Douban

Douban (Beijing Douwang Technology Co. Ltd.)^[11] was founded by Yang Bo (杨勃). He majored in physics at Tsinghua University before he attended University of California, San Diego as a PhD student. After receiving his PhD in computational physics, he worked as a research scientist at IBM. Later, he returned to China, becoming the CTO of a software company founded by one of his friends.

In 2005, Yang started to create a website for travelling named Lüzong (驴宗), initially a one-person project at a Starbucks in Beijing. In a couple of months, however, the site was transformed into what is now known as Douban.com.^{[citation needed]}

 

• 2005
  • March 6, account registration opened to the public
  • March 8, Group (小组)^[12] was released
  • March 9, the first topic appeared in the Group
  • July 6, the traditional Chinese version of the website published
  • August 23, Douban Location (豆瓣同城)^[13] was released to allow users to share and discover local events and activities
  • December 8, English version of the website opened for public testing
• 2013
  • Douban announced that Douban covered 200 million monthly independent users in the second and third quarters of 2013, double the same period last year.^[14]
  • As of September 2013, Douban has 16.7 million book entries, 320 million movie reviews, 1.06 million music entries, 27,000 independent musicians, and 380,000 various interest groups.^[14]
  • September 17, 2013, “Douban Dongxi" (豆瓣东西)was released^[14]
  • Until September 2013, Douban had more than 75 million registered users, mainly from first- and second-tier cities across the country, with an average daily PV of 210 million.^[14]
• 2016
  • Until the end of 2016, Douban had 150 million registered users and 300 million monthly active users^[15]
• 2017
  • Douban launches content-paid product "Douban Time" (豆瓣时间)^[15]
• 2020
  • Beijing Douban Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Douban.com, had a significant business information change on July 8. The shareholders and business scope changed.^[16]
  • The company's business scope has expanded from "Internet dissemination of officially published book content" to "publishing literary original digital works, digital works consistent with the content of published publications in China," Beijing Douwang Technology Co., Ltd.^[17]
  • Douban achieved the permission to publish original literary e-books.^[17]

Douban has attracted a large number of intellectuals who are eager to discuss social issues. This makes Douban vulnerable to censorship by the Chinese government. Douban reviews all content posted on the website, preventing some material from being posted in the first place, and taking down other materials after the fact.^[18]

In March 2009, Douban removed art paintings of the Renaissance on the grounds that they contained 'pornographic' elements.^[18][19][20] This led to a campaign called "Portraits: Dress up" in which internet users were asked to dress up images of famous renaissance nudes in a protest against Douban's self-censorship. The administrators then removed the discussion about the campaign.^[18]

That year also saw the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and Douban further extended its keyword list to ban any terms that are likely to relate to the incident.^[21][22] This angered some members, causing them to move to other similar websites that employ less strict self-censorship policies.^[18]

In 2011, some Chinese lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) groups announced that they had planned to boycott Douban as their posts announcing an LGBT-themed film festival had been censored by the website. In mainland China, films and television programs with LGBT themes are subject to state censorship.^[23]

In 2021 amid controversy surrounding the 93rd Academy Awards over scrutiny of Nomadland director Chloé Zhao,^[24] Douban removed mentions of films' Academy Awards wins and nominations from its film pages. However, comments about the Academy Awards by Douban users remained on the site.^[25]

Douban has been accused that many users of Douban purposely gave The Wandering Earth, a 2019 Chinese science-fiction film, one star. Critics further accused that some users "change their given five stars to one star" and some users are paid to give one star to the film, which later turned out to be false. On 12 February 2019, Douban officially announced that "mass score-changing is abnormal and it won't be counted in the total score. To avoid such incidents, we are urgently optimizing product features." in its official Sina Weibo account.^[26]

 

Wikidata has the properties:

•   Douban film ID (P4529) (see uses)
•   Douban game ID (P6444) (see uses)
•   Douban music ID (P6445) (see uses)
•   Douban drama ID (P6443) (see uses)
•   Douban book works ID (P10319) (see uses)
•   Douban book version/edition ID (P6442) (see uses)
•   Douban movie celebrity ID (P5284) (see uses)
•   Douban musician ID (P6446) (see uses)
•   Douban author ID (P6441) (see uses)

• Official website (in Chinese)
• Sample texts written on Douban, with English translation