The people do not need Tianya

On this year's Children's Day, a very old Internet product officially announced its return in a very high - profile way.

This product is Tianya Forum, which can be called the "living fossil" of the Chinese Internet. Its return topped the Weibo hot search list.

From an official perspective, choosing such a special day might be an attempt to celebrate the product's rebirth. However, the new Tianya presents a completely opposite style.

For example, under an article with the theme of "restart" on the official WeChat account of Tianya Community, some former "Tianya users" self - mocked, "Most of us who used to hang out on Tianya might not be alive anymore..."

Then someone replied below: "We've just grown old, not died!"

But the truth is even more straightforward.

When you open the homepage of Tianya Community, the old - fashioned layout and color scheme might make you feel as if you've been suddenly dragged back to twenty years ago.

Then, when you click on the most popular post, "Stories of the Ming Dynasty", the posting time is clearly shown on the page: "22:21, March 10, 2006". At that moment, the sense of time became more tangible: old web pages, old titles, old posts, and old users...

Generally speaking, on Children's Day, Tianya's grand return represents a huge contrast between a young - themed festival and a product with an "old - fashioned" feel.

So, can this "veteran" of the Internet world make any waves in today's new Internet era that has already embraced AI?

Does Tianya want to "target middle - aged men"?

First of all, it's obvious that although Tianya has returned, it's no longer the same as before.

Tianya's earliest domain name was www.tianya.cn. The company associated with this domain name is Tianya Community Network Technology Co., Ltd., and its founder and legal representative is Xing Ming.

It was this company that incurred huge debts due to poor management.

According to public reports, Tianya's parent company was involved in debt issues such as over 150 million yuan in restrictions on high - end consumption and being listed as a dishonest debtor, including owing more than 16 million yuan in IDC - related fees to Hainan Telecom.

As a result, the old "Tianya" was forced to shut down for as long as three years.

The new Tianya that has returned this time has the domain name www.tianya.net. The main promotional platform for the new Tianya is the WeChat official account "Tianya Ke", and the entity behind it is "Tianya Good Things (Hainan) E - commerce Co., Ltd."

According to the equity penetration information from Tianyancha, after multiple levels of shareholding, the ultimate actual controller of this company is Yang Jie.

Companies associated with Yang Jie, such as Oceanic Hengtong Holdings Co., Ltd., are mainly concentrated in fields such as financial services and investment management. In other words, the financial backers behind the new Tianya are not traditional Internet companies, but rather external capital with a background in financial services, investment, and factoring.

Changing the entity and legal representative might be a reasonable move under the burden of debt, but it also raises another question. Why did they try to revive it only after it went bankrupt, when they didn't manage it well for the previous twenty years? What exactly is worth all this trouble?

The answer is nostalgia.

Many people might not know that although nostalgia is intangible, it's a very valuable thing.

Perhaps many people still remember the game "Fantasy Westward Journey" in the early 2000s. This game is still one of NetEase's most important "cash cows", contributing about 20 billion yuan in annual revenue to NetEase.

Legend - style games, the ones that used to shout "If you're my brother, come and fight me" in the bottom - right corner of the computer screen, were also very popular around 2000. Although they have faded out of the mainstream, this IP still generates about 20 - 30 billion yuan in annual revenue.

These two games have one thing in common: they target middle - aged people in their forties.

This group is characterized by having money, being older, and having a penchant for nostalgia. So, in these games, there's basically no limit to their spending.

Similarly, the people behind the new Tianya are also targeting the same group. Their goal, using a popular term nowadays, is to "target middle - aged men".

For example, the first step taken by the new Tianya is to sell memberships.

This membership product is packaged as the "New Tianya Founding Member Product Service Package". It's limited to 9,999 copies, and each copy is sold for 1,999 yuan.

To make this membership seem more prestigious and valuable, the new Tianya has added an identity narrative to it: buyers can obtain the "Tianya Restarter Digital Badge", representing the unique honorary status of a "Tianya Restarter".

At the same time, they can also get a premium membership gift box from Tianya Ke, 10 - year free access to the official paid section of Tianya's classic posts, rights and interests in Tianya's meta - space, a 10 - year premium membership discount for Tianya Ke, and 1,999 Tianya gold beans.

If all 9,999 "founding members" are sold successfully, the new Tianya can probably get about 20 million yuan as its initial capital.

Of course, to make all this seem more credible, the operators of the new Tianya are sparing no effort in promoting the new story of Tianya.

Based on the information released so far, the new Tianya mainly has two directions: one is short video dramas, and the other is e - commerce.

Xing Ming said in an interview with Economic Observer that short video dramas are a hot direction, and such dramas require a certain amount of original content. "We have a lot of such resources on Tianya."

This statement points out what the new Tianya wants to utilize the most: the stories, characters, classic posts, and IPs that were accumulated on the old Tianya.

In contrast, the e - commerce part is still rather vague.

Currently, the display of e - commerce business on the page is still limited. It's only positioned as a "global travel and fashion consumption social platform". This sounds more like a direction rather than a well - established business.

In addition, in the promotion, the new Tianya also mentioned the "Overseas Tianya" based on the Web3.0 platform, including concepts such as decentralized community governance and IP copyright digital asset trading, and even proposed to have a global influence surpassing that of Reddit.

