Why did the ZAO, which was blessed by the AI, become a victim of social experimentation?

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “螳螂财经” (ID: TanglangFin ), author ihahe.

ZAO responds to personal information security disputes.

also means that ZAO’s highlight time is over.

Starting from the ZAO screen, it’s not very good inside. The reason one is that the creativity is general, or you can change your face and say things. For those who are used to the geek forum, Deepfake’s face-changing technique has taken away our curiosity. What ZAO did was just change the interface. It integrates the front-end requirements with the back-end AI computing power through the mobile app, which is more like a landing AI application. The second reason is that the gameplay is not new. It integrates some functions of short video. Compared to the video of a certain length and the quality of the vibrato/fast hand, ZAO is equivalent to providing a standard template. The user only needs to take the photo. Put it on, you can lower the threshold in terms of creation, and you can satisfy some of your inner expectations. It is more fun to some extent.

But the reality is, in a world where photos are more than bricks, and video is more common than noodles, do people really have such a big interest in standardized video? But this is not the most deadly. In the perspective of the financial team, the template provided by ZAO is contrary to the social trend, which constrains the user’s creativity and makes ZAO lack social attributes. This is the crux of the problem.

Today, we have a “post-event”, how to make ZAO “die”.

1, ZAO lacks social attributes

Social attributes are about sticky, and where the stickiness comes from, there are at least five points: one is interaction, the other is circle, the third is enough information, the fourth is reward, and the fifth is emotional diversion.

These ZAOs are relatively lacking.

First talk about interaction. ZAO has a friend function and can also post videos, but the released videos have to be transferred to other platforms. This logic is a bit strange. Secondly, the commentary function of the video is not enough to attract people’s interest in comments. The design is logically biased towards comments, and standardized video and processes make it impossible to evaluate video. If you want to evaluate the face-changing video (let’s think so) can only evaluate people’s beauty and ugliness, and obviously violate the original intention of social.

This makes the so-called friends have no common topic, just like one face, it doesn’t make sense. At the same time, videos and lines are standard, and most people publish them.The frequency difference is not large, and the social attributes are greatly reduced.

Speaking of its core – face change, did not grasp the user’s psychology. For example, in recent years, with the hot live broadcast, the self-portrait is hot, which has given birth to beauty. For example, the beauty of a man can be made into a woman, and the old woman can be made into a girl. The logic of the firestorm is that most people think that the picture on the mobile phone is better than that. The ugliness that I think (the other is that I am used to the self in the mirror, I can’t accept myself in the camera), this is the fundamental. At the same time, there are some people with ulterior motives to make themselves look like non-adults (please forgive ihahe’s straightforwardness), and open the live broadcast on various “demon ghost” screens, but the public likes it. The root cause is that the beauty masks the part that I don’t want to see, so that I can feel at ease in the public. I think the star still wants to face the plastic, let alone the general public? This is not conducive to ZAO promotion.

Second layer. Each person’s circle is established according to the three views. Since the first step of ZAO is not too far, the circle is more difficult to establish, and there is no circle, so people can’t stay.

The number of people in the circle is closely related. 螳螂财经 ihahe observes the ratio of original content and DAU all the year round, and probably draws an empirical data. The contribution rate of topic content in the network is about 5% of DAU, and the interaction rate of each topic content is about 5% of the click rate. (including likes, etc.), unless the money is broken.

A social platform must have a minimum stickiness, at least 500 or more topic content per day, and more than 10,000 interactions.

In combination with the above empirical data, the first step for a social app to survive is to achieve a DAU of more than 10,000, while a DAU that maintains more than 10,000 must have a registration of more than 500,000. The download rate and number of evaluations and evaluation scores of the iOS platform ZAO in the past two days are not particularly prominent. Its score and word of mouth drop is still relatively fast, only two points under the iOS platform.

In the social world, even a six-digit DAU doesn’t make much sense. A can of anonymous social networking has a 6-digit DAU, and the number of hops is close to 10 million DAU, which is still too small. It seems that the social platform has a DAU of 100 million.

Speak enough information again. This is an important component of social stickiness.

ZAO does not provide much material, which may be related to the computing power in the background. At the same time, some people also revealed that the cost of the AI ​​server is relatively high, resulting in insufficient preparation. Most people have waited for problems when generating video. The user experience. One point in the app evaluation is for this reason, and part of the reason is that the resolution of the avatar photos saved by the phone is too low to be used.

This limits the richness of ZAO content. Now ZAO does not allow users to crop video themselves, perhaps related to AI training. As far as we know, if you change your face like Deepfake, you still need to consume resources if the user video joins.ZAO server computing power will be worrying, and at the same time it may be necessary to retrain the optimization results, the user waiting time will increase greatly, which will reduce the goodwill. At the same time, users uploading videos may also involve regulatory issues and make management more cumbersome. If the content is not rich enough, repeated information will quickly make users lose interest, and it is easier to reverse from high light to bleak.

