Wretch: Scavenged Computers, Sold Youth, and a Disappearance No One Mourned

30-second overview: Wretch was born in 1999 in a dorm room at National Chiao Tung University, where six Computer Science students cobbled together discarded department equipment and self-deprecatingly named it "Nameless" (Wretch). Within ten years it grew into Taiwan's largest blog platform and the cradle of Taiwan's creator economy. In March 2008 it even surpassed Yahoo to become Taiwan's #1 website, with 2.5 million members, 1.2 million daily visits, and 500 million photos. But it had already been acquired by Yahoo in 2007, and on the night of December 26, 2013, it was permanently deleted. Today, if you search the Wayback Machine, most people recover nothing but grids of unopenable empty albums. We remember it as "youth," yet rarely recall: from day one, that youth sat on a server someone else could switch off at any moment.

Wretch's story is usually told as a warm nostalgic piece: the junior-high years, album passwords and "Who's Visiting My Home," an innocent era before algorithms hijacked our feeds. That version isn't wrong, but it filters out the single most crucial fact.

This article wants to put that fact back. It isn't the rise-and-fall history of a machine; it's the story of a generation's first time entrusting its most private memories to a switch it could neither turn off nor rescue. And that switch really was pressed in the end.

A Scrapped Computer, and a Site Called "Wretch"

1999, Hsinchu, in a dormitory at National Chiao Tung University. Six students from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering (Chien Chih-yu, Wu Wei-kai, Lin Hung-chuan, Chiu Chien-hsi, Pan Wei-cheng, Chen Hsuan-yun, all teaching assistants at the department's computing center and classmates) set up a BBS site¹. In that era this was no big deal; nearly every science and engineering department in Taiwan had people running BBSs. What was truly special was where its hardware came from.

"At the time, to cope with ever-increasing system load, we had to spend all day collecting the department's scrapped equipment and then piecing it together into usable hardware," founding site administrator Chien Chih-yu later recalled². A reporter from Guanghua Magazine described it more bluntly: some said Wretch was built on "scavenged junk," which may be an exaggeration, but it was indeed originally set up using the department's old scrapped equipment³. A machine assembled from parts nobody else wanted—its most unassuming characteristic was that you could turn off the power at any time. Didn't want to play anymore? Pull the plug, no one would object. This detail seems irrelevant now, but eight years later it would become the pivot of the entire story.

As for the name, they self-deprecatingly called it "Wretch" (無名), which later became the familiar Wretch (無名小站). "We were all nobodies, with no grand ambitions at the start," Chien said⁴. In turn-of-the-century Taiwan, doing internet business sounded highly suspicious. "Entrepreneurship itself was heterodox; if you did internet, you were a lunatic," he described the atmosphere in an interview years later⁵. A group of nobodies dismissed as lunatics, on a scavenged computer, planted something that would later be remembered by over twenty million people.

Who Visited My Home: Taiwanese Turn "Being Seen" into a Form of Intimacy

Wretch (無名小站) truly began to expand the moment it grew a blog out of its BBS roots. On October 28, 2003, the blogging function officially launched⁶. It stitched together the three trendiest features of the time into a single account: a personal blog for long-form writing (not "Personal News Channel" — that was PChome's brand), a password-protected online photo album, and a message board for comments, letting everyone arrange their own corner exactly to their liking.

The feature that best captures the Taiwan flavor was "Who Visited My Home" (誰來我家). It logged every visitor to your page, leaving a trail of visitor footprints. In the West, putting "who viewed me" out in the open would likely scare off a horde of privacy-conscious users — it feels like surveillance. That's why Facebook and Instagram never dared to build a "who viewed your profile" feature. But in Taiwan, it became a form of digital intimacy: you knew your crush visited your album at 11 p.m. last night; you knew which old friend quietly came back to check on you. Being seen became proof of being cared for.

