Baidu Tieba

Baidu Tieba^[1]

Type of site	Bulletin Board Service
Available in	Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese
Headquarters	Beijing, Haidian 10, Shangdi Street, Baidu Building  People's Republic of China
Owner	Baidu
Created by	Robin Li
Website	tieba.baidu.com bbs.baidu.com post.baidu.com tieba.com wapp.baidu.com（mobile version）
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Compulsory

Baidu Tieba (Chinese: 百度贴吧; pinyin: bǎidù tiēbā; literally: "Baidu Paste Bar") is the largest Chinese communication platform provided by the Chinese search engine company, Baidu. It is an online community bound tightly with internet search services, one of the main business of Baidu. The website functions by having users search or create a bar (Forum) by typing a keyword, and if the bar has not been created before, it is then created upon the search.^[2]

Introduction

Baidu Tieba was established on December 3, 2003. On the service, "bar" refers to a forum providing a place for users to interact socially. The slogan of Baidu Tieba is "Born for your interest" (Chinese: 为兴趣而生). As of 2014 there are more than eight million bars, mostly created by fans, which cover popular stars, films, comics or books. More than one billion posts have been published in these bars. According to Alexa Internet, traffic to Baidu Post Bar makes up more than 10% of the total traffic to Baidu properties.^[3]

Every bar can have up to three masters (moderators), thirty vice-masters and ten video-masters (mainly to manage the uploaded videos).

Functions

In the period before 2010, Baidu Tieba allowed anonymous posting, displaying only the IP address of the poster. Now it only allows posting by account, and anonymous posting is not allowed. Users can post at most 10 pictures and one video quoting from certain broadcast websites. Users cannot edit the published posts, whether they have an account or not. But users can delete their own published posts and comments from other users on their posts.

Baidu Tieba, beyond regular text posts, allows for polls. Every bar has its own 2GB space for members of the bar to upload videos. If a bar is in the top 500 of the official rank, it can have its own album.

History

In January 2000, Baidu was established in Zhongguancun, Beijing. It is the largest Chinese website and the largest Chinese search engine in the world.^[4]

On November 25, 2003, Baidu Tieba began internal testing and was established on December 3, 2003. It is a completely user-driven network service. The originality of the paste bar was from Yu Jun, Baidu's Chief Product Designer.^[5] At the time, the reason why established the paste bar was to combine with the search engine and built an online communication platform. It can keep people with the same interest together, communicating and helping each other expediently.

On February 25, 2005, Barzhu Bar was changed from an official platform to an unofficial one which was used for communication between the owners of different bars.

On April 15, 2009, Tieba Cloud was integrated into Baidu Tieba

In 2012, Baidu Tieba has gone through a huge change in its interface and function. It changed from a simply reply-by-sequence user interface into a more complicated reply-in-same-floor one. Meanwhile, Baidu Tieba added more functions such as ranking, more expression pictures, enabling administrator to change background image of Tieba, etc.

Nowadays, Baidu Tieba has become a super popular comprehensive forum, with a large amount of active users posting their creative posts, replying each other, and doing interactive activities. Baidu Tieba provides users with forums of different topics. Generally, Baidu Tieba makes great contribution in social network sites.

Differences with formal BBS

1：Topic

In traditional BBS, the topics are usually broadly covered, which may contain a wide range of information. For example, in traditional BBS, 'Singer' can be a topic. However, in Tieba, the topics are actually very specific: a topic can be a pop star's name, an online game, and even your own name. Tieba is somewhere that people can show their ideas on a specific topic.

2：Users' demand

Traditional BBS attracts users by its high-quality posts. Users come to the BBS because they know someone they admire are using this BBS or some articles they want are posted in this BBS. It is high-quality posters and posts that make this BBS become larger and larger. However, Tieba's attraction is simply focus on the topic. Users come here because they want to share their ideas with others on this specific topic. In one word, traditional BSS's attraction is in its article, while Tieba's attraction is in its topic.

3：User community

Any mature BBS forums will keep the user community in a stable status, and they can even form specific cultures. Users in any mature BBS would share same interests, reading habits for a relatively longer time. Tieba, in contrast， hold a more flexible user community, users may change their interests frequently. To satisfy this characteristic， people can easily "disinterest" from one topic.

4：Quality of posts

Posts in Formal BBS : high quality

vs.

Posts in Tieba : high-quantity

Famous bars

These five bars are currently the highest 5 ranking bars on Baidu Tieba main page.^[11] It changes frequently, check http://tieba.baidu.com/index.html for more detail.

Overseas development

Postbar is the international version of Baidu Tieba. In order to expand its commercial domain, Currently Baidu Postbar has introduced to several countries list below :

• http://br.tieba.com Brazil
• http://th.tieba.com Thailand
• http://vn.tieba.com/home/index?fr=index Vietnam
• http://jp.tieba.com Japan

However, it's still unknown whether Postbar will have further development in these countries. Actually, the Japanese version has shut down in late 2011. The Vietnam version cannot be logged into in May 2015.

References

External links

• Baidu Answer : http://zhidao.baidu.com
• Baidu Knowledge : http://zhidao.baidu.com
• Baidu Article : http://wenku.baidu.com/?fr=bks0000
• Baidu Map : http://map.baidu.com