V2ex, founder Liu Xin Private prosecution

I've been fascinated with the online community since 2001.

I was a freshman at that time. We built our school's forum with a Perl CGI program called BBS3000. Later, when I was a sophomore, I had to go to another richer place. So I took the online community that I built before and took it to the new school to promote it. The community later named Epeta,peta was 10 of the 15-time party. Almost all of the students in the school have a network (at that time, the 56K dial-up) have registered the community, but also extended to the surrounding schools. At its peak, the community had almost 13000 registered users, almost all of them middle school students.

At the end of 2005, I worked for a project called Kijiji in Shanghai on EBay. I'm still fascinated by the online community. I started the development of Project Babel at that stage and opened the LAMP program to Google code in March 2006. I built the first generation of V2ex with Project Babel. Http://V2EX.com This domain comes from an inspiration--way to Explore--v2ex in the summer of 2005.

The V2EX has been running very smoothly over the past 2006 years, but at that time I did not make too many assumptions about the future of the site and felt that everything would be fine as long as it was able to keep accumulating.

At the end of 2006, the Triple Life Weekly interviewed me about V2ex. Then on the second day of the magazine listing, V2ex in Shanghai's server network cable was unplugged, ISP is http://1stChina.com, they gave me the answer is "received the notice of superior authorities, http://V2EX.com the server's network must be immediately unplugged." So, no one knows the exact reason. Then V2ex ran on a server in the United States, and by February 2008 I closed the first generation because I didn't feel the momentum needed to keep the site going.

But I'm still fascinated by the concepts of online communities and the accumulation of information.

Now you see this v2ex on April 25, 2010. As a webmaster, I know the difficult to do the site, technical aspects, and those who are not technical aspects. So the new V2EX employs a new technology architecture Google App Engine, which allows the community to now run on thousands of Google servers. I believe App Engine is a perfect ultimate technology, and all new sites in the future should be running on similar architectures.

With this kind of technical assurance, the new V2ex can run smoothly on the track I envision for it-to keep accumulating really informative things and having fun in the process.

Frankly, most of the communities on the internet make me feel pretty boring. If you want to use any professional terminology to describe the words, it is that the signal-to-noise ratio is too low. I try to avoid boring myself, and I hate to deal with boring people or things. So what is boredom? Boredom seems to me to be, for example, to repeat what the whole nation has already known, or to sell other people's opinions without thinking about it. So I hope that when I'm doing an online community, the community is as boring as possible, with as much information as possible. This process inevitably makes some people uncomfortable, but I think that's the way it is--it's not about who you say yes, but who you say no.