Baidu Tieba

Baidu Tieba (Chinese: 百度贴吧; pinyin: bǎidù tiēbā; lit. 'Baidu Post Bar') is a Chinese online forum hosted by the Chinese web services company Baidu. Baidu Tieba was established on December 3, 2003 as an online community that heavily integrates Baidu's search engine. Users may search for a topic of interest forum known as a "bar" which will then be created if it does not exist already. It has been described as similar to Reddit, with the bars comparable to subreddits. The forum had over 300 million monthly active users during its peak in the 2010s, but the number of active users had declined by nearly 90% from its peak by the early 2020s. The number of its total registered user accounts exceeds 1.5 billion. As of June 6, 2021, Baidu Tieba has 23,254,173 communities.

Baidu Tieba uses forums called bars (which are analogous to Reddit subreddits) for users to socially interact. The slogan of Baidu Tieba is "Born for your interest" (Chinese: 为兴趣而生). These bars covered a variety of topics, such as celebrities, sports, science, films, comics, and books. More than one billion posts have been published in these bars. Some Baidu Tieba bars are large enough that they are comparable in influence to independent forums, while others are much smaller, perhaps only having a few users, and more resemble a personal blog.

In many cases the topic of discussion on Baidu Tieba forums has little to do with the title of the bar.

According to Alexa Internet in 2007, traffic to Baidu Tieba then made up more than 10% of the total traffic to Baidu properties.

Every bar can have up to three masters, thirty vice-masters, and ten video-masters to manage uploaded videos. Users can post, at most, ten pictures and one video quoted from certain broadcast websites. Users cannot edit any published posts. However, users can delete their own published posts and comments from other users on their posts. Beyond regular text posts, Baidu Tieba allows for the use of polls. Every bar has its own 2GB space for members to upload videos. If a bar is ranked within the top 500 of the official rankings, it has its own album.^{[citation needed]}

Like Reddit, Baidu Tieba forms are moderated by unpaid volunteers, who are allowed to set the rules of the bar, remove comments and posts considered disruptive, among other functions. Moderators can be removed by Baidu staff at will for reasons such as lack of activity, failure to grow the forum, or for exploiting their moderator position for commercial gain.

Prior to 2010, Baidu Tieba allowed anonymous posting, displaying only the IP address of the poster. Since then, users are required to have a registered account in order to post on bars. It is illegal in China to publish rumors which "threaten the social order", a crime punishable by up to 7 years jail. The onus is on service providers to police and remove such content. Baidu Tieba is no exception and warns users against the dangers of spreading false information, suggesting it is done for notoriety as well as commercial and political gain.

Baidu Tieba also has a consumer-to-consumer e-commerce sale function, which had led it to be likened to Craigslist.