NetEase Commenters: Public Intellectuals in a Corner | QDaily Anthropology

They care about politics and society, and they want to take a stand in their own way.

Who they are

"Follow Your Heart," born in the 1970s, is a farmer in Hubei. In autumn and winter, when there is little work in the fields, he comments on NetEase, and he has a gift for verse. Under an article about a contractor in Xiangyang who fell ill and was still owed his wages, he wrote an acrostic poem whose first characters spell out "Utterly helpless, one long sigh."

"I'm just using poetry as an excuse to vent," said the man NetEase users call "the Poet." "There's nothing poetic about it."

"Dynamic Superman Superfly," who wants to be a scientist, has never met "Follow Your Heart," but online they are the same kind of person. He says he was moved by a line from Fan Changjiang, an early-20th-century reporter for Ta Kung Pao, and started commenting on NetEase in 2014. The old journalist had written: "News is the important facts that the public wants to know, ought to know, and does not yet know." He is only 18, but "Dynamic Superman Superfly" says he never holds back from speaking out about society.

NetEase has far more commenters than these two, but a large share of them fit one description: they love to comment on politics and spread their views in public, they write in vivid, fierce language, and they try to win people over to their side.

Huang Yu first read NetEase News in high school, and it shook her values. Now a fourth-year law student at Sichuan International Studies University, she can coolly list the traits of NetEase comments: "full of regional attacks," "America is either heaven or dog shit," "attack everything the government does, then add: This is China!"...

Of course, the people sounding off on NetEase do not fully meet the standard for public intellectuals that the American writer Russell Jacoby set out in the 1980s: professional expertise, a view of the world, a sense of social responsibility, action to change society, and the courage to lead it.

Still, they have something in common with the first public intellectuals, who emerged in France's Dreyfus Affair of 1894. Émile Zola published an open letter to the President of the French Republic in a newspaper (the letter better known as J'Accuse…!), and rallied scholars, teachers, journalists and students in large numbers behind Dreyfus, a trainee officer sentenced to life in exile on thin evidence. Public opinion quickly turned.

In the internet age, though, content is increasingly made by users, so these voices can be heard, and gain influence, without anyone needing to place an open letter in a newspaper.

"Drillbit," who would not give his real name, admits that NetEase gave him a sense of belonging. He works at a culture magazine in Chengdu and follows politics closely. What wears him down is that anything even slightly sensitive at work gets swapped out. Not on NetEase. "It makes you feel less alone. You know that besides you and the people around you, there are still people in China who dare to speak." He also compared it with Guancha.cn, another news-and-politics site, and concluded that "NetEase's IQ is still a bit higher."

"Peachy Wang" began as a loyal reader of Vista magazine, buying almost every issue, which left him with a hazy grasp of current affairs. "Once I got on NetEase, I really liked it here, and my thinking was clearly pulled in." He spends one to two hours a day on NetEase: "I refresh the news more often than social media!" In time, by his own account, he became an "American cent," someone who praises anything to do with America. When other users and his roommates took the opposite side, he quickly learned how to hit back effectively.

The kind of journalism Jürgen Habermas criticized, which merely "presents" and "discloses," is changing. Commenters take part in the news in both directions, through dialogue, and so become "public intellectuals." As spokesmen for a particular class, they want to "change the world," much like the "organic intellectuals" Antonio Gramsci described in his Prison Notebooks.

These "public intellectuals" speak through a form called the comment

On December 30, 2008, Tang Yan, who later founded Momo, was still chief editor of NetEase News.

He and his team released a five-minute Flash video as their review of the year. The newsroom had spent nearly a month picking its material out of 41,658,635 comments posted on 2,397,339 news stories that year, and the video carried the slogan "No comments, no news" in bold.

That was the sixth year of the comment feature, and NetEase now put it at the center of its strategy. It kept paying off. According to iResearch figures from July 2015, NetEase News reached 38.3% of users each month, with an average of 23 minutes per visit, ahead of Sina, Tencent, Toutiao and Sohu News.