The same design logic extended to album passwords. Locking your photos and then privately sharing the password with specific people was itself a small trust ritual: whoever got the password was declared part of your inner circle. For that generation of Taiwanese, the inherently risky act of "being seen" was translated by Wretch into something warm. This is Wretch's most charming aspect, and the one most easily magnified by the nostalgia filter. But it's precisely this defenseless intimacy that makes what comes next especially cruel: the more you gave away, the more you stood to lose.

💡 Did You Know
"Album passwords" were the hard currency of Taiwan's online social scene back then. Who you gave the password to — and who you didn't — drew concentric circles of relationship. But there was a premise no one thought to examine at the time: that lock was never yours to keep. The lock sat on the server; ultimate control of the key rested with the platform. On April 14, 2007, Wretch's password-protected albums "went wide open" once — all locked private photos were momentarily exposed to the public due to a system anomaly, which the company attributed to "system maintenance"⁷. Those so-called "private albums" were never truly private.

By 2006, Wretch had become Taiwan's second-largest website, trailing only Yahoo! Kimo. According to InsightXplorer's ARO unique reach metric, its reach hit 63.81%, with over 6.5 million monthly unique visitors⁸. 2.5 million registered members, 500 million photos, 5,000+ blogs, and 1.2 million daily visits³. Something that grew out of a dormitory BBS became the default homepage for an entire generation going online within seven years. The membership growth curve is practically a time-lapse of this generation of Taiwanese collectively moving onto the internet.

Source: Wikipedia (2004/11 200,000; 2007/7 3 million) + InsightXplorer ARO Traffic Report (2006/10 2.8 million)⁸

The NT$10 Million from Chia Wen-chung, and That NT$700 Million Never Publicly Disclosed

Once it swelled to this scale, the romance of scavenging could no longer hold. Chien Chih-yu later described this turning point clearly: "We have to be responsible for this little site; we can no longer just shut off the server power whenever we don't feel like playing anymore."⁴ This was the first moment in the whole story when someone realized the weight of that power switch. From a scavenged computer that could be switched off on a whim, to a platform that had to answer to two million users, Wretch was turning from a student project into a business that needed money, needed shareholders, needed to "be responsible for it."

The money came from Chia Wen-chung, a well-known figure in the stock market. In 2005, he entered as an angel investor with NT$10 million, and later led the negotiations with Yahoo. That same March, Wretch Co., Ltd. was established with a capital of NT$20 million; the founding team held 51% through a technology equity stake⁹. According to Global Views Monthly, Chia held 49% and ultimately personally pocketed over NT$300 million, but this shareholding ratio comes only from Global Views; other media have not verified it¹⁰.

On December 14, 2006, Yahoo Kimo announced its acquisition of Wretch¹¹. On March 29 the following year, the Fair Trade Commission ruled at its 803rd meeting "not to prohibit the combination," and Yahoo obtained 100% of Wretch's shares¹². The most celebrated figure of the whole deal was "NT$700 million," but this number must carry an honest question mark. Yahoo Kimo General Manager Chou Kai-lian never publicly confirmed the amount; TVBS's report at the time wrote: "Rumored acquisition price as high as US$22 million, approximately NT$711 million"¹³. English-language media InfoWorld put it more bluntly: "The two sides did not disclose the terms of the transaction."¹⁴ In other words, the sum that made Wretch a famous acquisition in Taiwan's internet history has never been officially disclosed to this day. The "700 million" we remember is a media estimate, not a figure the two parties signed off on.

As for why Yahoo wanted to buy, the most popular saying in the market was "couldn't beat them, so bought them." The phrase is catchy, but it's commentary, not Yahoo's official reason. Chou's version was "multiplication": "Leveraging Yahoo's technology, plus our massive traffic, plus the content Wretch has already generated — however the two sides multiply, we'll take the service to the next stage."¹⁵ Of course, "multiplication" is the kind of polished talk a merger press conference calls for; but if we simply swap it for "I couldn't beat you so I bought you," we're writing a line Yahoo never said. The truth probably lies somewhere in between: Fair Trade Commission data at the time showed Yahoo held 60% of the portal market share, yet its own blog had only 1.6%¹². It indeed couldn't catch up to Wretch, but what it said was multiplication, not surrender.