In other words, the new Tianya's idea is not simply to restore a forum, but to build a new platform that includes membership, e - commerce, short dramas, digital assets, and an overseas community by leveraging the content assets and the nostalgia of old users from the old Tianya.

However, this new design that combines nostalgia, membership, e - commerce, digital assets, and Web3 concepts is even more chaotic than the northwest Shanxi region when Li Yundong attacked Ping'an County.

So, in this situation, will anyone really be willing to pay for Tianya out of nostalgia?

Tianya can't come back

Of course, for many people, they might not care about the calculations behind "Tianya's revival".

Because for them, Tianya represents a period of youth, a period of time, and a precious and irrecoverable memory.

However, even so, we know that Tianya probably can't come back.

After all, three years ago, when Tianya was in trouble for the first time, users of Tianya Community spontaneously launched a live fundraising event called "Seven days and seven nights to restart Tianya", hoping to raise 3 million yuan to solve the urgent problem.

But in the end, including live - streaming sales, user rewards, and donations, the total income was only about 200,000 yuan. This shows that not many of the old users mentioned by Xing Ming are willing to pay for Tianya.

In addition, due to the huge debts of the old Tianya, the recovery of Tianya's most important soul - data - has also been affected.

Although Tianya Community and China Telecom have obtained an arbitration award regarding data migration through the Hainan International Arbitration Court, the recovery of the old data still requires processes such as migration, verification, and reconstruction.

Judging from the seemingly bustling return on June 1st, Tianya has only partially resumed access. Currently, what users can see is mainly concentrated in the "Tianya Highlights" section.

Moreover, and most importantly, the times have really changed.

Today's Internet is no longer the open and elite - oriented Internet model of the past. Now, it belongs to large platforms, emphasizing closed - loop and ecosystems.

The voice in the Internet has also shifted from the elite group in the past to the general public.

In the past, Internet users would spend thousands or even tens of thousands of words analyzing and debating a problem. Now, Internet users pursue short, simple, and fast content and the most dazzling sensory stimulation, so they watch short videos and use Douyin...

Of course, what really shocked me was that when I was writing this article, a post - 2000 friend saw my computer and very curiously asked: What is Tianya?

I suddenly remembered the webmaster's famous saying: Time is like a wild donkey that never stops running. In this process, many things will be left behind, buried, and forgotten.

In fact, without its old users and lacking new users, Tianya should have been buried long ago.

But since it wasn't, today's revival of Tianya is more like a grand and solemn "summoning of the soul" for something that has already died by a group of people with different motives or obsessions.

Tianya doesn't need to be forced to stay alive

In fact, even for those with obsessions, Tianya doesn't need to be forced to come back.

To this day, the words "Tianya classic posts" are still scattered all over the Internet.

It reminds generations that there used to be a place that could always produce strange, raw, vivid, and irresistible stories.

But this is also the problem.

Since it's called "classic posts", Tianya has taken on a certain divinity. Divinity requires distance and imagination. It's suitable for being remembered and retold, but not necessarily for being brought back to the real world and repackaged with short - video, e - commerce, membership, digital badges, and Web3 narratives.

The new Tianya's attempt to bring back the past "divinity" to the real world is not so beautiful.

For old Tianya users, Tianya Community was their spiritual home on the Internet in the past. It doesn't need to do anything. As long as it quietly "lies" there, preserving the old posts, old IDs, old floors, and the atmosphere of the old era, it's enough. It doesn't need to compete in the short - video field or engage in live - streaming sales.

Playing the "revival" game with so many twists and turns will only disrupt its position in their hearts.

In the "Biographies of Empresses and Concubines" in the Book of Han, there's a well - known statement about "retaining someone with beauty": Those who rely on their looks to please others will lose favor when their looks fade, and when favor fades, kindness ends.

Before her death, Lady Li refused to see Emperor Wu of Han because she was afraid that her sickly appearance would ruin her beauty in the emperor's heart. She understood that some yearnings don't depend on reunions but on keeping the memory at its best.

The same goes for Tianya.

It's still remembered not because it's still very useful, but because it preserves the spirit of the early Chinese Internet: raw, free, wild, and full of diverse voices. There were long - winded stories told by ordinary people, relay - style watching by strangers, long - term waiting between the post - author and readers, and a sense of public community that's hard to replicate today.

What people really want to revive is not the Tianya website, but the era when they still believed that posts could change fate and strangers could form a community.

The smartest way for some things to leave is to stay in memory, rather than letting everyone see their decline.

Conclusion

There are always people who live in the past for a long time. They hope the world will stay at the moment they're most familiar with. Once the world moves forward, change becomes a mistake.

This obsession is usually attached to an old thing. For a generation of Internet users, Tianya is such an old thing.

It was once the spiritual home of a generation. However, the most vulnerable part of a spiritual home is that it often belongs only to memory, not to reality. In reality, Tianya incurs debts, stops service, and sells memberships. In memory, Tianya is always lively, and there are always people waiting in the posts.

In the AI era, this spiritual home of the old Internet seems even rarer and more precious. We're getting more and more used to being pushed by algorithms, fragmented by short videos, and having content written and summarized by AI. But the most touching thing about Tianya is its clumsiness, sl