Forgotten passwords and Long-Gone exes: the life and death of Renren

Abstract

Founded in 2005, Renren was a popular and leading Chinese social media network, especially among college students. However, after reaching its heyday in 2011, user growth dwindled and advertisers fled. By 2018, Renren morphed from a social network to a secondhand car sale business. This paper reconstructs the history of Renren and documents its failed transformation from a social network to a platform. Grounded in platform studies and a political economy theoretical framework, this paper traces Renren’s platform evolution from two perspectives: first, from an end user’s point of view, it examines how Renren’s user interface registered and mirrored shifting corporate strategies and platformisation processes writ large; second, given Renren’s status as a privately-owned, publicly-traded and for-profit business entity, the paper examines how Renren pursued different strategies in search of a viable business model and later on in managing shareholder value and profitability. Ultimately, this paper presents the rise and fall of Renren first and foremost as a platform historiography project. It then discusses Renren’s demise by looking retrospectively at changing interface design, business strategies, and financialisation against the broader dynamics and shifting sociocultural uses of the commercial Chinese internet.