Author: Cheng Jie, from the title figure: Vision China

January 28, 2011, in the early hours of the week after WeChat went online, Zhang Xiaolong updated a meal:

“Brother is not a product, he is a freedom to realize the potential.”

In August 2018, the daily login volume of WeChat exceeded 1 billion, which is the first App of the scale of 1 billion DAU in China. To this day, the emphasis on DAU without the emphasis on DAU is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of WeChat’s potential.

People believe that there is a huge secret hidden in a small revision of the WeChat public account, that the small program is the future of the mobile Internet, and that the video number will become the next opportunity for content entrepreneurship …

Zhang Xiaolong said that WeChat does not have a standard answer. Just as WeChat ’s startup page has not changed over the years, “It leaves the imagination space to the users themselves, 1 billion users have 1 billion understanding, it will find it to impress Point. “

For Zhang Xiaolong and WeChat, the massive users associated with WeChat and its associated unlimited innovation and creativity are the source of WeChat’s potential.

On the other hand, WeChat ’s bloat is becoming more and more criticized. The installation package is getting bigger and more and more and more features. WeChat has always been rated as miserable in various app stores. Tucao’s “product experience is poor”.

More and more young people are “pretending to die on WeChat and go to Weibo”, and WeChat, which adheres to the “decentralized” concept, is becoming a “giant” that devotes all kinds of traffic Some people exaggeratedly called “the world suffers from WeChat for a long time.”

At midnight on November 27, 2010, Zhang Xiaolong wrote in the meal:

A product, how many functions must be added to become a junk product!

It looks more bloatedHas become the largest data island in the mobile Internet.

This seems to be back to the fateful story of the dragon-killing boy who finally became a dragon. People seem to be less and less free in WeChat. Does WeChat still have potential?

First, the end of socializing

To understand everything about WeChat, you must return to its basic social functions to understand.

For WeChat, which has reached 1 billion DAU, Zhang Xiaolong is particularly thankful for two things. The first is not to import a batch of friends in batches, but to manually select one by one by the user; the second is to maintain the WeChat users ’initial product Natural growth rather than rely on promotion.

“We have always been very cautious, and we always hope that the user’s friends do not have too many, so every time you add friends, you are prompted whether the user is sure to add him.” Zhang Xiaolong believes that less information means users can be more efficient The processing means that he can free up more time, which means that the future of this product will become larger.

In early 2020, after the updated version of WeChat, the upper limit of 5000 friends was cancelled. The friends added later can only maintain the chat function without the permission of the circle of friends and WeChat sports.

Zhang Xiaolong revealed that the number of friends of nearly one million WeChat users has been close to 5000, which prompted WeChat to expand the upper limit of the number of friends, but he said: “It is very easy to expand the limit of 5000 friends, but the impact on it , To be honest, we will think again and again. “

Most of WeChat ’s problems stem from the generalization of social:

For example, the decline in the opening rate and reading rate of the public account; the so-called escape from WeChat and the abandonment of the circle of friends; the video of the moment or the video number, it is difficult to reappear the next product of the “friend circle”, etc. .

The interpersonal relationship brought by the Internet is cumulative, which means that everyone ’s social relationship is also cumulative, and it is almost inevitable that the number of friends break through the Dunbar limit (Human stable social network is limited to 150 people. In the Internet age, this limit is between 150 and 200 people.) More and more activities such as life, work, and entertainment that rely on WeChat are required.

Zhang Xiaolong said, for hundreds ofFor a group of thousands of people that exceeds the natural capacity of human beings, how can everyone maintain a high communication efficiency or a very close interpersonal relationship is a challenge for all organizations.

Social generalization naturally brings the generalization of information, the generalization of content and the generalization of services. For many users, this generalization directly brings increased social pressure, and Inefficient screening of information and content and difficulties in maintaining social relationships.

It must be acknowledged that WeChat, which adheres to the concept of instrumentalized “see now and go”, is still extremely simplified at the product level.

WeChat’s bloat comes from the accumulation of bloat on the Internet.

A very interesting paragraph (maybe reality) can reflect this social dilemma, some netizens said: I really admire my Mom, more than 20 people on WeChat still insist on doing WeChat.

Another comment: Most of these twenty people may still be in the group of “dating each other in love”.

On Weibo-related topics, the top comments on this list are like this:

  • “The quality of these 20 friends must be very true”;


  • “I always thought that there were so many friends of their generation, because there were dozens of likes on the pyq clockwork, and there were many people interacting”;

    • “Suddenly feel that my parents are lonely, and then I thought about it, but their friends The quality is very high, so I am the lonely. ”

      ”

      (The magic of Dunbar number, Wang Dingding)

      Beijing University professor Wang Dingding believes that the limit of Dunbar ’s number is almost insurmountable, especially for emotional bonds: When a person ’s “self-centered network” expands to a certain extent, because his emotions cannot be shared equally For every neighbor in the network, for his relationship with most neighbors, emotional indifference has become an inevitable trend.