The turning point came in 2003, when content director Li Xueling, who later founded the voice platform YY (now JOYY), launched "NetEase Comments."

In 2006 Li Yong, newly appointed editor-in-chief of NetEase, again stressed how interactive NetEase News should be. "Just adding a comment page after the story is nowhere near enough," he said. "We have to give users more power and let them really take part in creating the content."

At the time, NetEase News did not rule the field. Sina News had launched round-the-clock news, using speed and breadth to give readers the most basic reassurance that they would not miss anything. It had also launched a "Let Me Say a Few Words" discussion forum as early as 2000, but the forum never took off, and Weibo, where debate was far livelier, would not peak until 2010. Tencent News had a huge readership and no obvious weakness, except that its commenters, drawn from QQ users, varied widely in quality. Sohu News, another portal, played a different game: it was strongest at covering big sporting events.

None of them believed in comments the way NetEase did, or worked as hard at them.

NetEase ran its news operation on four levels: the editor-in-chief, who set the overall direction, then chief editors, senior editors and junior editors.

Comments were the easiest way to measure a junior editor's performance. Sun Meng, four months into a junior editor's job at NetEase News, had to keep every section she ran above 15,000 comments. If she hit the target, her bonus was multiplied by 1.5. It was well worth her while to find ways to get there.

Zeng Jian, chief editor of NetEase News in 2006, later said that one feature made NetEase Comments stand out: "building floors," in which each reply quotes the whole chain of replies before it, stacking up like the storeys of a building. At first the format existed only to solve one problem: people in a discussion could not see what came before. As the product evolved, these "buildings" grew from around 20 floors to more than 70, and became lively places.

As the maker of the rules, NetEase also gave its commenters ranks. The names are revealing. They reward ordinary people for speaking up, yet they also lay bare an official-rank culture's idea of "authority": a beginner is a "clerk," and then rises to section chief, division director, bureau chief and party secretary. A user who reaches 65,000 points becomes an "elder of the Comment Bureau."

Points do not depend only on how often you post. They come from a set of "daily tasks," "daily achievements" and "bonus achievements."

NetEase also collected the most influential comments into "red booklets" and put them on Amazon as free downloads. A new booklet came out every two months. They helped settle NetEase's comment culture into something lasting, and they earned the site a good name. Southern People Weekly, a magazine known for in-depth reporting, put it this way: "If you want to know how smart Chinese netizens are, look at NetEase's floor-builders."

Quite likely, the floor-builders in turn shaped how NetEase News was edited.

In 2011 Tang Yan gave NetEase News a new slogan: "With an Attitude." As he explained on Zhihu, the slogan was meant "first, to make us recognizable, and second, to give the team some direction in its work."

NetEase headlines took up the new slogan with enthusiasm. When an article titled "Where Does the Confidence of the Chinese Dream Come From?" was reposted from the PLA Daily, NetEase retitled it "PLA Daily: The Doctrine We Believe In Is the Truth of the Universe." Another, "PLA Daily: Understand, Don't Distort," became "PLA Daily: Reading Your Superior's Intentions Is the First Task of a Good Cadre." And a story about the swimmer Jiao Liuyang returning home with a gold medal put the spotlight on the liquor: "Jiao Liuyang Gets a Hero's Welcome: Moutai and Flowers Await Her."

NetEase has its own measure. It believes it can read what users want and feel. Put simply, it looks for what gets them excited.

How far NetEase's "public intellectual" world sits from the real one

People soon found that NetEase was the place to say the blunt things they could not say in real life.

In its 2015 year-end review, titled "Us," NetEase thanked "the majority that would not be silent." As one NetEase employee, who asked not to be named, saw it, the point of working "with an attitude" was not to be different for its own sake, but to respect users' voices and dare to speak up for them.

The site's appeal was that more than one voice could be heard there, and NetEase deliberately resisted pressure to delete posts, giving its users cover.

But that tolerance also bred crudeness and chaos. Regional attacks and abusive posts were everywhere.

