Those excellent community products are secretly recording user behavior

1. The Originator of Content Platforms: BBS

"Dalian Jinzhou Doesn't Believe in Tears" made two people famous, one is Lao Rong and the other is Lao Chen.

The former is Wang Juntao, one of China's first Internet celebrities, the founder of 8848 and an early explorer of B2C e-commerce .

The latter is Chen Tong, who is known as China's No. 1 web editor. It can be said that he single-handedly set the standards for Internet web editors . He later went to Xiaomi and finally to Yidian Zixun as president and co-president of Phoenix.com, and served as a director of Yidian Zixun on behalf of Xiaomi.

At that time, Sina was not called Sina, but Sohu.com. It was not a portal website, but a community, and Lao Chen was just an ordinary editor of this community.

As the book of Ecclesiastes says:

“What has happened before will happen again, what has been done before will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

I saw a lot of things that are happening right now in "Dalian Jinzhou", but at that time, due to the scale of the Internet, many things were not seen by people. But now these things are exploding exponentially.

Lao Rong said that before 1997, no one thought that a person would become famous overnight because of a post.

According to the first Chinese Internet survey in October 1997, the total number of Internet users in the country at that time was only 620,000, less than the number of fans of any random Internet celebrity today.

But at that time, those 620,000 people could almost be regarded as the group with the most say in China’s Internet, and all the active bigwigs today are among them.

Therefore, even if there are only 620,000 netizens, it does not prevent Lao Rong and Lao Chen from becoming popular across the country and leaving a significant mark in the history of China's Internet.

Lao Rong also became an "Internet celebrity" at that time, and he and Lao Chen accidentally became a "hot spot" together.

On October 31, 1997, the Chinese team lost 2-3 to the Qatar team in Dalian Jinzhou. Amid the sighs in the football world, an "explosive article" came out of nowhere and was reprinted by mainstream media.

There is a sentence in "The Way of Sina" written by Lao Chen 8 years later, which I think can be modified and applied to today:

"This incident made people feel for the first time the power of combining content and hot topics."

From the perspective of a content creator, Lao Rong is lucky. I think if it were today, Lao Rong's post would probably be drowned in the massive amount of popular articles that take advantage of the trend, and it would be difficult to have the same influence as before. Of course, it is also possible that this article would become popular like Wang Wusi did by relying on a high-quality social circle.

If there were new media at that time, the title of "Dalian Jinzhou Does Not Believe in Tears" should at least be like this:

"A 30-year-old man gritted his teeth and bought three plane tickets, but cried like a dog after getting off the plane in Dalian. He said these words to his son";

After this incident broke out, at least such articles would appear:

"After Dalian Jinzhou lost the game, this man paralyzed the server of Sohu.com with an article. The editor was shocked after reading it!" 》

"Mainstream media have requested to reprint the article. What exactly did he write in the article that paralyzed the server of Sohu.com?" 》

There are several key words in this incident, which are so similar to the current situation: Internet celebrities, content, platform and hot spots.

"Dalian Jinzhou" accidentally borrowed a national hot spot, and there was almost no competitor. Someone originally advised Lao Rong to submit the article to the newspaper, but Lao Rong felt that it would be troublesome for the newspaper to edit and review it, so he published the article in the sports salon of Sitonglifang.

From the perspective of content operation , Lao Rong has done at least a few things right:

1. Produced high-quality content;
2. Caught a hot spot;
3. Manuscripts are produced within 48 hours to ensure timeliness;
4. I chose a community that has few people but high-quality users.

In terms of form, there is no essential difference from the current new media routines, except that at that time there were no WeChat public accounts , no Weibo, and no endless "various accounts". There were only forums.

After the millennium, two products were born, which are also epoch-making for the Internet:

One is Discuz! developed by Dai Zhikang when he was in college, and the other is PHPWIND (formerly ofstar) developed by Wang Xueji and Lin Yaona.

An interesting thing is that later Discuz! was sold to Tencent and PHPWIND was sold to Alibaba .

Both giants wanted to consolidate their position as Internet leaders by connecting small and medium-sized sites. However, within a few years, the status of personal websites plummeted and the trend quickly passed. What ended the trend of personal websites was the liberation of discourse power brought about by the rise of social networks .

Big Vs and internet celebrities ushered in their own golden age, followed by self-media and content entrepreneurs .

On July 15, 2010, CNNIC released the "26th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China". There was an interesting data in it: as of the reporting date, the number of websites in China had decreased by 440,000.

It was during this period that social networks emerged.

• In May 2007, Wang Xing founded Fanfou.com;
• In August 2007, Tencent, which had 410 million users, launched Taotao;
• Starting from July 2009, Fanfou Taotao ceased operations , and Jiwai, Follow5, and 9911 began to enter people's field of vision;
• Sina Weibo, founded in August 2009, swept the Internet with overwhelming force and became a unicorn at that time. Countless grassroots big accounts began to rise strongly.
• On August 18, 2012, the WeChat public account was launched.