The fourth is reward. In ZAO, users are involved in content production, and the protagonist in the video may be themselves. According to the addiction theory, it includes at least triple rewards: the first is social rewards, which refers to the interpersonal rewards that users obtain from the video through interaction with others. The second prey reward refers to the specific resources or information obtained by the user from the production of the video system. The third self-reward refers to the sense of control, accomplishment and sense that the user experiences from making and publishing the video. Reward design determines the degree of addiction.

This is the lack of ZAO. Although ZAO has lowered the threshold for video production, the restrictions have also increased, reducing the reward channel, greatly reducing the user’s sense of pleasure and achievement, while the homogeneous content can not attract Users with creative abilities are stationed, that is, they are not eager to get the expected reward from ZAO, and it is difficult to establish an addictive model.

The output content of ZAO is still UGC. If it is not addictive to users, it will be difficult to continue.

The fifth is emotional diversion. After the social network has completed the above four steps, and finally to implement the emotional diversion, this is the sticky point. For ZAO, on the one hand, users who participate in the production of video have emotional input, and naturally there will be emotional maintenance; on the other hand, the onlookers must have emotional diversion, and they will have interaction and become addicted.

Most social networking platforms will introduce current hot events or use inductive text to provoke a sense of participation. And some vertical platforms bring together people with common interests, let them express their opinions and form a hot spot.

But emotional diversion on ZAO can be a bit difficult. Most people estimate that their faces are not the focus of attention. Most people are still accustomed to sitting in the audience to evaluate other people, and let their feelings be replaced by love beans instead of being evaluated by others. Broken a large number of emotional diversion channels.

It is said that WeChat has sealed the sharing link of ZAO, and some early adopters have silently deleted their own videos after satisfying their curiosity. Early adopters not only have privacy concerns, but also temporarily cannot bear the consequences of being accepted and evaluated by onlookers. ZAO caught the user’s curiosity, but did not study the user’s psychology.

2, changing face video is not a good direction

Why does ZAO not have so many social factors, and developers have to force it? There is even news that the two days of ZAO’s online service even cost the service.One-third of the cost of the device is a bit exaggerated.

Let’s look at the background first. ZAO’s developers have strong social application development capabilities, and they have a strange background. The bullet texts they have developed have also been used in a week of red bursts. The highest daily downloads have hit 1 million, and a total of 6.33 million registered users have been seized. However, it was a short-lived trend, and it quickly fell after the hot, and the new strategy of paying for the new ones plummeted with the problem. After changing the name to chat treasure, and upgrading to the form of doing tasks to earn money, it is not flattering, development is general, the team is dissolved.

Look at the social platform environment. At present, WeChat, QQ is absolutely overlord, 1 billion DAU, even so, Tencent is super vigilant on a similar social platform, not on the WeChat platform blockade or as a counterattack. For example, the sound of booming is very popular. Tencent replies with micro-vision. Although it is not law-abiding, it shows Tencent’s determination to maintain social hegemony. In particular, the recent bytebeat claims to approach the domestic DAU of the vibrato to WeChat, and Tencent also has some calculations. For example, holding betta and tiger teeth is to break through the user barriers of the game and video traffic matrix. In the segment video, you can’t use the hard bar to encircle the periphery.

The data shows that only the proportion of Internet traffic occupied by video is as high as 58%, and the user overlap of games and videos is as high as 77%. Tencent has an absolute advantage in the game field. It also needs video to export this traffic, while locking users and strengthening the advantages.

In 2018, China’s mobile game users exceeded 600 million, short video users exceeded 500 million, and the number of Internet users was 830 million. This year, the number of Internet users has increased to 854 million, and the number of users has increased slightly. Reduced, user bonus peaked.

At present, the short video field has great development potential. This is why ZAO wants to choose a segment of video, but is it as simple as video into social?

Someone said that the reason why the vibrato can be achieved, said a lot of factors. There are two key points: First, you will be called the vibrato. Secondly, the algorithm recommends that “information dopamine” is made, which makes it easy to create addictive qualities.

Why emphasize “sound” instead of “shadow” (video)? The most important one is the anti-video transmission method. With music as the carrier and video as the performance, the length of 15 seconds is suitable for the mass creation, which lowers the threshold and is therefore popular. Microvision is not the essence of comprehending short videos, and it falls into awkwardness, and the results are not good.

So ZAO is also very clear about his position, not classified as social, but classified as entertainment, more precisely, this is a cross-border entertainment app with social features. In this category, the second is the watermelon video. At present, ZAO downloads rank first in the free app on the iOS platform, but it is not easy to cut the social cake.

