UPDATE: We emailed Livid after posting this interview, and he shared with us the sad news that Livid is shutting down V2EX. We posted on his announcement here.
One must be a great person to be able to develop a good skill (on something).
-Livid, Jan. 5, 2008 @ Chamate Jing An Temple
We met Livid Torvalds (Liu Xin, 刘昕) for the first time this January. He has blogged on his personal site Livid’s Paranoia since 2005. I picked up the number on his blog as on Feb. 2, 2008. The blog had been viewed for “3,388,186 (# of estimated site page view) +3,067,590 (# of estimated RSS aggregator view) times, average 3727.38 times per article” and he posts “5.68 new articles per week” on average. This is an amazing number for an independent site without Google Adwords. Livid is also famous for his community project called “V-the-number-two-E-X” (which according to Livid is now blocked at the keyword level with the Great Firewall (aka Net Nanny on Danwei). We will call it “the V project” in this interview.
Livid seemed to be very familiar with the tea house Chamate where we met. He ordered a drink without looking at the menu. He surfed Internet on his unlocked iPhone (one of 400,000 iPhones in China) and showed a webpage of his project’s Community Guideline to us. He speaks English very fluently.
Here is a summary of the conversation between Livid & CNReviews (Elliott Ng and Min Guo).
CN Reviews: What are you busy at recently? I noticed that you are working for 6.cn from your facebook profile.
Livid: (giving us his name card) Can you tell what’s the special about this business card? (We couldn’t figure it out) There is no title in this business card! I am still “free” while working within this company. I met the CEO also in Chamate, I respect him and want to work with a great person like him.
CN Reviews: We know you from “the V project”, Wang Jian Shuo mentioned it a few times on his blog. What does it mean?
Livid: It has two meanings: 1. Way to Explore. 2. Way to Extreme. (V = way)
Way to explore: I found there is no place to go in the Chinese Internet world. Why? For example, if you go to the major (main stream) portals/websites, you will see most of those contents are trying to appeal to human being’s lowest part. These are not something I want to explore. The V project is for people who want to explore other things.
To keep up our curiosity, we have to keep exploring the new things. This is part of our human condition, a part of human evolution. I believe that all things are to be born and then to fade away soon. We have a deep urge to keep exploring.
CN Reviews: Is this like Digg?
Livid: No. Digg is just about what is popular, and mostly about technology. I think this “Way to Explore” is more like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an ideal way to explore and organize new knowledge, things and ideas. I want to create a space for people to keep exploring via discussion and sharing.
Author Note: There is an interesting difference in Western views of Wikipedia vs. Chinese views. To Livid, Wikipedia represents freedom to explore…a project that shares knowledge via the community. In the West, Wikipedia just represents knowledge and has less of a feeling of exploration.
CN Reviews: What do you mean by “Way to [be] Extreme”?
Livid: Way to Extreme: I like the style to push things to the end, to its extremeness. Only by this means, I feel satisfied and happy. I took this term from “Extreme Sports” and “Extreme Programming.”
CN Reviews: When did you start the V project?
Livid:
- 2005/10: It was started as an internal project of kijiji.cn and I was responsible to build an open source platform.
- 2006/03: It was official launched as “Project Babel”. People can download the open source code that the V project is based on to build their own communities. So far, there are around 1,000 “Project Babel” on the Internet. For me, year 2006 is a year of happiness and pureness.(for focusing on programming and helping more people to use the source code).
- 2007/01: It was blocked for the first time.
- 2007/02: A few VCs approached me to talk about this project
- 2007/05 – 07: Some new features introduced: group blogs, built-in “Creative Commons” license to 9 original templates; Gtalk status update widget.
- 2007/09: It was blocked for the second time.
- Now: It is a keyword in the list of GFW.
CN Reviews: Tell us more about why it was blocked?
Livid: A journalist from Life Weekly (三联生活周刊, a magazine found in 1920s) magazine interviewed me in Dec. 2006. A few days after the story was published in the first issue of 2007, on Jan. 11 2007, the net wires connected to the servers were ordered to be unplugged (Livid’s notes in Chinese here) and all the data were not accessible.
CN Reviews: Why?
Livid: It was because of the report. I didn’t go to college and dropped out of high school, but I was able to learn to program, build a community and develop an open source project all by myself without going to college. The “related authority” thought my website was distributing ideas that would create doubts on the current education system. More and more people raising a question like “should I go to college” is not what this authority would want to see.
CN Reviews: Who are the community’s members in your site?