📝 Curator's Note
An easily overlooked coordinate: The Yahoo that bought Wretch had, just seven years earlier, bought America's GeoCities (the place that gave a whole generation of Americans their first personal webpages), only to shut it down in 2009. In other words, when Wretch handed itself over to Yahoo in 2007, Yahoo already held the "death record" of a same-type platform. The same hand bought GeoCities and shut it down, then bought Wretch and shut it down again six years later. We only see this pattern clearly in hindsight, but it was already written at the moment of signing.

2008: Wretch Climbs Atop Yahoo

Conventional wisdom says a platform should gradually lose its edge after being acquired by a giant. Wretch took the opposite path.

Less than a year after being bought by Yahoo, in March 2008, Wretch.cc claimed the top spot on Digital Era's "Taiwan's Top 100 Most Popular Websites" ranking — compiled from ARO and weighted Alexa data — pushing its parent company Yahoo into second place¹⁶. Even English-language tech media found it amusing: NetworkWorld ran the headline "Yahoo loses top spot in Taiwan to Wretch"¹⁷. A student site that started from scraps in a Chiao Tung University dormitory had, the year after its acquisition, climbed atop the multinational giant that bought it.

Propping up this ranking was a massive creator incubator. Today we casually say "self-media" and "KOL," but Taiwan's first wave of amateur creators to be discovered via the internet were almost all hatched on Wretch. Wanwan is the most representative example: she only tried the blog feature because she wanted to follow Giddens Ko's serial fiction on the Wretch BBS, yet her own photo-text blog soon hit 150,000 daily views, and her 2005 book Can I Not Go to Work? (《可不可以不要上班》) sold over 100,000 copies¹⁸. She, Giddens Ko, and Queen were dubbed the "Three Writer Treasures" (「作家三寶」), followed by a long string of names: Velociraptor Yuan Ai-fei, Da Yuan with 9 million-plus views, Sarah Lin Yi-xin, Tofu Pudding Girl Tsai Huang-ju¹⁹. The "pretty girl culture" of Wretch Albums was also part of this machine, though it later drew considerable criticism for the objectification of women — a topic for later discussion.

A key clarification is needed here. The legend often mentioned in the same breath — that "Wretch incubated online auction sellers" — does not hold: brands like Tokyo Fashion and Lativ got their start on Yahoo Auctions, not Wretch. What Wretch incubated were writers, artists, photographers. This distinction matters because it identifies Wretch's most precious asset: the content itself — the things over two million people spent years stacking up, one blog post, one photo at a time. And this asset, accumulated over seven years, was exactly what evaporated all at once when Wretch finally disappeared.

This was Wretch's peak. It climbed atop Yahoo, nurtured an entire generation of creators, stacked half a billion photos on its servers. No one at this high point could have imagined that eight years later, it would all return to zero in a single night.

If You Don't Want to Play Anymore, Just Turn Off the Power

Wretch's decline had no single fatal blow. It was pulled in several directions at once, slowly drained dry.

The first force was stickiness. In September 2009, Facebook overtook Wretch in the Creative ARO survey to claim the position of Taiwan's second-largest site²⁰. What's intriguing is that Facebook didn't win on reach: in terms of "how many people have visited," Wretch actually still led; Facebook won on "how long people stayed once they arrived." The survey that month showed Facebook users averaging 6.3 minutes per day, while Wretch managed only 3.9 minutes²⁰. The News Feed's ability to keep people glued was something photo albums and blogs couldn't match.

