It is December 31, 2019. A spokesperson at Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control
was browsing a popular Taiwanese website called PTT.
He came across a post showing a WeChat screenshot from a doctor in Wuhan.
In the WeChat thread, the Chinese doctor mentioned a strange new virus. The post
would give Taiwanese officials early warning of the unfolding events in our strange new world.
Most Taiwanese use Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter like all the rest of us. But PTT is a unique part of Taiwan’s Internet culture.
I had no idea it existed before coming here but if you sneak a peek on people’s phones while riding
the MRT you will often see its distinctive code-like font and text only interface.
In this video I am going to talk about PTT, how it works, its problems and more.
PTT is a bulletin board system ("BBS") hosted and administered in Taiwan. It
was founded in September 1995 by National Taiwan University student Tu Yi-Chin in his dorm room.
The name PTT is said to be a reference to Tu himself. He called himself Panda Tu because he
stayed up so late at night. So Panda Tu or PT was the original idea for the BBS name.
But since PT seemed a bit short, he decided to add another T.
It later got a backronym, “Professional Technology Temple”.
Now, a BBS is kind of like a precursor to the modern browser-based internet. Instead of using a
browser, you would access a BBS back then through a terminal over a phone line connection. Once you
log into the server you can read articles, post comments, and exchange messages with other users.
Once you are in, you can browse through many different "boards".
The most popular is called "Gossiping", but there are boards for stock analysis,
the NBA, politics, e-shopping and more. Someone submits a thread title, some
commentary and a few links. PTT users can then post comments underneath. So yes, like Reddit.
In the rest of the world, BBS are largely relegated to hobby trinkets for nostalgia
value. But in Taiwan PTT is widespread, used by youths and elders alike.
Today, PTT has over 20,000 boards, 1.5 million users, and up to 150,000 concurrent connections
at peak hours. The software is open sourced and run on the National Taiwan University network.
At the time of its founding, PTT was just one of several hundred
other BBS sites in Taiwan, including the official NTU BBS
"Coconut Trees". It was easy to set up. All you needed was a PC running Linux software.
Most BBS sites in those years had university students as their founders and "managing
staff" (mods). When those founders graduated and moved on to the real world,
those BBS servers lost their users and closed down. PTT was different in that their managing
staff came from the computer science department, and were able to establish a tradition of
"passing on" their managing staff rights to a new generation of university students.
And because the majority of the managing staff were actual computer programmers
at the best university in Taiwan, they were able to make modifications and improvements
to the software infrastructure that other BBS could not.
It looks quaint and old-fashioned, but the PTT software itself is quite sophisticated
beneath the surface. It no longer connects through phone lines but instead uses a more
modern network protocol called Telnet. It is also quite robust,
able to support tens of thousands of users. As any programmer knows, that’s hard to do.
Early on, PTT's computer science department users entered into a rivalry against Zoo - the
BBS used by the neighboring NTU Department of Electrical Engineering. At the start, Zoo had
the advantage of 250 MB more RAM, befitting for a department focused on hardware. But PTT's staff
was unable to accept that hardware was better than software and so strove to write better code.
This friendly university competition helped advance PTT's feature functions and capabilities.
It was the first BBS to achieve a thousand concurrent users, and soon hosted more. By the
mid-2000s, it had established itself as the BBS of choice for Taiwan's internet-connected youth.
Kind of like Facebook, PTT grew out of Taiwan's preeminent university and first spread through
its young elites. They continued to browse PTT long after they graduated.
But unlike with Facebook, its founder never centralized or corporatized their product.
Reddit internet history is riddled with infamous events that users can remember off the top of
their head. For instance, there was the time Redditors thought they found the Boston Bombers.
And there was the time when 75% of Reddit "went dark", whatever that means.
PTT has had their own notable "big events", times when everyone logged
onto the server to follow or track some huge event in Taiwanese history.
Five of the top ten are baseball events,
when the Taiwanese baseball team was competing in the World Baseball Classic.
