Chapter 1

I used to be a moderator with 100,000 IDs under my control

I have already aged.

One day, I sent a selfie to an old friend group. A woman said, "I have always known you. Everyone thinks you were very popular when you were young, but in my opinion, you are more attractive now because I like your aging face more."

Every artsy young woman might call me shameless after reading my words. Yes, I imitated the opening part from the classic novel The Lover "by Marguerite Duras. I wasn't being disrespectful. I love Marguerite Duras more than you do. I love her nostalgic and somewhat pretentious tone, which seems to prove that I once passed by the most beautiful things in the world.

I first met Han Xu when I was only 25 years old.

Back in 2000, I was the moderator on the literary forum of Tencent. The online community started emerging around that time. Tencent took the lead in launching the instant messaging tool OICQ (later QQ), which instantly attracted half a million users. Its online community became very popular along with some literature sectors. By the way, my first QQ account was only six digits, which proved that there were less than one million QQ users nationwide back then.

Now you might not believe. At that time, the literature forum was on the main page of most websites. Unlike now, you can't even find a literature tab on popular websites. Text was the main medium in disseminating information. We couldn't do much online apart from chatting or posting on forums. That was the golden age of online literature. I banned a few writers who became famous after. I won't list them to avoid embarrassment. I'm the only one who's not famous, which is why I'm being cranky.

Most netizens were well-educated back then. Online scrams were rare. It was unlikely that you chat with a person who claims to be your age online and end up talking to an old guy next door. Not many people knew how to or liked to browse the internet around that period. If you are not allowed to play games, listen to music, or watch movies online, would you still use your computer nowadays?

My QQ profile picture was a big beard hanging in the upper right corner of the literature page. We had five moderators on that forum, and I've got the lowest rank. The first one was Feng Lin. Do you know the meaning of Feng Lin? I highly doubt that. In any input method, Feng Lin is not a ready-made word. He told me it meant wind ripples and asked me whether I could see it.

I couldn't.

He said, "I am Feng Lin with one hundred thousand IDs." We always joked and laughed about it. He was not exaggerating.

Dozens of people tried to add me every day. I usually only added girls and those familiar male accounts. I was too busy writing posts and didn't have time to talk to girls.

Being a moderator was hard. Many rookies would challenge you if you didn't post high-quality content. I had no right to ban any accounts on the forum. It was useless even If I could ban them. People could register multiple QQ accounts in one minute and switch their accounts to challenge you. Moderators had to keep writing because countless writers were eager to show off. I needed to use my work to convince them and guard my moderator position. In such a challenging situation, I couldn't have chit chats with girls even I was a master of it.

I worked as a reporter in the N**orthernest** newspaper office. People still used to handwrite.

typesetting office for typesetting and proofreading. There were mainly young people in that office. They were always in chatrooms whenever I caught them slacking off. I also noticed they didn't know how to have fun chats.

They liked to have chi chats with strangers online. For example, they would ask, "Are you male or female? How old are you? Where are you? How many people are there in your family? Have you eaten yet, etc." Absolutely boring topics. The sense of freedom brought by the Internet was not reflected in their words at all. It was such a waste of the Internet.

I didn't know how to type at the beginning. When I was in college, I knew how to use Wubi input method (Chinese character input method) but it often made me feel like my hands were disabled. I couldn't even finish typing one sentence after receiving 8 messages. Pinyin input method wasn't cool enough for me. (Most people use this now) The staff in our typesetting office preferred to use Wubi, which seemed like a noble method. Whoever used pinyin seemed not qualified enough. It was like my college diploma came from a hawker who issued fake certificates on the street.

My colleague Sanshui saved me. His father admired my writing style, had a blue membership card from the National Writers Association, and received government allowance. Sanshui has inherited his father's romantic personality and was desperately in love with a call girl. They always communicated on the Internet. Sitting next to Sanshui, I was amazed by his typing speed. His index fingers jumped quickly on the keyboard like they were dancing, then a beautiful line of Chinese characters appeared on the screen.

"Once a month?" He was messing around in the chat room. The other person is called " Women Shed Blood Without Tears. "

"Buzz off! Jerk."

Sanshui and I both laughed out loud. That was considered a real chat in my opinion.

it took me a month to practice my magical typing skill in an internet café

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***