戒赌吧 (Jiedu Ba)

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

~ the obituary ~

Baidu Tieba worked by letting anyone type a word into a box and get a forum for it. Type 戒赌, quit gambling, and around 2010 you arrived somewhere that had been set up with a sincere purpose: men who had lost money telling each other not to lose any more. For a while that is what it was.

It became one of the three largest boards on the entire platform. Over four million followers by November 2016, over twelve million by March 2018, and more than fourteen million with ninety million posts behind them by the summer. Nothing on Tieba grows to that size on sincerity. What was actually happening was that the only place in China where a compulsive gambler could describe his week without being thrown out of the house was a forum nominally dedicated to stopping, and so the forum filled up with the week rather than with the stopping.

On 28 June 2018 Xinhua ran an investigation with a title that asked the question directly: quitting gambling, or luring it. The piece described betting strategy traded openly, loan-shark contacts passed around, adult content, and people arriving to get better at the thing they had come to give up. Baidu closed the board the following day, citing the output of bad values and a large volume of harmful content.

~ the case file ~

~ the language ~

The reason this board mattered beyond its own membership is that it generated vocabulary, and the vocabulary escaped. 老哥, older brother, stopped meaning an older brother and started meaning a man in debt addressing other men in debt. 撸口子 meant taking out the cash loan that covers last month's cash loan. 跑路 meant running, the morning you stop answering the phone and leave the city. 稳 started as the eerie flatness you feel after losing everything and drifted, out in the wider internet, into a general term of approval.

The board also adopted a mascot from outside itself: a small-time electric bike thief from Guangxi who had told a television camera that he would never work a day in his life, and who the members treated with a straight-faced reverence that was half joke and half genuine. That register, deadpan self-mockery sitting right on top of real ruin, is the thing that leaked out. Chinese internet humor spent the years after 2018 running on a tone this forum had spent eight years perfecting.

~ the crackdown ~

The timing was a single day, which tells you that the decision was not Baidu's. A state news agency published on a Thursday, the platform acted on a Friday, and nothing about a board that had already been at twelve million users in March had changed in the interval except who was looking at it.

It is also hard to argue Xinhua got the facts wrong. A recovery community with no clinicians in it and no rule against posting the phone number of somebody who will lend you money at fifty percent is a room where the loudest voices are by definition the people still in the game. Fourteen million followers was the evidence for both readings at once.

~ where they went ~

Tieba users are hard to remove, because the platform's own design hands them a new room for the price of a new word. Members first poured into 戒吧, which had been the old abbreviation. Then they settled on 借读吧, borrow-and-study, which sounds in Mandarin almost exactly like 戒赌吧 and means nothing of the kind, and the person running it was the same person who had run the board that was deleted.

It never got back to the size. A forum of fourteen million people rebuilt itself under a pun and came back smaller, which is the usual outcome when a community has to trade its name for permission to exist. I was not anywhere near this one, and the honest reason is not distance in kilometers: the whole thing ran in a dialect built out of Mandarin puns, and reading it in translation gets you the facts while losing the only part the members actually came for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »