Author Ren Dongmei Associate Researcher at the Institute of Taiwan, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
If the bikiji Industrial Workshop (PTT), which was born in 1995, allows Taiwanese people in their 25 to 40s to speak a common Internet language, then for the young generations such as high school students and college students in Taiwan, the common online social media memory may be gradually shifting from PTT to Dcard.
In 2011, Lin Yuqin and Jian Qinyou, students of the Department of Information Management of Taiwan University, launched a social networking website called "Dcard" based on the university's creative entrepreneurship course courses. The concept at the beginning was very simple, it was just an online dating platform for college students. Users of this website will receive an anonymous invitation card paired by the system (that is, Dcard) at 12:00 every midnight. If you are interested in knowing each other, you can submit a friend invitation. Those who receive the friend invitation must agree to the invitation before midnight that day, so that both parties can become friends. Once they miss it, they will pass by and miss each other forever. Dcard's "D" represents "Destiny", which means fate. Dcard refers to a card that is drawn every midnight and has only one chance. The next year, Dcard added the campus chat room function, and later launched the forum function, allowing users to post and leave comments on discussions anonymous (or only reveal the school name), and then evolved to the current comprehensive forum. At first, Dcard only opened registration for students from Taiwan University and Political University, and members must provide real names, personal photos and school mailbox certification registration. Later, registration for other universities in Taiwan was successively opened. Users can browse, post, and respond to other people's articles on Dcard's website or through the App. The forum is also divided into different discussion versions according to the content. Each school also has its own school version, and only students of this school can post and leave messages on it.
As the platform users are more and more, Dcard officially established the company Dika Technology in 2015, constantly launching new functions to give users more diverse experiences. At the end of 2016, users drew more than 150 million cards on Dcard, and a new article was born every 10 seconds. In 2021, Dcard opens applications to non-college students and launches mobile registration. As of 2021, Dcard has 5 million registered members in Taiwan, with 16 million non-repeated visitors per month and 1.6 billion monthly views. After laying a solid foundation on the island, Dcard also began to enter overseas markets such as Hong Kong and Japan. In April 2021, Dcard launched the international version of "Dtto" in Japan, named from Italian Detto and English Ditto, representing finding people and things that resonate with each other. The company has expanded from less than ten people at the beginning to more than 200 employees on and off the island, and has a team in Japan.
According to a survey on social networking website behavior of Taiwan’s FIND Center (Digital Transformation Institute) in 2017, among users aged 12 to 24, 48% have visited Dcard, second only to social media predecessors Facebook, LINE, Youtube, Instagram and PTT. Dcard product manager Huai Yu privately revealed that "the results are definitely better than the survey's figures." 2016 was a year when Dcard grew very fast, with growth of at least 5 to 10 times. After Dcard opened more school mailboxes to register, 169 colleges and universities across Taiwan have joined. In the future, in terms of the business direction of the forum, the next trend that the team is optimistic about is audio and video, and will think about how to increase the richness of the platform's content based on text. After registering Dcard with
, users will see the system invitation by opening the mobile app. They will first select five topics of interest, and then use artificial intelligence calculation to present personalized recommendation posts. If you want to break away from the areas you are concerned about, you can also switch to a page sorted by popularity and observe the overall discussion trends of Dcard users based on this. A college student who started using Dcard ten years ago, even though he has been in society for a while, with marriage and children, he can still find resonance in this online platform with nearly 500 topic billboards.
In 2021, Dcard not only discussed the increase in billboards, but also the user group has also been opened from college students to alumni and people in the society. In recent years, it has also launched the "Good Products Research Room" e-commerce services, selling food, makeup, life, clothing and 3C products, etc.In order to have more interaction with users, Dcard has also launched various online activities, such as "Come on Friends for Half-Mature Adults", inviting public figures in their early 30s and influential to the younger generation, posting on Dcard to share their deep memories and choices in their 20s, as well as the Dcard billboards they like to browse, etc., to attract more users' attention. Lin Yuqin, founder and CEO of
Dcard, was listed on the Forbes magazine's annual "30 Under 30" celebrity list in in 2020. At the age of 28, he led his team to create a native social platform in Taiwan. The extremely high proportion of young members have rich discussions on the platform, which also makes Dcard one of the important media that cannot be ignored for observing the ideas of Taiwan's 18-35-year-old ethnic groups.
