NetEase Blog

» see blog.163.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

There is still a page at blog.163.com. It is not a blog and it is not an archive. It is a notice, centered on a purple gradient, telling you that this website will be closing on 30 november 2025 and thanking you for the years. The date on it has already gone by.

NetEase is one of the companies that built the Chinese consumer internet, and its blogging platform opened on 1 september 2006, at the point where a portal without one looked unserious. It ran twelve years. A large amount of personal writing in Chinese lived there, on a page shape that assumed you had something to say at length and a reader willing to scroll.

I did not lose anything here, so the honest thing to note from the outside is the record rather than the loss. A platform can run twelve years and carry a national habit of writing, then leave less behind in English than a two-year american startup with a good publicist. I found the shutdown notices before I found a single one of the blogs.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the staged shutdown ~

The announcement came on 20 august 2018 and the dismantling started the next day. App downloads went first, along with new registrations and the top-ups for paid accounts. You could still read. You could no longer upload a post or attach a picture, and the comment boxes stopped accepting anything.

On 30 november the site closed and logins stopped working. Whatever had not been moved or saved by hand was erased. The destination offered was Lofter, NetEase's light-blog product from late august 2011, which was built for short posts with images. Twelve years of text written for one shape of page was invited to move into a different one.

~ what killed it ~

Nothing dramatic. By 2018 the Chinese reading audience had moved to WeChat public accounts and Weibo. Short video took what was left. The long personal post stopped being the unit anyone reached for, and the same collapse was running everywhere else at the same time.

What made this version of it faster was that the replacements were closed. A WeChat article does not sit at an address a search engine can reach, so a blog losing traffic was also losing the only route anyone had to it. The platform did not have to be shut down to become unreadable. Shutting it down was the paperwork.

~ the second date ~

The strange part is that the address did not go quiet in 2018. Something kept answering at blog.163.com, and what it answers with now is a farewell notice giving 30 november 2025 as the closing date. The same day of the same month, seven years later.

The wording is warmer than these notices usually are. It thanks you for the company and the trust over a long time, and apologizes for the inconvenience. Then it says that parting is hard but that what was made together was worth making, and it hopes to meet you again in some other corner of the internet. A closing notice for something that had already closed, written by whoever was left to write it.

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