would keep working offline, but cloud drafts would no longer open and custom brushes would no longer sync, so everyone was told to download their own work before the date.

The wind-down terms were careful in a way that suggests somebody wanted to leave cleanly. Anyone who had bought a membership or a course since 15 December could claim a full refund through the payment platform's own record. Anyone holding unspent currency could claim the remainder. Outstanding artist payments could be settled by messaging a WeChat account named BankOfHuabar with your ID and the amount owed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ playback ~

The replay feature was a format decision, and it carried the whole community. A gallery of finished pictures is a gallery. A gallery where every picture can be unwound into the process that produced it is a teaching tool, and it made the site useful to beginners in a way that a finished-image feed never is. The archivists who later saved it noted, almost in passing, that the entire corpus is 100% free of AI-generated content, because every file in it is a timestamped sequence of human strokes rather than a bitmap.

It also made the data enormous. Storing the image is cheap. Storing the image plus a full vector recording of its construction, for ten million works, across eleven years, is twelve terabytes.

~ twelve terabytes ~

Between the announcement and the cutoff, the volunteers at Save The Web Project took the whole thing. They crawled the metadata for every work on the site into MongoDB, then worked out what pulling ten terabytes out of the Qiniu object storage over the public internet does to the bill of the company you are trying to save: north of four thousand yuan, charged to a business already in court over its debts. So they stood up a server in the same region and pulled it over the internal network instead, then shipped it out to their own storage.

What came out was more than ten million paintings, project files and images both, totalling somewhere between ten and thirteen terabytes, now sitting on the Internet Archive. They also captured the social graph: 14,205,933 user accounts and 31,688,768 follow relationships, timestamps included. Those two numbers are the only measurement of 画吧's size that exists anywhere, and they were taken by outsiders during the shutdown rather than published by the company in eleven years of operation.

The project page carries a small detail about its own cover image. The farewell illustration at the top, a picture titled 《拜拜》, was drawn by a 画吧 user. The archivists bought it from them.

~ the afternoon ~

The founder's own post went up on the forum the next morning and it is not a corporate notice. He describes sitting alone at the computer in the afternoon with the sun hard on his face, seeing himself reflected clearly in the screen, and saying out loud: let go, you have done your best. He thought he had been worn numb by years of company troubles, he writes, until he actually opened the old files.

Then the part about the screenshots. By the early hours of 13 January he had assembled dozens of images, every major home page redesign since the founding, the online and offline events worth commemorating, and then deleted them one at a time and kept a single paragraph. Let the past be past; what deserves remembering will be remembered anyway. From 2013 to 2024.

He thanks the users, then the moderators and administrators who ran the place for free, then the staff, then the investors and partners, and then apologizes to his family for how much his willfulness cost them over the years. The archivists' own notes add a line the post does not: there was a 2023 court judgment and 250,000 yuan still owed to a bank. The post is signed with his handle, 小学生, which means elementary school student.

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