Yan is an animal, pronounced chá, and now it is also synonymous with people who eat melons on the Internet. Because in Lu Xun's hometown, Yan always steals melons to eat, so Yan has become synonymous with melon lovers. Now it generally refers to netizens who brush gossip information and read the latest gossip (also called "eating melons").

In online forums, people post to discuss problems, and there are often a bunch of people queuing to follow the posts, or expressing their opinions or shooting the breeze. 20 16 Some people refer to ordinary netizens who "don't talk, just watch" as "people who eat melons", which is used to express a state of not caring about themselves, just watching and not expressing their opinions.

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There is another saying about the origin of eating melons. According to the Book of Rites, the Zhou Dynasty had a strict system of rites and music. At that time, even eating melons was divided into three or six grades. The emperor's melons are usually peeled, cut into four pieces, cut off in the middle and covered with cloth before they can be presented. And ordinary people usually peel melons and eat them themselves, so the people who eat them are generally the masses. Later, people who eat melons were used to represent ordinary people.

People who eat melons usually laugh at themselves or ridicule, but now they are more focused on watching a gossip. For example, if a major network incident occurs, netizens will be very concerned and laugh at themselves for eating melons. Later, eating melons was accused of being a gossip entertainment event, which also derived from "the melon eater who didn't know the truth".