Baidu Knows’ first product manager: Communities are all about the world, how do we handle user conflicts?

Wherever there is role distinction, there is role conflict. Community products are all about interpersonal relationships. Who you choose to associate with and how you stand on the side will determine the direction and even the life and death of the product. Baidu Knows and Baidu Tieba have very deep thoughts on this issue.

A community is a world of its own. Why do we say that? The biggest feature of community products is openness and transparency. Anyone can express their feelings on any topic and leave comments. Initially, this made the community active. But what are the consequences over time?

Publishers and responders, new users and old users, top users and mass users... a huge relationship network has been formed. As the product grows bigger, the relationship network becomes more and more complex. And where there is role distinction, there is role conflict.

This makes the product requirements very high. Making community products is actually about building interpersonal relationships. Every decision made by your users involves the interests of all parties. How to balance these interests? Which users should be protected? Which users should be put on hold?

Based on my product experience at Baidu Knows and Baidu Tieba, I would like to share how we think and what we do when we encounter these user conflicts.

Content Producers vs Viewers - Think clearly about who your community is for

For any community product, the first user conflict encountered is probably that between content producers and viewers.

what to do? Some people say that supply is the foundation, and of course producers are given priority. However, the community is made for the viewers, and the latter's experience is the standard for designing your product. Especially in the early stages of a community, do not design the community to produce an absolute amount of content, otherwise it will definitely fail.

Because if you keep thinking about how to make people who contribute content have the most fun, the threshold for your content will definitely be lowered, and a large amount of junk content will come in without any sedimentation value. In the end, it will become self-entertainment. Users will find that interacting with you is not fun, and eventually they will leave, and the community will be paralyzed.

So, as long as you want to protect the browser experience, you will inevitably kill off a considerable number of content contributors.

New users vs. old users: Protect users who share the same values ​​as your platform

When a community product passes the start-up phase and begins to grow, you will find that intense conflicts arise between new and old users. Old users want to maintain a sense of accomplishment in the community, so they will work together to set up barriers to fight against new users because new users are a threat to them.

A year ago, a very strong conflict between new and old users occurred in a certain knowledge community. New user protest:

Why are violations by old users often ignored, but penalties for new users are very strict?

Old users criticize new users for asking too few questions and say things like “the questions they ask are too simple” and “you should read the community question guide carefully before asking questions”, which obviously causes great harm to new users.

Who do you protect in this situation? Most people will choose to protect old users, but in fact you should protect new users, or more accurately, protect the group of users who share the same values ​​as your platform.

We must remember that whenever there is a group of users in the community who regard their own interests as the perspective, the interests conflict with those of other users of the platform. In this case, what we need to protect are users who stand on the platform's value standpoint.

Top users vs. mass users: users who tend to create more value for the community

As the number of users gradually grows, conflicts arise between top users and mass users. What should we do?

For example, when we were working on Baidu Zhidao, we designed a points system, but we didn’t expect users to spend more than ten hours on it every day and their levels would increase very quickly. In about two months, we had users reaching the maximum level.

If he reaches the maximum level, he might leave. We discussed: Should we design an area? For example, the "Hall of Fame" or something like that would give them value and motivation to stay.

Later we didn’t do the “Hall of Fame.” Because we have observed that in Baidu Knows, the core answer contributors are not the top users, but the majority of middle users. This group of users has begun to complain that all of Baidu Knows' operational strategies and resources are tilted towards the top users.

Under this situation, if we continue to "frame" the top users, it will cause huge harm to the most valuable middle users of "Baidu Knows". At least at that stage, we are more inclined to incentivize users in the community who may be more valuable to me.

High-quality users vs. low-quality users: your content should match the users

High-quality users VS low-quality users, is the higher the quality, the better? The key to determining this degree actually depends on who your target users are.

For example, there is a category in Baidu Zhidao that is related to computers. We all think it is too unpopular, and the questions and answers must be very bad. As a result, there are not only a lot of answers in this category, but also very high quality. Unfortunately, it is so high that users can't understand it.

The characteristic of the entire Internet users at that time was that most netizens did not know how to express their questions using professional terms? They will simply describe the problem:

• Why does the computer freeze for no reason?
• What should I do if my computer blue screens for no reason?

So, the computer technology expert came to answer:

When turning on the computer, press some shortcut key, enter some channel, find a certain code, enter something, then a page pops up, and then find something else.

This kind of answer is very accurate, but users really can’t understand it and directly rate it as dissatisfied.

Therefore, the most fundamental thing is that the content you provide must match your users. Similarly, if your users have upgraded and you are still providing general answers instead of professional and in-depth content, that won’t work either.

High quality or low quality, this is a process of active selection. We need to understand who the target users are and output content for them.

Questioner vs. Answerer: Setting the threshold for asking questions

Wherever there is role distinction, there is role conflict. Even Baidu knows that there are conflicts between questioners and answerers. You know, this is such a natural pair of characters with no conflict of interest!

For example, if you do not raise the threshold for questioners, after a large number of questions have been answered, the questioners will not choose the best answer. This is so easy. I only need to ask questions and not worry about the follow-up. However, this will result in a large number of questions having no best answers, and the respondents will not get any points, which will inevitably harm the interests of the respondents.

Second, the platform resources are limited, and the amount of questions it can handle is also limited. Once the questioner starts asking random questions, a large number of questions that really need to be answered will sink to the bottom before they are seen.

What I regretted most after leaving Baidu Zhidao was that I did not launch the questioner points system online before leaving, which is to set a threshold for questioners: if you want to ask a question, you need to select the best answer from the last question.

Only by doing this design for the questioner can invalid questions be significantly reduced, and users will not casually ignore the best answer after asking a question.

Therefore, there are conflicts of interest among all roles. If there is no good system design, users will be inadvertently harmed. Everyone must remember that building a community is about interpersonal relationships and interest groups . Who you choose to associate with and how you stand on the side will determine the direction and even the life and death of your product in the subsequent development.

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The author of this article @田晓萌 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!