App Profile: 豆瓣

rooftin

Rating: 5/5

I use this app for 7 years and still absolutely love it. It’s like the combination of a lot of things: IMDb, goodreads, Yelp, music radio, etc. in order to provide a best possible place for any kind of people to know the basic information, leave comments, and to rate anything. I particularly love that I can not only find & add books / albums descriptions which are less trodden to common readers, but though which I would discover a actually quite big rare-book-lovers community, which is precious. Yet it’s extremely helpful for scholars who conduct research on East Asian studies. Without Douban my academic life would be so dry and less creative. So thank you and wish DB a better future.

frog's mum

Rating: 1/5

I’ve been using Douban for a while now, and I’m increasingly disappointed by how the platform seems to handle malicious low ratings. It’s clear that many genuinely good works are being intentionally rated low by certain users or groups, and unfortunately, Douban’s algorithm doesn’t seem to address this issue properly. What’s more concerning is that the final scores of these works often feel suspiciously predetermined—there are noticeable discrepancies between what’s shown on Douban and what independent data analysis (like my own scripts in Python) would suggest based on user reviews. It gives the impression that scores are somehow manipulated or at least not reflecting genuine user sentiment. This unfair scoring system ends up burying good works and skewing recommendations. Douban used to be a place for discovering authentic reviews and finding gems, but lately, it feels like the playing field has become anything but fair. I hope Douban takes this issue seriously and finds a better way to handle malicious rating behavior and score calculation.

ten-year Douban User

Rating: 5/5

For me, the most impressive part of Douban is that it really respects its users. Except Douban, no any other website in China allows a user to totally delete account. And Douban never force or seduce user to provide one’s phone number and other personal information, until the authority asked them to do. Douban also is the last main website that provide RSS feed, which I used very often. Apart from these stuffs, I really love Douban’s atmosphere, in which there is no one who can be dominant with huge fans and every one here seems more independent and has a different view for this world. I really appreciate them and Douban.