A story headlined "Tourists Charged 10,000 Yuan for a Meal in Harbin; One Iron-Pot Fish Cost Over 5,000" drew 120,000 participants and 17,000 comments, and the comments were mostly about Harbin itself. "That's Harbin for you, so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face." "Harbin is LOL! The smell of the toilets at Harbin Station sums up the whole city"... In one thread, two users whose IP addresses placed them in Shenzhen and Qiqihar started trading insults.

Regional prejudice and abuse may always have existed. A map circulating online, titled "China's Hometowns of Crime," labeled Yichun in Jiangxi the hometown of lock-picking burglars, and Zhumadian in Henan as full of honey traps and sham marriages, and so on. NetEase made place matter in every topic: in early 2007 it began automatically attaching location to each comment, and it made a point of putting city names in headlines. That made regional feuds more likely to flare up there.

It did not stop at regional attacks. Under a story about a murdered female university student, commenters eagerly tagged her with labels like "slept with celebrities," "young chick" and "slut."

When China's broadcasting regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, ordered the TV drama The Empress of China re-edited, even Huang Yu, who had once found the NetEase atmosphere hard to take, felt the pleasure of a pile-on. "When people mostly agree on something, it feels great to watch everyone tear into it," she said.

"Drillbit," however, still looks down on the commenters. He reads but never posts, because he has had some years of education, while "these people just want a quick take. They don't do serious commentary." In his view, none of it rises to a higher level.

He has a point. On NetEase, the faster you post, the more likely you are to collect the most likes, become a top comment and stay pinned at the head of the comment section. That makes the prevailing view in NetEase comments very hard to overturn. Huang Yu says she sometimes reads comments on Weibo as well, and finds that when an argument breaks out there, the majority view tomorrow may differ from today's. "But NetEase almost never changes," she says.

Get in fast. You don't need an airtight argument, but you do need something worth reading. That is roughly the playbook of "Dynamic Superman Superfly," whose comments get liked about half the time and sink without trace the other half. "I think it depends on how fast you spot the story after it's pushed out, on the quality of your view, and on comment moderation."

When he commented on a story about "bar touts" in Lijiang, women who lure tourists into overpriced bars, his first reaction was: "Holy shit, plenty of guys let their lust do their thinking." Then he put himself in their place and jotted down a few key words. Finally he linked them together. Once the details, the logic and the plausibility all held up, he could turn it into a readable story, a little cheeky and easy to picture yourself in.

You will rarely hear commenters tell these stories in real life.

"Dynamic Superman Superfly" has posted more than 4,700 comments in three years, which makes him a big name among commenters. But he prefers to keep that identity hidden. On the phone, he refused to talk to us about his formidable commenter persona. "Apart from getting some information, and the time spent getting it, commenting has made almost no difference to my life," he said.

Here, at least, they talk as loudly as they can.

Under the story "Indian Scholar: Indian English Is the Purest in the World; British and American Accents Are Too Strong," commenters mimicked Indian-accented English and made up words like "Aglee," "me doo" and "velly velly absolutely." Under "Man Whose Name Contains a Rare Character Has Never Managed to Buy a Train Ticket Online," they answered with strings of equally rare characters of their own.

In January 2015, China's national football team met Australia in the quarterfinals of the Asian Cup. Under stories about the match, several "buildings" rose past 60 floors. One comment read: "Last night this old man studied the stars and counted on his fingers. Our empire's football team faces grave danger, unless..... the second floor admits he's a fucking idiot. Then disaster will surely turn to fortune, and we will march into the semifinals."

A reply soon came from the comment box marked "2" in the top right-hand corner, the one everyone calls "the second floor": "For the boys of the national team, I'll do it. Listen carefully: I! AM! A! FUCKING! IDIOT!"

So what changed the public intellectuals?

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that the commercialization of the media would transform the structure of the public sphere. "The critical debate of a reading public" would gradually give way to consumers "exchanging tastes and preferences," turning a "culture-debating public" into a "culture-consuming public."

That is what happened.