At the same time, a large number of new media technology platforms, such as Huxiu, 36Kr , Titanium Media , Chuangyebang , Investment Circle , Everyone is a Product Manager and other crowdsourcing content platforms have been established and launched, and authors in the fields of technology media and operations have taken the stage as self-media.

The endless stream of social products and content platforms coming online have made people forget about BBS. Especially the experiences of Tianya, Mop, Xici Hutong and others in recent years have made many people feel that the era of forums is over.

I think this is a misunderstanding. Forums are actually getting better and better. BBS as the mainstream form of forums has bid farewell to its glory, but the core value of forums is constantly innovating and being reborn.

2. Evolution of content platforms

The full name of the forum is Bulletin Board System (BBS). We can understand it as the notices posted by government offices in ancient times or the bulletin boards in communities. On the basis of completing offline functions, it integrates the functions of interaction and free posting by users.

These already exist offline.

BBS integrates the functions of offline bulletin boards, improves community operation efficiency, and infinitely expands the boundaries of the community.

The above paragraph is a bit difficult to understand. I made a table to compare the functions of offline communities and forums:

As you can see from the table I made above, the most primitive forum is to integrate these offline actions online through code, thereby improving efficiency and broadening the boundaries of the community, so as to achieve the goal of influencing more people.

Later personal spaces, real-name social networking, Weibo, WeChat, public accounts and content platforms all evolved from these basic functions, which were the result of the official decentralization and tightening of user rights.

1. Personal space

Representatives: QQ Space, 51 Space, NetEase Blog, Sina Blog , Qingbo, NetEase LOFTER, Diandian, etc.

From the table above, we can see something very obvious: forum communities and offline communities are centralized squares, which are centralized platforms where users can express their opinions, but the authorities can choose to listen or not.

The advantage of forum communities over offline communities is that they give users more voice, but once they go against the will of the platform, they will also be harmonized.

The last column of the table is garbage, offline it is psoriasis, and online it is machine-posted .

The traffic on centralized platforms is unprecedentedly concentrated, which means that the authorities must strengthen management and weaken the rights of users, otherwise the entire platform will collapse.

The emergence of personal space solves this problem. The centralized platform disappears, and users become the main body of the entire platform.

Personal space turns the original personal center of the user in the forum into a homepage (later, the personal center of forum systems such as Discuz! also added a blog-like skin), and turns the homepage into the main display form of the platform, directly cutting off the centralized square (some platforms such as Sina have aggregated high-quality information into a special channel of the portal).

This was the case with the early 51 Space and QQ Space (private messaging was made into a separate IM). Without the traffic provided by the centralized forum, the relationships between users floated from the bottom of the forum to the top, and the value of the number of friends became prominent, and later gradually evolved into the number of fans.

During that period, Han Han and Xu Jinglei became the two most prominent bloggers, and the number of hits on their blogs exceeded 100 million respectively.

At the same time, many other grassroots blogs emerged. Sina even created a grassroots blog list. Acosta's blog has long topped the list and was the first grassroots blog to have over 10 million followers.

At that time, the influence of Sina Blog was no less than that of WeChat public accounts today, but unfortunately it eventually declined due to various reasons.

Blogs are another type of community that puts personal values ​​first, and are another type of forum after the platform has been weakened. It can be said that many big Vs on public accounts have been directly transferred from blogs and other community platforms.

For example, Shiliupo Report was first updated on a blog, and Mimi Meng was also a big Weibo account with nearly one million followers.

After new trends emerged, they promptly transferred their influence to official accounts, preserving and amplifying their influence.

2. Real-name social networking

Representatives: Renren , Fanfou, Pengyou, FACEBOOK, etc.

Early Internet communities all existed anonymously, which caused a series of problems. Relevant departments have always required real-name registration. Social networks represented by Facebook can be said to have just followed this institutional trend.

The value brought by social networks with real-name registration is also unexpected.

I have never used Renren, but I have used Tencent's Pengyou.com (mainly used for stealing vegetables). The most surprising thing is that under the real-name real-person social mechanism, the world's social network has been perfectly copied to the Internet.

People are connected to form a huge three-dimensional network, and many lost people are connected together again.

In that era, Renren was a well-deserved unicorn and the darling of the capital market. Unfortunately, it declined due to various reasons.

Compared with Facebook's current market value of nearly US$400 billion, the failure of real-name social networking in China is somewhat regrettable. There is actually no standard answer as to why it failed, and everyone has their own opinion.

This is just like how Weibo is rising again, but its originator Twitter is having a hard time abroad. This is not the main purpose of my article today.

What I mainly want to talk about here is the community. Real-name social networking is a new fission based on the original personal space, which further strengthens the importance of personal ID . Like personal space, it is a community that puts individuals in front and the central square in the back.

Another excellent thing about it is that it is a place for purely personal expression. Everyone writes about their own feelings, and not many people pay attention to traffic. It is an interactive community in a small circle.