Livid: Mostly students who 1) feel that they don’t know where to go (in Internet) and 2) want to build communities by themselves; 3) who are not Lusers.(Wikipedia: a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. ) They want a community of Truth, Love and Realness (v.s. Rumor, Hatred and Fake). Can you believe that a super popular internet game recently launched is “successful” because its rule is to “kill more people to create more hatred to game up”? For example, the ranking of a kingdom is calculated by the number of victories in wars, and the murderer/killer is rewarded with double points whenever she/he killes a person. Of course, you can through in CASHES to buy your weapons and status. This is not the place my community members want to go.
CN Reviews: What are the most popular topics in the communities?
Livid: Whether of not to drop off school, or go to college.
CN Reviews: How would you describe the V project in the Internet world in China?
Livid: A small mirror of China Internet.
Author Notes:
The ONE hour conversation with Livid was too short for us. We see Livid as a small mirror of Chinese new generation bloggers and want to understand him as a “Post 80s” (80后, bā líng hòu) Chinese geek via the first big project he started. Of course, Livid bears many other tags, such as “single child”, “drop out”, “freelance” “creative” and even “mac”.
He feels disappointed that there is no way to access more knowledge. Wikipedia is great, but it is not accessible now. He believes that a person must to be a GOOD person in order to master a skill. I know there are exceptions but I lean towards to agree with him, or I wish what he believes is true.
“More than one-fifth of the world’s population is children of the 80s, The post-80s generation of China has alternately been dismissed as emotional and self-centered, or lauded as passionate and creative.” CRI said. I don’t want to and don’t know how to categorize Livid, yet. I sincerely wish Livid find more happiness and satisfaction in his new projects.
Apendix:
Name: Liu Xin 刘昕
ID Used: Livid Torvalds | Lividecay | Castalia
DOB: May 31st, 1985
Home Town: China -> Yunnan -> Kunming
Music: Opeth | Lacrimosa | Rhapsody | The Doors | Nirvana | Smashing Pumpkins | Suede | Lube | Beatles | Dido
OS: Mac OS X
Language: Mandarin | English | Deutsch
Drinks: Starbucks Natie
Hobbies: Literature, painting, programming and 读秒
High school: Kunming No. 3 High School, Middle Schools of Yunnan Normal University
Wish: Get yself satisfied everyday
Spiritual Leader: Myself
LIvid is only 6 days younger than me, but his is so successfully on programming, his V2EX is so famous although it’s blocked in China, but his new project, which called Footbig, will be more and more popular in China. He is really a genius in Programming and web design & development.
Individuals like Livid are inspirations for others. At the same time, individuals like Livid are reminders of how woefully inadequate one is in comparison. Your mileage may vary and your sentiment may change with the moment.
That said, I admire the main thrust of what he presents v/duece/ex as (I can’t even anonymouse to it right now) as it certainly reminds me of my younger idealist days when a friend and I purchased a domain (www.modernvoice.com – not us, but free plug for a domain name I previously birthed) and pursued a similar enlightened notion that there are people who prfer to operate higher on Maslow’s hierarchy.
Then life happened and I became irreversibly cynical (or painfully realistic, depending on whether the glass is half-empty or half-full) about humanity.
But here’s the problem with the superlatives employed with regards to v/duece/ex that I feel compelled to point out because I’m something of a resident grump and critic: Who are the “people?” Who are the so-called “people who want to explore other things?”
Wang Jian Shuo calls it “a pure technical forum full of geeks.” To be sure, they’re often inquisitive types who enjoy trying new things and (apparently) pushing the boundaries (heh, to the extreme, baby). They’re also great at segregating themselves into intellectual walled gardens of technocracy (ironically, a concept awkwardly at odds with and exemplified by the very Chinese government that banned the hell out of v/duece/ex).
What’s the difference between “lusers” (heh, go MIT) and “the teeming ignorant masses” the CCP invokes to preclude the expansion of freedoms of the nation’s citizens?
One final question: What’s a Starbucks “natie?” Latte?
Kai, to your final question, I’m a monkey who spells ridiculous English because I think I’m in higher class when I spell English.
Livid, I understand you may be going through a tumultuous period of self-reflection at this time so the questions I brought up may not be as worthy of your attention than long walks on the beach…barefooted. But should you ever return to dedicating 8 hours of your day to sitting in front of the computer with the intent to discuss the possible (but interesting) contradictions in your ideological worldview, these comment fields are always open to you and I’ll do my best not to point out your spelling errors (though I seriously searched to see if “natie” was a new Starbucks drink).
Just promise me you won’t get your buddies to hack my bank account or something.