Pi Tuo, a former NetEase reporter, says he knew exactly what kind of post would take off. "Sensational subjects like GMOs, traditional Chinese medicine, the government, the Cultural Revolution, regional stuff: they never miss." One week his section fell short of its required comment count, so on the last day he ran an article about LGBT issues, and his numbers were saved.

This is, above all, a news portal that lives on advertising, and high clicks and reply counts are never a bad thing. But day after day of this, people more or less forgot why they came here in the first place.

"Qin Shou," a physics researcher, often copies the best comments over to a Douban group called "I Just Love Reading NetEase Comments 2.0." Comments once brought news of the outside world, and rare excitement, into his fairly monotonous life. But over time he came to "read just the headline and then the comments. I hardly read the article anymore." He admits he still visits NetEase out of habit, or for a laugh.

"Follow Your Heart" says he has gone numb on NetEase. "I used to answer every insult. When someone cursed me, I got angry and cursed back. Now I'm used to it. I still reply, but I don't really get angry anymore."

"Peachy Wang" has simply decided that only a pile-on makes you feel part of things; anything less feels distant. Under one difficult science-and-technology story, he remembers a comment that read: "How am I supposed to trash this one? Waiting here, urgently." The one thing he stays away from is regional attacks. As a native of Henan, he has often felt they were attacks on him personally.

Old NetEase in-jokes such as "regional dogs," "Japan-and-America cats," "50 cents" and "Little Li," the name for timid, yes-man officials, have also become the site's way of laughing at itself. The first kind became "badges" that users can pin on one another when replying; the second, Little Li, appears on the comment section's 404 error page. "The Second-Floor Law" became part of NetEase's own marketing too, since most people had already embraced the joke that "the second floor has always produced XX."

"The quality of NetEase comments has really plunged in the past couple of years," says "Little Bunny's Uncle," who has been using NetEase since 2003. As the portals lost ground and more competitors appeared, NetEase quietly stepped up deleting posts and closing comment sections, to keep the platform from being destabilized. That is why the comments were closed on a story titled "The Biggest 'Map Cannon': Northerners Don't Feel the Cold." NetEase's explanation: to "prevent water-meter checks," and to curb regional attacks, personal attacks and spam.

NetEase is not the only thing that has changed.

The standard Jacoby set out in The Last Intellectuals, "professional expertise, a view of the world, a sense of social responsibility, action to change society, and the courage to lead it," is changing too.

What today's public intellectuals still hold on to is the surface part of it, which may also be the important part: go where the crowd is and speak your mind. But they also understand, deeply, what Habermas described: "cultural criticism" is being replaced by "cultural consumption."

"Yes, I'm a public intellectual. I'm consuming politics, I'm consuming current affairs, I'm consuming whatever's hot," Han Han wrote in a blog post titled "I Want to Be a Stinking Public Intellectual."

Zhihu, a site that originally wanted experts to answer questions, is also stretching the meaning of "knowledge." Pop psychology and relationship questions have caught on there, often answered with clever stories and jokes. They quickly produced opinion leaders in these fields and made the platform popular with a far wider audience.

NetEase is a miniature of all this. It encourages people to speak up early, ideally with something unexpected and forceful. Through what Habermas called "cultural interactivity," public intellectuals now appear quickly, on top of the "buildings" that the times and the platforms have raised together.

A dictionary of NetEase comment customs and culture

1. Comment (gentie):

NetEase's own word for its comments, written with a different character from the usual word for replies posted online. Its history: December 3, 2003, NetEase Comments launch. February 24, 2005, the first "building" goes up on NetEase. January 20, 2007, comments begin showing location based on IP address. December 30, 2008, the "No Comments, No News" special goes live.

2. The Second-Floor Law:

"The second floor has always produced idiots." Some users, in a rush to grab the second floor, either blindly echo the post above or reply in haste without understanding what is going on. What they say comes out stupid or ridiculous, and they get laughed at. That is the Second-Floor Law in its basic form.