3, social networks can’t escape the “hormone effect”

Who can understand, who wins.

Socially, it is also a sense of identity and spiritual satisfaction. Since QQ, the fundamentals of social interaction have not changed, and social networks and circles have been much larger than in reality. Now, there are new ways of playing, such as the same kind of push of the vibrato can bring the information “dopamine effect”, which forms the viscosity, and becomes the main means of “getting customers” and “reserving customers”.

In contrast, QQ and WeChat are somewhat old-fashioned for new users, and there is inheritance from the QQ era. Weibo is more open and can be combined into a circle by the user’s common preference for information. In order to eliminate the “genetic disease”, WeChat broke the information barrier of the small circle through the public number and provided the possibility of cross-circle socialization of WeChat.

ZAO’s dating method is still somewhat old-fashioned. Similar to QQ, there is still a genetic disease of QQ. The sharing mechanism also depends on the traditional social platform, and it will inevitably be caught by the neck.

ZAO’s developers also stressed that ZAO’s foothold is in making friends, that is, the face-changing video is used to some extent as a “guest”, and the “reservation” method has not yet been visualized. From the current point of view, ZAO’s “acquisition” strategy is very successful, but the ability to “reserve customers” remains to be seen. That is to say, ZAO still lacks a clear user circle, and it lacks a clear positioning. Perhaps everyone is waiting for the miracle of ZAO?

Of course, ZAO still has a lot of opportunities. Studies have shown that since the rapid development of the self-property culture in Japan, people’s sense of loneliness has not been weakened by the prosperity of the social platform, and thus various sub-cultural circles have been developed, and the sense of loneliness has been concreteized by concrete objects. This trend has spread across the globe.

For example, the number of single people in China has increased by 20% since 2016. There are currently about 240 million single people in China, and men account for 60%. Among them, various factors such as personality, work, environment, and the prevalence of house culture make heterosexual contact a difficult problem.

So, it’s not surprising that Soul, who is dating with the opposite sex, is emerging. The live broadcast boom is closely related to the house culture. The game also becomes a channel for heterosexual friends through hobbies. Games like “eat chicken” have taken part in the marriage and love function, and the game broadcasts help, the “hormone effect” is quite remarkable.

This reveals a very strange phenomenon in the social field, attracting women to enter, it is possible to develop a social platform, retaining a woman to retain a man, and women tend to be more active in social networks, prefer to show themselves It is simply the favorite of the otaku.

An effect in psychology is called “exposure effect.”

refers to people who prefer things they are familiar with. People will have a good impression of people and things that are often exposed to their own eyes, and with the deepening of familiarity, the degree of likes will deepen.

The logic used in women’s self-portraits is that the impression of oneself is actually in the mirror. According to psychologyResearch, people will be more than 30% self-beautifying when they see the mirror (human brain beauty). Most people see that their photos are not suitable, they need to adapt to themselves in the lens.

In other words, the more women take self-portraits, the more they feel that they are beautiful in self-portraits, and they will like themselves more and more self-portraits. It is not difficult to understand social networks: beauty is everywhere, and “pig heads” have nowhere to stay.

We also need to pay attention to the fact that the more men’s social platforms are less tolerant to women, the more men’s demands on women in the network are higher than in reality: for example, with malicious comments, and the infinite magnification of defects, it is more common. Building a social platform that is tolerant of women will make social platforms more dynamic.

If ZAO can attract a large number of women to settle in, there is still a chance to seize the bonus of the single group, but the premise is to make ZAO more social.

Conclusion

WeChat and QQ are still entrenched in social headlines, but some concepts are lagging behind. Their viscosity is convenient for time. It is far less effective in shredding and is more effective than tools for exchanging effective information. Not a leisure tool.

The large and small groups are not enough because of UGC, and most of the time they will become “dead groups.” WeChat’s public number and friends’ circle are efforts to make changes, but there is no reward mechanism. The power of UGC is still insufficient, and the circle is too divided, which is easy to cause long tail content.

People who know these problems will try to challenge QQ and WeChat. These sieges will wave after wave and will not stop. Tencent is unable to block all possibilities in any case. As long as there is a phenomenon-level app, there will be more App eager to try, thus weakening Tencent’s dominance.

ZAO may be an attempt, an attempt to collect data and information, although it will fail with great probability, but multiple intensive bombings will make it possible for a successful app to be born, even if ZAO is the future The stepping stones are also very meaningful.

At the same time, the network environment is different now. The App has been fragmented and the network has become one of the “network Balkans”, which is difficult to break. Even within the social platform, it’s not that easy to build links. Just as WeChat is so large, but in essence there are countless small circle divisions and combinations, its value is not completely released, and some events are not easy to push through WeChat.

Do ZAO intend to break this deadlock? I haven’t seen it yet, maybe it’s a rash test piece.