Since the concept of "1024 Festival" became popular, there have been people celebrating this day every year. I have wanted to say a few words about it many times but held back. This time, on this special day, I will showcase some trivial skills and discuss a few words from a literary perspective.<b>

First of all, the popularity of the term "1024" initially came from a Chinese adult website called "Grassland," and had nothing to do with programmers. The so-called binary romance of imagining "$$2^{10}=1024$$" may be a result of misinterpretation.<b>

"A bit of history from 2006 to 2012"

In the final years of the idyllic internet era, the number of netizens had reached a certain threshold, and the internet had become a mixed bag, with the dilution of high-quality content becoming evident. In order to ensure the vitality of their websites and forums, the community experience points system came into being.

This is actually quite reasonable. In a relatively large community, it is intuitive to reward those who contribute more with honors.

So how do newcomers earn points? How do they contribute? Generally, it is through posting and replying. From the perspective of community operation, it is best to post high-quality threads or reply to high-quality threads, as these are the most deserving of encouragement. However, it is impossible to only allow users to post high-quality threads, as creators are always in the minority. In statistical terms, in a community with a sufficiently large number of people, good threads are scarce, which is also a sign of the end of the idyllic era.

Therefore, if only high-quality threads are encouraged, it will lead to a rapid decline in user activity. Although the internet in the era of grassroots communities did not emphasize daily active users (DAU), community operators, based on their intuition, knew that they had to give some experience points to spammy posts in order to increase community activity. Even if their replies may only be a word of thanks, praise, or sometimes a nonsensical question, it is still better than discouraging participation.

So you can fully understand that even meaningless posts, as long as they involve interaction, will still receive experience points and credits.

However, under this reward mechanism, a new phenomenon emerged: "spam posts."

As the name suggests, spam posts refer to the act of replying with meaningless content in order to gain experience points, with the motivation behind it being quantity over quality. Posting a high-quality thread is too tiring and troublesome, while posting ten spam posts may only require copying and pasting ten times, taking about a dozen seconds to accomplish.

This spamming phenomenon continued to exist even during the era of Baidu Tieba, such as classic examples like this.

You can see that Tieba users always emphasize the importance of 15 characters. Why is that?

In fact, it is Baidu Tieba's way of raising the threshold for spam posts. They have set a minimum reply word count of fifteen characters in order to earn experience points, thus limiting users from exploiting the system to level up through spamming.

The origin of "1024"

You can see that the rise of spamming is a major trend, even adult website Caoliu is not exempted. In order to prevent the proliferation of spam posts, the operators of Caoliu came up with a solution comparable to Baidu Tieba's, which is to restrict users' reply frequency. New users can only reply to a post after an interval of 1024 seconds. This greatly reduces the number of spam posts.

Words like "1024" have undergone many changes in meaning. The process of evolution seems to dissolve the original meaning and convey its extended connotation. Just like "1024," many words that were originally directly related to sex are now only used to express power dynamics.

Later on, it can be seen that due to the special nature of the Grasshopper, many users of the Grasshopper community would occasionally intentionally reply with "1024" as a mockery of others' content or as a manifestation of their own identity.

Until 2012, 1024 was still the unique symbol of the Grasshopper.

https://www.v2ex.com/t/50745

The widespread use of words dissolves the original sexual implications.

Why is it 1024? Why is it called 1024 festival?

In 2013, the high-end and stylish Cheetah mobile browser filmed an advertisement, promoting the 1024 festival on October 24th.

The relationship between Cheetah and programmers on 1024 day is not significant, it just says "Watch videos at high speed, no need to wait."

I searched with a search engine and found that it wasn't until 2015 that some coding training institutions started to combine 1024 with Programmer's Day.

Later on, it gradually gained widespread recognition.

Why? Is it because early internet culture was dominated by males? Is it because early Chinese internet engineering culture was also dominated by males?

Actually, in theory, 2015 is not considered early, but it can be inferred that at that time, there were still mostly male engineers, and women, in terms of both quantity and influence, were still being silenced, and hearing the voice of female engineers is still a long way off.

I don't want to discuss too much about women's rights issues, let's get back to the topic of language, the art of wordsmithing, and discuss the evolution of words.

The evolution of sexually suggestive internet slang

Words like 1024 have undergone many changes in meaning, the process of evolution seems to dissolve the original meaning and convey its metaphorical meaning. Like 1024, many words were originally directly related to sex, but later they were only used to express power dynamics.

For example, "口嫌体正直" (kouxian tizhengzhi) is, according to my research, derived from Japanese erotic manga, where it describes (fantasizes about) a woman feeling pleasure in her body when being raped, but not admitting it verbally. However, this phrase is now commonly used in online discussions, diluting its original sexual content.

Older words like "屌丝" (diaosi) and "装逼" (zhuangbi) have already become slang.

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I have written enough, no more detailed arguments and reasoning, just my conclusion.

1. The widespread use of words dissolves the original and sexual implications.
2. More female engineers participating in the 1024 festival will expand the connotation and extension of 1024.
3. The difference between "口嫌体正直" and "坐地排卵" lies in the effect of reasoning. They have the same origin but different outcomes, resulting in a change in the meaning of the words.
4. Using sex to explain power relations is more straightforward, as power relations ultimately manifest in the body.
5. The evolution of popular internet terms follows its own rules. Every social class has its own culture. No one should interfere or judge. The idyllic era has long passed. This is now the era of decline, where dragons fall from the sky and snakes emerge from the ground. We should celebrate the richness and diversity of this world. You can have fewer things you like, but your taste needs to be broader. Coarseness has its uses, and delicacy has its weaknesses.