      With the change of personal relationships, such as some acquaintances no longer contact, new reasons for the increase of new friends, WeChat’s “acquaintance socialization” will gradually “de-acquaintance” due to the accumulation of interpersonal relationships.

      The generalization of socialization also manifests beyond WeChat—connecting with users is both an end and a result. It is difficult for other Internet products and Internet companies not to be ambitious about socialization, so-called socialism is not dead.

      On the other hand, social stability is rooted in the stability of interpersonal relationships, based on the attributes of IM (instant messaging) , WeChat maximizes It replicates the sum of the social relationships of individual users from intimate relationships such as family and friends to marginal relationships such as supermarket owners and couriers.

      “The essence of man is the sum of all social relationships.” Corresponding to “WeChat is a way of life.”

      This means that if a WeChat user ’s personal circumstances, living environment, and interpersonal relationships do not change drastically, his personal life ’s dependence on WeChat can hardly be completely stripped away.

      So there was the sentence: WeChat can only be defeated.

      For individual users, WeChat is irreplaceable. The new and innovative product design and product experience are not as convenient as the exchange of WeChat. If you want to return to private social networking, register for a WeChat trumpet and change All the freshness of “identity” will come back.

      WeChat also suffers from this. Just from the perspective of social tools, the biggest rival of corporate WeChat is not a nail, but WeChat, just as more and more people are difficultSeparation of life and work.

      The victory of social networking is also the end of social networking.

      Second, content is a measure of social testing

      In the face of competition from emerging information platforms, short videos, and other products represented by the byte system, WeChat ’s public account creation ecology is also facing a problem of declining traffic.

      In the past two years, WeChat has been adjusted more and more frequently on the content side: take a look, discover the public number, related reading, multiple rounds of comments …

      Especially reprint the logo, from top to bottom, then from bottom to top position adjustment, form adjustment, and even pixel-level adjustment of the size of the logo.

      WeChat is in a very stiff posture to “macro-control” the content flow within WeChat.

      Unlike the gradually becoming mature applet function, the “Search One Search” and “Take a Look” functions launched on May 18, 2017 have not yet had a significant flow gain effect.

      As Zhang Xiaolong has repeatedly emphasized-“WeChat is a decentralized platform”, it is impossible to centrally mobilize the distribution of traffic, making the effect of WeChat’s “search system” on content traffic minimal.

      In the WeChat public class in 2020, Zhang Xiaolong said that WeChat is going to work on short content, and the video number will be online after a short time.

      Recently, the video number has increased the scope of the internal test. More and more people have obtained the internal test qualification, and some people say that “the video number is a middle-aged uncle.”

      On “Content-paying students And Death “ In the article, I predicted that short content will be presented in the form of a video number for two reasons:

      1. The threshold for creating short videos is lower. Graphic creation is an abstract expression, which requires some creative training. The video is more concrete, and the public is more accustomed to and easy to accept the expression of the video, which is the reproduction of “life”; / p>

      2. The WeChat video number mechanism should still be based on “subscription + social + recommendation”.

      Social networking will be a more important element of a series of content and functions including video numbers and subscription numbers; WeChat may try to actively mobilize traffic, which WeChat has not done before.

      At the same time, I also made two predictions for the video number:

      1. WeChat short content will be open to all WeChat users like a circle of friends. At present, the trend of simplified requirements and full opening still exists;

      2. Although short content supports pictures and videos, in the long run, video should be absolutely mainstream, and pictures cannot constitute mass content consumption. The category of pictures may be celebrity and IP-like content such as celebrities.

      The second prediction also did not deviate, and even the photos had little sense of presence in the video number.

      A simple example, the current picture of the video number and the static presentation of the video are exactly the same, and the video does not have a progress bar. It is easy to view the picture dynamics as video dynamics.

      (Guo Caijie’s video number picture dynamic)

      At present, WeChat ’s overall operation strategy for video numbers has two obvious characteristics. One is to give priority to the original WeChat public account creators for internal testing qualifications, and the other is to introduce star artists, as well as some Internet celebrities, MCN Entry.

      The former caused a lot of people to say “the middle-aged uncle in the video number”, and the latter further promoted the creation of ordinary users (Use) The threshold.

      The entrance of the video number is under the circle of friendsMy location prediction for the video number should be a short video product with a time interval of 15 seconds to 1 minute.

      However, WeChat itself does not provide the filters, editing and other functions that are standard with products such as vibrato and quick hands. Therefore, creating videos through the entrance of the video number is basically unrealistic.