3. Map cannon:

Originally a weapon in the Super Robot Wars game series that hits a whole area of the map; later a general term for any weapon or spell of mass destruction. Online, a "map cannon" means a verbal attack on a whole group. It usually refers to people who attack whole regions, or to condemning a whole group for what a few of its members did, typically writing off everyone from a place because some people from there said something.

4. Mouth cannon:

Someone who keeps making claims he cannot live up to; in plain words, a braggart. In ACG (anime, comics and games) culture, it is a common "skill" of heroes who use their quick tongues, by appeals to feeling and reason or by sheer shouting, to inflict psychological damage on their enemies.

5. High-level trolling:

Veiled content that mocks or ridicules people or events indirectly. Under NetEase stories, users often use high-level trolling, in a single comment or a whole "building," to voice their discontent.

6. Martian netizens:

While building its IP address database, NetEase found some IP ranges with no location, or marked only "not allocated by ICANN." It calls users from these ranges "NetEase Martian netizens." Because these addresses cannot be identified, and few users actually use them (not counting wrongly matched addresses), Martians appear very rarely. When one does, it causes a stir and some admiration.

7. This Old Monk, This Poor Nun / Little Li / the Bureau Chief:

"This Old Monk" and "This Poor Nun" stand for the disadvantaged. They often grumble about social injustice, in a mocking, funny, sharp way. Little Li stands for the low-level government clerk, always meek and obliging. The Bureau Chief stands for officials, and talks with pompous self-importance.

Which comments were hits on NetEase over the past year?

"Great, I support this, mighty, now there's hope":

Comments like these often turn up under political news. On NetEase they usually mean the opposite of what they say.

"Open up, delivery":

When police went to arrest a suspect, they would usually invent an excuse to get the door opened. It started with "checking the water meter," and over time grew into many versions, such as "Open up, delivery, checking the electricity meter." On NetEase, whenever someone posts something too outspoken, someone else replies: "Open up, SF Express delivery." It means "you know too much," as a joke.

"Hello, is that 110? Things are getting out of control here":

A common reply, invoking China's police hotline, that commenters use to cool things down when a discussion gets heated.

"I owe Qvod a membership fee":

Under NetEase stories last January about Qvod's trial on pornography charges, commenters sided overwhelmingly with Wang Xin, its founder. Users played on emotion by telling stories of their own history with Qvod and reminiscing about it. Slogans from that time included "They've arrested the gutsiest man in China" and "Qvod has fallen, but losers don't cry: Caoliu still stands."

What kinds of commenter are there?

Star commenters can be divided into "poets," the "witty and sharp party," the "alter-ego party," "Brother Persistent," the "Li Jufu party" and others.

"Poets":

People who write poetry in comments. The well-known poet "Li Bubai y," for instance, wrote under a recent story, "High School Student Lin Jiawen, Author of a History Monograph, Dies After Battling Depression": "Here only the Huangyi Tower remains," a twist on the Tang dynasty line "Here only the Yellow Crane Tower remains." "Mingqian Maofeng" is known for rewriting song lyrics. There are also organized groups of poets (some even meet offline) who often team up to build floors.

"The witty and sharp party":

They post short comments and jokes from unusual angles. For example, the user "Follow Your Heart," under a story about "a younger sister who cared for her bedridden older brother for years," explained it as a result of the relaxed two-child policy. His reasoning: only now that a second child is allowed can "a younger sister caring for her older brother" fit family-planning rules, and so be talked about at all.

"The alter-ego party":

They often pose as particular people in the news and jump into the comments. Take "Quick-Pee Han Chong": reading his comments, you find that "this man has worked as a waiter and been a big boss, studied abroad in the West one moment and hunted in Africa the next." Every comment reads like personal experience, and anyone who doesn't know him might believe it.

"Brother Persistent":

Posts the same comment every day, or comments every day under the same story.

"The Li Jufu party":

They take a news event apart point by point and then reach a conclusion, and they cling stubbornly to their views. ("Li Jufu" is a pun on "There's reasoning and evidence. Convinced?")

(Drillbit, Sun Meng and Pi Tuo are pseudonyms. All other names are real names or NetEase and Douban user IDs.)

Cover image from roarmag