But the top two events in PTT history - meaning the most people ever on one board - were because
of Taiwanese political events. The first took place during the 2018 magistrate and mayoral
elections, where over 100,000 people logged on to Gossiping to follow the results of the Taipei
mayoral election. The second is the historical 2014 Sunflower movement, when students invaded
and occupied the Executive Yuan. A hundred thousand went to the Gossiping board then too.
How to best describe PTT culture? Hm. I think the best metaphor is to
draw a connection to Reddit culture. Redditors (with a few exceptions) are
often described as having very left-wing opinions that differ from the mainstream.
PTT people can be described as being similar. They express opinions that are critical of
the mainstream media and the current ruling government, regardless of who is in charge.
The Chinese is extremely difficult and brand new phrases are constantly being thrown out,
challenging Google Translate’s ability to keep up.
But for the most part, it is about saying shocking,
anti-mainstream things to get the most "internet points" - especially in the largest PTT board,
Gossiping. It is not rational nor logical. More like a market square
of people shouting crazy things at one another. Sounds like the Internet to me.
PTT threads regularly headline the mainstream media and government
organizations often review it from day to day for any breaking events. For many netizens,
it is the first source that they go to when it comes to new happenings in the world.
And as the anecdote at the start of this video indicates, that can have very real benefits.
But also because of this, like as with all social media networks, PTT
struggles with misinformation. Because most PTT users are largely anonymous,
it can be easy to churn the waters with fake news and FUD. The Wikipedia cites a
number of these incidents in their article about PTT. Go check that out some time.
Some of this information comes from within Taiwan itself. For instance,
public relations firms for political parties (from all sides, mind you) commenting and spreading fake
news about a candidate during an election year. My favorite is about Tsai Ing-wen's PhD at the London
School of Economics, which did not start on PTT but was posted and went viral there. To this day,
I still get comments from people telling me about a conspiracy to hide the "truth" of that one.
And then there is the more nefarious stuff. Stuff coming from outside the country,
where third actors come in and try to undermine confidence in society
with false news at critical times. Think Russia and the American 2016 elections.
One incident occurred in 2018 when a PTT message circulated about Honduran officials visiting
Beijing, spreading fear about the country severing diplomatic ties to Taiwan. The post was traced
to an IP address in Beijing. The Firewall might occasionally mysteriously unblock PTT at critical
times, unleashing a deluge of “patriotic” users bringing in fresh new perspectives so to speak.
These incidents lead to huge flame wars on the big PTT boards. The flame wars then make
the news, and further spread the FUD amongst the populace. FUD by the way means fear, uncertainty,
and doubt - if you were wondering. You can see how this kind of stuff can quickly get out of hand.
In response to a particularly bad spate of misinformation incidents, PTT closed registrations
to new users for some time. People can only browse threads. Without an account, they cannot comment.
PTT reopened registrations after the elections were over.
Misinformation is not only a technical problem.
It is also a social problem stemming from a populace unprepared for the internet age and
lacking of trust in their government. "Fixing it", if such a thing is at all possible,
requires not only coordinated efforts from both government and business, but also increased
personal responsibility on all of our parts to do our informational due diligence as citizens.
For more on this I recommend reading the work and statements of Audrey Tang,
the current Taiwanese minister.
I do not use PTT myself but I know a lot of people who do. When you ask Taiwanese about it,
they might sheepishly say that they read it from time to time but do not write in it.
I do enjoy the memes that get shared to me at times though.
I am fascinated by this tiny bit of Taiwanese internet culture
and hope it continues to persist over time. One of the things that the rise of Google,
Facebook and Twitter have done in this world is to essentially pave over small niches like
these. For all of its drawbacks and issues, PTT is a pretty cool thing.
Go check it out some day. Download the app if you can read Chinese.
The one you see here is my preference. If not, access it on the web. You can try to use Google
Translate to wrangle its wild Chinese wordplay. Likely won't work but worth a shot. Try anyway
and dive head first into this unique bit of Taiwanese internet culture.