Event Operations: What should you do when you encounter users trying to take advantage of you?

What should you do if you encounter freeloaders during an event? I guess most students who are doing activities will encounter this problem, so let’s talk about it in detail.

Pull, pull, pull, pull the wool

A few years ago, when P2P emerged like mushrooms after a rain, there was a public account that quickly gained a large number of fans with its unique positioning. This public account is still alive today and is called "薅薅羊毛寶記".

When you search for "薅羊毛" (薅羊毛) on Baidu , 4.5 million search results will appear.

If you check the Baidu Index, you will find that this word has become popular since 2014 and has remained popular until now.

Earlier, there was a group of users on Weibo who were called "professional lottery users". Their daily Weibo updates were all about forwarding lottery events and trying to win prizes.

Going back further, there was a profession that has been active for many years. Zhou Libo once played a role in it. In Shanghai dialect, it was called "pile driving mold", which means scalper.

In any product, whether online or offline, as long as it is profitable, you will definitely see these people. In the past, you could easily search for "recycling game coins" and "recycling mooncake tickets" on Taobao. Can you search them now? I guess it's still possible.

This group of people actually have a love-hate relationship with the company and its products.

If someone comes to take advantage of the situation, at least it means that someone is paying attention. But if no one comes to take advantage of the situation, many things seem to be in trouble. For example, in a game that makes a lot of money every day, there are usually "merchants". Once there are no "merchants" in a game, it often indicates that the game's in-game ecology has been completely destroyed.

Therefore, it is really hard to say whether taking advantage of others is good or bad.

If I want you to pull

Suppose a product hopes that someone will come to take advantage of it, then it only needs to make the anti-brushing mechanism simpler.

You see, in order to prevent others from taking advantage of us, it is not easy for us to develop products and operations , and we are "forced" to help us establish an "anti-fraud mechanism."

When it comes to anti-brushing mechanisms, the simplest ones are blacklists and whitelists.

The so-called blacklist means that users on the list cannot receive rewards, or can only receive general rewards;

The so-called whitelist means that only users on the list can get rewards, or users not on the list cannot win the prize, or can only get general prizes.

Therefore, if I am an operator and hope that someone can take advantage of the product and spread the product in the early stage of product operation , then I must deliberately expose flaws. Such flaws will often attract users to try it.

Among a large number of cases, the one that everyone is most familiar with is probably the case in which Baidu Netdisk initially attracted users.

In June 2013, someone discovered that there was a price loophole in the recharge capacity of Baidu Netdisk. It only cost 50 cents to buy 100G of capacity. As a result, many people took the opportunity to purchase a large amount of capacity to expand the capacity of Baidu Netdisk.

Looking back on it afterwards, you will find that this incident was simply directed and acted by Baidu. With this action, Baidu Netdisk attracted a large number of users to purchase capacity - even if some of them could not use up the capacity in their lifetime.

With this measure, Baidu Netdisk quickly gained a large number of users and occupied the market share despite being squeezed by other cloud disks such as 360 Cloud Disk.

Then what?

When users who buy large capacity get used to such a large space, they will renew their subscription. If they cannot use the space, Baidu will not suffer any loss - because the unused space has never been used.

If I don't want to be grabbed by you

In fact, if I don't want you to pull me, I'm afraid you won't be able to pull me anyway.

Here I can share a real case (forgive me for being vague for now, after all, I plan to write this case in a book, and I would be embarrassed if it was widely reprinted before the book was published).

One year, Brother Liang was ordered to do something. What was it?

Bring the black market price of points back from close to the financial cost price to the normal market price.

Thus, the "inflation break" that lasted for half a year began.

The method is very simple:

1. Transform the rules for issuing and consuming points, and control the value of points from both the acquisition and consumption ends.
2. Analyze the behavior of large users, identify problematic users, and then put them into a list library.
3. All physical goods are limited to daily redemption stocks, and a lottery channel will be opened at the same time.
4. All physical goods must be verified by a lottery before redemption to determine whether they are eligible for redemption.
5. All points will be cleared by the end of the year and converted into new points at a certain ratio.

I believe if you are smart enough, you can guess what happened next.

The first thing is actually very simple, which is to change the rules. However, when changing the rules, the access channel is closed, so the existing points market will be the target.

The second thing is actually a basic work. The so-called user identification is to identify the list of users whose points sources are problematic. Combined with the third and fourth things, it is actually to restrict these problematic users from using points to exchange for physical goods, and then arbitrage and cash them out - in other words, as a platform, I don’t want to continue to be taken advantage of by problematic users.

The fifth thing is more ruthless, which is the redistribution of benefits. Normal users and problem users are treated differently. Normal users may receive high valuable points in return, which they can redeem for the goods they want and maintain their original contributions; while problem users will be directly returned with a point stock that is countless times lower than before, completely disabling them.

You must be confused after reading this. What if the problematic user repeats the same trick and accumulates excessive points again?

It's very simple, the acquisition rules have changed. As for how to change it, I won’t mention it.

So you see, if the platform wants to reject some users who come only to get the benefits, there are many ways to do it. In one sentence:

If I want you to grab it, you can grab it, but if I don’t want you to grab it, then it is absolutely impossible for you to grab it .

What I actually want to express here is:

"Rules" have always been the most powerful tool for operations personnel, but whether you know how to use them and how to use them determines the extent to which you can control your users.

Of course, all of this depends on how well you understand your users, because if you don’t understand them well enough, you won’t be able to discern the value contribution of their behavior.

Whether to pluck or not, the decision is not actually in the hands of the user

Let me summarize.

Part of what I want to talk about today is related to methodology:

What should you do when you encounter a user who tries to take advantage of you?

But the other part is actually related to worldview:

Under what circumstances can it be tolerated that users take advantage of others, and vice versa?

For a new product, if allowing users to take advantage of the product can attract a large number of users, then users can be allowed to take advantage of the product, which is the so-called "revealing a flaw". However, if the product is already mature, then whether to allow "being taken advantage of" is actually just a decision-making issue, and should not be an operational difficulty.

That’s all I have to say.

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