At that time, personal spaces were polarized. Some people wrote for traffic, while others wrote for interest. However, since most people in personal spaces are strangers, the motivation to create will disappear without interaction, so many people choose to write in QQ space.

Although QQ is not a real-name social network, the first friends in QQ are generally classmates, making it an informal social network.

This is not the case with real-name social networks. You can find almost everyone you know on them, which immediately gives users the motivation to create content. Good feedback is always the key factor in the continuous production of content.

User ratings, points, and points mall in the forum are all designed to generate feedback.

The feedback here does not require 100,000+ views, just a like or a message from your friends will be enough. "Mutual stepping on each other" was one of the buzzwords of that era. By searching QQ groups, you can find various forms of "mutual stepping on each other" groups.

3. Weibo, Moments and WeChat

In the process of community evolution, Weibo's main contribution is to make content lighter. In the past, when creating content on personal spaces, since the pages were displayed in the form of articles, it was too heavy for content creators, and many people actually did not have the ability to produce such content.

Weibo has liberated those who are not capable of creating long-form content, giving them a space to express themselves in 140 words or even shorter sentences.

Tencent once launched Tencent Weibo, but it ultimately failed. However, QQ Space’s “Says” was a success.

Maybe not everyone in the younger generation has a Weibo account, but it is no exaggeration to say that everyone has a QQ account. They may not post on Weibo, but they will definitely post something on QQ space. The reason is that for young people, QQ is a real social relationship chain.

Every post will be seen by your classmates and friends.

Real relationships are more likely to get feedback. The probability of us liking and leaving a message for someone close to us is much higher than that for a stranger. One of the biggest reasons why the number of WeChat users is increasing rapidly is that we can guide friends from QQ and address book into a circle of friends and connect acquaintances in various social circles.

The reason why we open WeChat frantically every day to check the messages in Moments and post updates in Moments is rooted in this.

WeChat itself is actually a variant of the community. It puts personal ID and private messaging functions in the main position, and splits the original sections and posts into public accounts. Everyone has the opportunity to become a moderator and create a section that is completely controlled by themselves.

You can also be a complete browser, customize the sections you want to follow, and discard the sections you are not interested in by following or unfollowing them. Instead of being like traditional communities, those sections will be like spam in front of you regardless of whether you are interested or not.

At the same time, you are your own editor. Unless your post is blocked, you will not feel the existence of the platform.

Allowing users to "customize" is the greatest invention of the Internet and an absolute trend. Even the homepage of portal websites allows users to define their own section combinations.

Official accounts are currently the most complete form of this kind of customization. It can be said that WeChat as a whole is one of the best community products so far, along with Weibo and QQ.

They put personal values ​​first and infinitely weaken the platform's presence.

3. @ and #

Community products have two core functions: communication and exchange.

Under these two core functions, two epoch-making functions were born: @ and #.

It simplifies the communication process. We don’t have to click on a person’s homepage and then send a private message, nor do we have to look for that person’s business card in the IM friend list. We only need to enter an @ and then find the person’s name through fuzzy search.

A restructured central plaza and forum area. The functions of forum sections and Weibo topics are the same, which is to bring together a group of people with common interests to discuss a topic. You can directly follow the topics that you have long-term interest in, and just participate in those that you are not interested in.

Here I will focus on the "#" character.

In the past, communities had a page-like central square, but the traffic in the central square was extremely limited. An overly heavy central square would restrict the development of a community.

Currently, Jianshu is caught in such a dilemma. It is trying to achieve the goal of decentralization through the form of special topics, so that each special topic can form a system in itself, and each user can generate a homepage of his or her own by following this action, so as to achieve the goal of different homepage content for different users.

Baidu Tieba, Zhihu, Douban, Weibo and official accounts have all done this very successfully.

Under the “#” character is a decentralized central square. The square is generated by user cooperation. Users with the same interests will use the “#” character to find their companions. This is a UGC production process.

In the past, forum communities were organized into sections with official topics set by the government, but this often limited the content and size of the community. In the process of generating topics using the “#” character, the platform can use data based on the number of topics to analyze the content trends of the platform, thereby better adjusting its market strategy.

This is still a customization process, it is another form of tag cloud.

The number of readers for a platform is often misleading. In order to make the community run, a platform often sets recommended content. Users tend to pay more attention to the content recommended by the platform, which makes it difficult for operators to figure out whether it is the user's interest or the platform's recommendation that plays a role.

@ and # are both actions initiated by users and can more effectively reflect the real needs of users.

Actions such as customization, following, @ and # are increasingly becoming the mainstream configuration of the community. The purpose is to continuously give the right of choice to the users themselves and to generate big data with greater judgment value by recording their actions.

More and more communities are weakening the sense of existence of the communities themselves, and their form is becoming less and less important.

Valuable content and users' demand for content are the core value of community operations.

Finally, leave a limerick:

Users gain sovereignty by moving forward, and platforms are not idle by moving backward;

The invisible eye looks quietly and everything is in the palm of your hand.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @范子龙 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map