Source: Creative ARO Survey, September 2009 (Commercial Times report)²⁰

The second force was the smartphone. Starting in 2010, smartphones proliferated, moving the internet's entry point from the desktop screen to the palm of the hand, while Wretch's layout was designed for desktop computers. The third force came from its new owner. After Yahoo took over, account integration created all kinds of friction, and the product itself barely moved from where it stood. A 2013 Business Weekly blog used a cutting but precise description, calling Wretch "a has-been star with traffic in continuous decline, a service interface design showing almost zero improvement, still stuck in 2006 thinking"²¹.

Pulled by these three forces simultaneously, Wretch eventually arrived at Yahoo's "difficult decision." On August 30, 2013, Yahoo announced the closure of Wretch, citing a return to mobile first and concentration of resources on core products. The official statement was suitably corporate: "In order to refocus on optimizing core products and accelerating development of innovative services, sometimes difficult decisions must be made."²² Then came a four-month countdown, from announcement to deletion, each step shutting the door a little tighter²³.

Source: Yahoo official closure statement + ETtoday three-phase timeline report, August–December 2013²²²³

Chien Chih-yu's line back then — "If you don't want to play anymore, just turn off the server power" — was meant as a declaration of accountability: he would be responsible for this platform to the end. But the sentence hid a premise he didn't state, perhaps didn't even realize at the time: the power switch he claimed couldn't be turned off had long since left his hands. The moment the contract was signed in 2007, ownership of the button transferred to Yahoo. On the night of December 26, 2013, Wretch's power was indeed switched off — only the finger on the switch wasn't that group of students who'd quit by pulling the plug, but the company that had bought it.

A Disappearance Without a Funeral

If the story ended with "the platform shut down, everyone was sad," it would be no different from any other has-been website. What makes Wretch truly unsettling is what happened after it closed.

Go to the Wayback Machine and pull up wretch.cc, and you will discover a cruel fact: the text is still there, the comments are still there, even the popularity counters from back then are still there — but the photos are almost entirely gone. Most people who open their old albums see nothing but a grid of blank, broken frames — because the album images were hosted on external content delivery networks, and those URLs expired when the site shut down, leaving only empty frames where memories used to be²⁴. A platform that once prided itself on "500 million photos" left behind almost zero images for posterity.

Private citizens tried to rescue it. The international volunteer group Archive Team crawled Wretch in two batches before and after the shutdown, totaling roughly 45.7 GB and over five million pages, but they honestly labeled their own backup entries: Partially Rescued²⁵. What does 45.7 GB mean? It couldn't even hold a fraction of the 500 million photos at Wretch's peak. And the rescuers were a group of international volunteers with no connection to Taiwan; they've rescued dying websites all over the world — Wretch was just one item on their list.

As for Taiwan itself, not a single organization carried out a systematic rescue: not the National Central Library, not the Ministry of Culture, no one. I verified this repeatedly, and the conclusion is a glaring blank: zero national-level preservation for Taiwan's largest slice of digital youth²⁶. We have comprehensive systems for preserving ancient books, old photographs, and intangible cultural assets, yet not a single mechanism exists to catch a website that held the memories of over two million people when it shut down. In our cultural imagination, "things worthy of national preservation" seemingly still stop at paper and physical objects; digital youth is treated as disposable by default.

This blank becomes even more glaring in international comparison.

The most telling numbers come from France. When Skyblog shut down in 2023, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) proactively designated it as national digital heritage, rescuing 12.6 million (still-online) blogs and 37 TB of data²⁷.

37 TB versus 45.7 GB — a difference of nearly a thousandfold. Behind this multiplier lies an unspoken difference in attitude: France treated teenagers' blogs as "our collective memory, to be preserved"; Taiwan implicitly treated its own platform as just a has-been website, with no one feeling that rescuing it was their responsibility. The French gave teenagers' blogs a state funeral; Taiwan let its own greatest youth quietly get deleted on a night with no mourners.

