Like a great many of his contemporaries, Li Cheng-te (李政德) frequently logs in to two social networks to keep up with the latest developments among his friends, family and peers as well as in wider Taiwanese society. The first of these, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Facebook, the carefully crafted U.S.-based site that has grown over the past decade to become a near ubiquitous part of modern culture across much of the world. The other is PTT, a local text-based platform that has evolved relatively little since its establishment more than 20 years ago, yet retains a prominent position in Taiwan’s online landscape.
Li’s interest in the social networks is as much professional as personal. He is currently an assistant research fellow in the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s foremost scientific institution. Specializing in social network analysis and big data mining, he studies how information spreads online. According to Li, the enduring popularity of the comparatively low-tech PTT despite the emergence of global platforms like Facebook highlights Taiwanese netizens’ desire to engage in comprehensive discussions on local issues. “Facebook has a mechanism for screening posts according to the attention they receive from a user’s friends,” he says, “whereas PTT provides a platform that clearly presents different, and often divergent, opinions in the order in which they are added.”
From its humble beginnings as an intranet forum for National Taiwan University (NTU) students, PTT has grown into the biggest bulletin board system (BBS) in Taiwan and one of the largest sites in the world that uses the Telnet protocol, which enables text-oriented communication through a virtual terminal connection. Created in 1995 by Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾), then a sophomore in NTU’s Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering and now a researcher for Microsoft Corp. in the U.S., PTT has also become perhaps the most influential online platform in the nation.
Bahamut organized a concert of music from video games in November last year in Taipei City. (Photo courtesy of Oneup Network Corp.)
The origins of BBS sites in Taiwan can be traced back to a Ministry of Education initiative launched in the mid-1980s to establish online academic networks at universities. During the subsequent decade, hundreds of such platforms emerged on campuses across the country. Designed to give students easy access to educational resources, these intranet systems quickly became popular communication tools.
PTT is not the only BBS site that has grown from an internal university system into a widely used online platform. Another notable example in this regard is Bahamut, a student intranet forum for discussing video games developed by Sega Chen (陳建弘) in 1996 that has evolved into a successful commercial venture and one of the biggest online communities in Taiwan. When he designed the site, Chen was a postgraduate student of computer science at National Central University in northern Taiwan’s Taoyuan County, since upgraded to the special municipality of Taoyuan City. Bahamut, which is named for a winged dragon in a popular Japanese video game, initially focused solely on video game-related topics but over time has expanded to include forums on other subjects such as animation and comic books.
In 1999, Chen launched a website based on Bahamut, establishing Oneup Network Corp. in Taipei the following year to manage its operations. “My company emerged during a period when Internet businesses were booming across the world,” says Chen, CEO of Oneup and a board member of the Taiwan Internet and E-Commerce Association, which was established in Taipei in 2012. “The company wasn’t really affected by the subsequent collapse of the dot-com bubble as the Internet environment continued to mature in Taiwan and the growth of online gaming attracted a large number of users to the site.”
While Chen transformed his creation into a commercial venture, PTT has remained a nonprofit organization and is now administered by a student association at NTU called the Electronic BBS Research Society. Today, PTT and Bahamut, each of which boasts more than 1 million active registered users, are the two largest domestically developed discussion and social networking platforms in Taiwan, though they are far from the only such sites.
The popularity of Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je, center, among avid social network users was among the reasons for his election victory in November 2014. (Photo by Chin Hung-hao)
Numerous other networks have popped up over the years that, like Bahamut, focus on a specific area of interest. Among these is Mobile01, a website established in 2000 and now operated by Taipei-based Yong Sheng Technology Co. that hosts discussions primarily about consumer and lifestyle topics such as electronics products and interior decorating. According to Li, who earned a doctoral degree from the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia at NTU, the key to developing sites such as these is to focus on serving the needs of their core communities. For instance, “Bahamut provides a neutral environment for exchanges between gamers and relevant business operators, and as a result has earned considerable devotion from its users,” the researcher says.
Chen points out that he did not have a long-term vision when he established his online network, but rather decided to let it grow naturally. He has been delighted to see the site’s user base expand not just in scale but scope. Once dominated by male college students, the community now includes people of all ages and professional backgrounds. “Video games are like big movie productions in that they involve people from various fields such as art design, music and writing,” he says. “Also they’re very engaging as there’s no standard answer to the question of how to play a game. These factors encourage debate among players.”
Although Bahamut and PTT were founded around two decades ago at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, their influence has only grown over the years. This is particularly true in the case of PTT, which has become a significant platform for political and social commentary in Taiwan.
The site’s founder Tu, whose username on the network is, appropriately, “PTT,” released a video statement last year congratulating it on its 20th anniversary and remarking on its ability to shape both attitudes and public policy. He noted that PTT is distinct from prominent Internet organizations such as Baidu, Facebook and YouTube in that it remains a nonprofit venture jointly administered by netizens. “Initially, it was simply a platform for online discussions, but has since evolved into a tool for mobilizing tens of thousands of people,” he said.
Members of the Sunflower Movement prepare to leave the Legislative Yuan on April 9, 2014 after occupying the building for several weeks. Locally developed social networks played an important role in promoting the protest campaign and mobilizing participants. (Photo by Central News Agency)
Li points out that PTT was previously a rather closed system, with anonymous users presenting various personal opinions and sending private messages. This began to change in the early 2010s when the platform launched an online version that enables people to share discussions from PTT on other social networking websites such as Facebook. “We’ve seen many examples where an issue being debated on the site has gained traction in Taiwanese society,” he says.
The ability of social networks such as PTT to influence Taiwan’s development was highlighted in March and April 2014 when thousands of people, many of them university students, gathered at the Legislative Yuan to protest against what they perceived as an attempt to rush through the ratification of a services trade pact between Taiwan and mainland China. Much of the debate regarding this issue among young people began on the site, and on March 23, 2014, during the peak of the student-led protests, PTT saw one of its boards, Gossiping, surpass 100,000 active users for the first time. The Sunflower Movement, named for the flowers carried by the protesters, resulted in the trade agreement being set aside until a supervisory mechanism for cross-strait negotiations can be established.
The influence of the online community was again felt in the November 2014 local-level elections in Taiwan, when Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), a physician and former head of the Department of Traumatology at NTU Hospital, was elected mayor of Taipei. Ko’s victory made him the first successful independent candidate in the two decades since the capital resumed staging popular elections for the office. Among the reasons for his win was his popularity with young voters, and in particular avid users of online forums and social networks.
In contrast, Ko’s main rival for the post, Sean Lien (連勝文), who set up an account on PTT in an effort to win over netizens, was fiercely criticized on the site. The scathing comments about Lien, the son of a former vice president of the Republic of China, were regularly featured in news reports concerning the election. In September 2014, the site’s prominence in the nation’s political landscape was highlighted when PTT presented live broadcasts on YouTube of its interviews with the three major hopefuls in the Taipei mayoral election, with the site’s community proposing questions for the candidates.
According to Li, developments such as these illustrate that discussions and interactions on online forums are promoting political engagement, particularly among the nation’s youth. This development reflects the original purpose behind the establishment of PTT and other online networks, which, as Tu put it in his video statement, is to give people the power to make their voices heard.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw