Neihan Duanzi

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

~ the eulogy ~

i learned this app's name from its death. Chinese consumer software of the 2010s reached me the way weather in another hemisphere does, as something i read summaries of afterward, and Neihan Duanzi arrived in my reading in 2018 already in the past tense. That is not the language barrier alone. It is that a country can run an app with two hundred million accounts on it that never once shows up in the internet i use.

It launched in March 2012, from a company founded the same month. Before Toutiao made ByteDance a news business and long before Douyin became TikTok, Neihan Duanzi was one of the first things the company shipped, and for years it was the more beloved one. The format was simple: text jokes, images, short clips and a comment section that was usually funnier than what it hung under. By 2018 it was around fiftieth on the Chinese Android charts overall and had passed two hundred million registered users.

What made it unusual was that the community did not stay on the phone. Users called themselves duanyou, roughly joke-friends, and built an identity out of it that spilled into physical space, which most social products spend years trying to manufacture and never manage.

~ the dossier ~

~ the horn ~

Duanyou put stickers on their rear windows so other duanyou could spot them in traffic. The recognition signal was a horn pattern, one long blast followed by two short ones, and the correct response was the same pattern back. There were call-and-response phrases lifted from an old film and from nothing in particular, the kind of thing that only works if enough people already know the answer. Traffic police in several cities objected, which tells you how widespread it was.

Offline it went further than in-jokes. Duanyou ran WeChat groups by city, organized meetups, collected money for members in trouble, showed up at each other's weddings and at least some funerals. A joke app had accidentally become a mutual aid society with a secret handshake. That is also, from the point of view of a state that pays close attention to organized groups it did not organize, the least comfortable possible outcome for a piece of entertainment software.

~ the order ~

The pressure came in stages. In early April 2018 regulators pulled ByteDance products from Chinese app stores for a period of rectification, with Toutiao given three weeks. On 10 April the National Radio and Television Administration went further with Neihan Duanzi specifically and ordered it closed permanently, citing vulgar content and incorrect guidance. No wind-down period was announced and there was no appeal that would have meant anything.

It is worth naming what kind of death that is, because most of the graves on this site are business failures. Neihan Duanzi was not losing money and was not losing users. A government agency decided a popular product should not exist and it stopped existing, which is a cause of death with no equivalent in the American or European internet of the same decade.

~ the apology ~

Zhang Yiming published a public letter in the early hours of 11 April 2018. He said the product had gone astray and had failed to promote core socialist values. The company, he wrote, had put its effort into growth and lagged behind on building the filtering it should have built. He took personal responsibility in about as direct a phrasing as exists, and committed to expanding the in-house content review team from six thousand people to ten thousand.

That last number is the part with consequences. The apology bought the company its survival and it also set the terms: a Chinese platform at scale runs a censorship department larger than most media companies employ in total. Everything ByteDance built afterward was built with that department already in the org chart.

~ what happened to the duanyou ~

On the evening of 11 April, duanyou drove to the broadcasting regulator's building in Beijing and circled it, honking. One long, two short. It is a small protest by any measure and it was over quickly, but it is the only recorded case i know of where people took an app's shutdown into the street using the app's own signal.

ByteDance launched Pipixia in August 2018, which synced old Neihan Duanzi accounts and data across and was described carefully as a new product about light humor. It was the same audience in a smaller room with the edges sanded off. Meanwhile the company that had its joke app deleted by the state spent the following five years becoming the most-installed media company on earth, which is the ending nobody would have written in April 2018.

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