⚠️ Controversial Perspective
Before mourning Wretch, one account must be settled: its roots were controversial from the start. Wretch began on TANet (Taiwan Academic Network), using public academic resources, yet later grew into a commercial cash cow. In late 2006, The Lord of the Rings translator Chu Hsueh-heng issued a scathing critique: "Innovation and entrepreneurship cannot be achieved by any means; they must Do No Evil to deserve encouragement. Given Wretch's controversies this year, it is absolutely a negative case study."²⁸ The following January, Legislator Tang Huo-sheng questioned Wretch in the Legislative Yuan, challenging its leveraging of academic network resources for commercial profit²⁹. Add to that the previously mentioned "password album fully open" incident and the "Petite" board's objectifying structure toward women's bodies — these are real wounds that existed. Recording Wretch only as an age of innocence is to whitewash its controversies. An honest commemoration must remember these too.

An account with 12 followers waited ten years.

The story should have ended inside that empty album. But in the spring of 2025, it unexpectedly got an echo.

In March, a Threads account called @wretch_1999 began posting. Its bio perfectly replicated the symbols of that era: "★●○● Welcome to Wretch ●○●★ / Background music: 5566 - Wo Nan Guo / Total visitors: 0000520". On March 24, it posted a screenshot of its own Instagram (with only 12 followers), captioned with a self-deprecating line: "When will someone finally discover me? Resurrected." ³⁰ That post struck a collective memory nerve like a needle, going viral instantly and surging past 17,000 followers ³¹. The nature of this account has never been officially confirmed; it is almost certainly a fan-made tribute, not an official Wretch revival.

But the responses it received were more honest than any official announcement. The comments flooded in: some demanding "Give me back my password," some regretting their younger selves from ten years ago, and even someone telling a platform that had already died: "I'm from the future — secretly telling you not to sell to Yahoo." ³² The account itself asked in a post: Are the people using Threads now too young to know who I am? ³³ A name no one remembered, after twelve years of silence, finally waited until someone discovered it — except what got discovered was just a hollow shell a fan built from memory. The real thing was deleted long ago; not even ashes remain.

And the truly unsettling part isn't 2013. It's now.

That salvaged computer — its most modest feature back then was that you could just switch off its power. Later, Chien Chih-yu learned that power switch must not be turned off; he had to take responsibility for it. Later still, he discovered the power wasn't in his hands at all — the button had been pressed by Yahoo. Now it's our turn: the Stories you put on Instagram right now, the albums on Facebook, the first-birthday photos of your child in cloud storage — they are fundamentally the same thing as those 500 million photos inside Wretch. They all sit on servers you cannot switch off, and cannot retrieve. Wretch was Taiwan's first digital lesson. It didn't teach nostalgia; it taught a sentence we may still not have truly understood twelve years later: You think you're preserving memories, but you're actually just entrusting those memories to a power plug someone else can pull at any moment.

Further Reading

History of Taiwan's Internet Community Migration、PTT、Bahamut、Dcard、Plurk、Facebook、Taiwan's YouTuber Industry and Culture、A-Shen、Taiwan's New Idol Generation、Huang Shan-liao、Taiwan's Classmate Generation。

Image Sources

This article uses 5 images licensed from Wikimedia Commons (CC and GPL), all cached in public/article-images/culture/ to avoid hotlinking the source servers:

• Alan Sung / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0 (screenshot of Wretch's 2005 hardware upgrade downtime notice, hero)
• T Gordon Cheng / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0 (National Chiao Tung University Guangfu Campus South Gate, the 1999 founding site)
• T2o6n8y9 / Wikimedia Commons — GPL (Taiwan campus BBS login screen, using PTT as a period representation, not the Wretch site itself)
• Alan Sung / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0 (2008 Yahoo Kimo Open Hack Day)
• Yahoo! Blog / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0 (2010 Yahoo Kimo Wretch Fun Party, article illustration)

References