The Chinese Social Network, Dauban, was born in a different era for both the internet as a whole and the internet as it exists

on the Chinese mainland. The best international comparison for Doban is probably Reddit, which is a

network of message boards with different focuses, topics, and regions, and thus wildly different in

nature and social composition from page to page, despite being predicated on the same software and hosted at the same website.

Doban is also a fairly streamlined simple setup

based on the generic online forum model.

But like Reddit, that model has allowed it to serve a huge variety of people

with a huge variety of passions and pastimes and has sometimes led to

controversy as a consequence. Doban differs from Reddit, however, in that it was built to be a

site for fans of various sorts of media, from books to music to film, to activities and businesses

around China. The idea was to create almost a micro-blogging service where folks would come to see if a movie

showing at their local theater was worth the money, or a local restaurant was worth checking out,

and that focus eventually led to Doban's reputation for being a legit place to find real reviews about things, positive and negative and neutral.

It also became a place to discuss other topics, though,

including things like fandoms related to fictional or real-life characters and gossip associated with celebrities.

One of Doban's most popular forums, in fact, is the Doban Goose Group, which grew out of a precursor

group called Gossip Is Coming, which was started on the site in 2010, and which expanded from covering

news and gossip related to a popular Taiwanese talk show to showcasing and stimulating conversation

about all sorts of people and entertainment properties.

The Goose Group eventually caught mainstream attention when it began to host not just gossip,

but also news about sexual misconduct amongst celebrities and misconduct in general by companies,

which the group then protested and boycotted and generally

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