      So what we can see is that in addition to the “middle-aged uncle” creators mentioned above, the video number basically uses the content created by Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou and other platforms in the video number twice. Distribution, and even a lot of “handling” video phenomenon.

      This will further cause two problems with the video number: first, there is not much content difference with other short video platforms, and second, it is not conducive to fostering a unique ecology of the video number, and the inability to produce a difference for users Short video content.

      Under this trend, the video number may be reduced to the tasteless existence of the same video at the same time.

      As mentioned earlier, to understand everything about WeChat, you must go back to socializing. Content is a measure of socializing.

      Three, WeChat training “algorithm”

      The last of the eight working rules of the WeChat team is user value first. They believe that this is the premise of all ideas and considerations.

      Zhang Xiaolong has always been anti- “interest feeding”, does not provide a centralized entrance, does not do information flow, he said: “We will only improve reading efficiency, rather than turning into uncontrolled information.”

      In all of Zhang Xiaolong ’s public speeches, the word “algorithm” was hardly found. He seldom talked about distribution. He believed that “recommendation” was more respectful. Humane. “

      Search and social recommendations are the core logic of all WeChat content and services reaching users directly.

      Just like the brutal growth pattern of Pinduoduo social fission, it is actually within the regular framework of WeChat.

      “Look at” friends are reading articles, WeChat circles, many friends of “discovered public account” follow, many friends pushed by subscription number have read, social recommendation mechanism of video number …

      This strong social recommendation is a prominent feature of WeChat traffic distribution.

      (social recommendation of video number)

      Taking friend circles as an example, the visibility of the content of friend circles mainly depends on the relevance of interpersonal relationships.

      With the generalization of socialization, the content is not interesting enough. Users will naturally reduce their dependence and frequency of use on the circle of friends, and they are grabbed attention by short video platforms.

      The use of social recommendations to operate traffic, for individual users, there will be two results:

      • First, due to the similarity of preferences, users are able to expand the screening and reading efficiency of information to a certain extent through “recommendations” from friends;


      • Secondly, due to the repulsiveness of preferences, “Recommendation” also emerges from “Recommendation Rate” (Follow friends of “Mimeng” (Number) , “smooth rate” (Follow the number of friends in “Langji Tianya”) this kind of value split.



        The former is a social burden reduction, in fact, it has always existed in WeChat, such as a peer exchange group, funny content sharing group, exaggerated group, and mutual curse group (Really reduce the burden) Spontaneously formed communities such as users, of course, WeChat ’s social recommendation is a kind of “implied” recommendation that weakens the presence of the recommender.

        The latter has exacerbated the breakdown of interpersonal relationships under certain special circumstances. Fortunately, besides taking a look at it, WeChat ’s social recommendation will notThe specific content “recommended person” appears.

        In short, taking a look and discovering the public account, video number, etc., is still the productization idea of ​​WeChat “improving efficiency and making good tools”, which has little to do with the business.

        Zhang Xiaolong talks about social traffic in WeChat, focusing on scene traffic, such as WeChat red envelopes, WeChat games, sports bracelets, etc., and for short videos like this, there has always been community sharing in WeChat.

        Many services and applications rooted in the flow of WeChat scenes can still be active based on user value, just like social e-commerce Pinduoduo, Xiaonian cake + Tools, platform applets) , take a look + (WeChat official short video applet) , are some data effects Excellent product.

        These products have a characteristic, focusing on solving a high-frequency demand, and the flow is hidden.

        For WeChat, it is hard to have any major innovations in the product style based on the mobile Internet, but WeChat changes not only social and content.

        Tao, the former WeChat open platform technical director, wrote in a paid article: WeChat is Tencent ’s central platform, and its scale is huge. It is also called Weixin Eco. This is a central platform that covers more than half of the mobile Internet.

        Zhang Xiaolong hopes to build an ecosystem based on WeChat, “Let all creatures or animals and plants grow freely in the forest, not that we build it ourselves.”

        Relying on the content and business innovation of WeChat ecology, especially the expansion of the innovation boundary brought by small programs, there are endless possibilities.

        But how to maintain the foundation of socialization and maintain the balance of everyone ’s social relationship in the Internet era, this is what the entire WeChat team and even WeChat users need to participate in.

        Before and after the birth of WeChat, Zhang Xiaolong wrote more than two thousand meals. On April 1, 2012, Zhang Xiaolong stopped changing. He finally wrote:

        “How much hardship is not revealed.”

        Reference materials:

        “Emotional Model: WeChat Group Scale and Social Brain Hypothesis” Wang Dingding

        “After reading Zhang Xiaolong ’s 2359 diary of meals”, I know. Space kids

        “tao | WeChat is the middle stage” riding Tibet 2020.4.22



        Author: Cheng Jie