As a community product, what is the future of QQ Interest Tribes?

In 2014, QQ, which has always been considered the most popular gathering place for young people, launched a new section called "Interest Tribes". This is another community product that QQ has focused on after QQ Groups.

There were two reasons why QQ launched Interest Tribes at that time. One was that with the wave of mobile Internet , there was a relatively large market gap in communities based on mobile Internet , and QQ needed a product that could occupy a position in the pan- social field. The other was that with the rise of WeChat , QQ focused on the young brand strategy, and needed a place to retain young people and carry and expand this young culture.

Because it was derived from QQ, when it first started operating , the first tribes that developed were mainly based on celebrities, games , and selfies.

As for celebrities, by 2015, TFBOYS had 14.83 million fans, which is enough to surpass a country; the second is Li Yifeng, whose appearance seriously distorts his age, and his fans reached 12.35 million. In addition, "The Journey of Flower" Zhao Liying and "Mrs. Huang" Angelababy are also very popular, with 10.13 million and 9.16 million fans respectively. It is worth noting that the now popular SNG48 had cooperated with Interest Tribe to recruit the fifth batch of students in early 2015. The data at that time showed that among the many channels of SNH48, Interest Tribe became the largest registration portal, contributing a total of 70,000 applicants, with a total number of registrations reaching about 110,000, which exceeded half of the total registrations.

The reason why Interest Tribe has become another gathering place for celebrity fans after Tieba is that the background behind it is just like how many people born in the 80s view Jiang Dawei. In the eyes of people born in the 00s, Jay Chou and Jiang Dawei are almost the same, like TFBOYS, Li Yifeng and other "Four Divine Beasts". Although their rise was extremely fast, they were often not accepted by mainstream culture, which meant that their fans needed a new place, a place different from the "Li Yi Bar" and the "World of Warcraft Bar". At the same time, due to the rapid development of mobile phones, posting on QQ is also very much in line with the habits of young users.

At the game level, "Tiantian Cool Run" released by Tianmei Studio at that time had long occupied the first place in the popularity of QQ interest tribes. In 2015, the Tiantian Cool Run tribe had more than 49.92 million people. Since QQ hosted QGC e-sports at that time, many great players of Tiantian Kupao were active in interest tribes, and many of them even relied on interest tribes for "commercialization". Due to the reward function of interest tribes, many great players could get a lot of praise by posting in interest tribes.

The Selfie Tribe ranks second in popularity among all interest tribes, after Tiantian Kupao, with 16.77 million members. As an emerging culture that accompanies the rise of smartphones, taking selfies is an indispensable skill for most young people, just like holding a pen or chopsticks. The most typical example is that five years ago, when introducing a person, the ability to take photos would never be mentioned, but now the ability to take photos has become the most critical factor in measuring a person's skills. I remember reading a lot of articles introducing Huang Bo, in which they would highlight his ability to take photos. This can be considered as the infiltration of emerging culture into mainstream culture.

Official data from Tencent shows that there are more than 300,000 tribes in total, of which more than 250 have over one million fans, and the tribe with the highest number of fans is nearly 50 million. The number of active users of Interest Tribes has exceeded 10 million, more than half of which are born after 1990, and the number of replies to a single topic can reach hundreds of thousands.

The rapid development of Interest Tribes has also attracted the attention of many state-owned departments. After all, for them, there is no other place to approach and understand young people more directly than Interest Tribes. Just recently, Interest Tribe and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences jointly released a "China Interest Report". The former collected and organized data through big data, while the latter provided framework organization and guidance for the report.

This report is basically the earliest report on "interests" in China. According to the report, 95% of people think they have interests, and 62% think they have broad interests. However, among all the people, only 14% actually meet the three criteria of interest: enjoying it, being able to improve themselves, and being willing to continue to invest. What exactly is considered an interest? In an environment where social pressure is increasing, it is obviously necessary to discuss this topic.

This not only concerns the overall development of society, whether people are working for their interests, or when people reach a certain level of life before they dare to pursue their interests, but also concerns people's cognition of interests. Is self-righteous interest a blind impulse, or has the younger generation begun to truly use interest as the starting point of life and work. It is no exaggeration to say that, just like the social phenomenon of the "Lost Generation", this report should be regarded as an advance prediction of society, and this is believed to be the reason why the Academy of Social Sciences values ​​cooperation with interest tribes and launches this report.

Although Interest Tribes has developed rapidly and even become a new birthplace of culture, it still cannot escape two problems: the first is the difference from Baidu Tieba, and the other is its "commercialization" path, whether it will repeat the mistakes of Baidu Tieba. For the former, the problem lies in the fact that Interest Groups and Tieba have too many similarities after all, and for the latter, the reason is that the screams that Baidu Tieba experienced during its commercialization process are still fresh in our minds.

The official response to these two questions is relatively boring. My personal understanding is that there are two biggest differences between Interest Tribes and Tieba: one is the parasitic relationship between Tieba and Baidu. Tieba is more like Baidu's moat, while Interest Tribes is to QQ more like the latter giving birth to the former. Although Interest Tribes now has an independent App, most of the resources are still on QQ; the second is that Baidu and Tencent are in different situations. Due to the absence of mobile Internet, Baidu as a whole struggled at the baseline of BAT and was even in danger of being thrown out. Therefore, it has its own understanding of the commercialization of Tieba, while Tencent has just surpassed China Mobile to become the company with the highest market value in Asia. It has enough business lines to support and breed QQ. In other words, compared with Baidu's Tieba, Tencent has enough options for Interest Groups.

When Baidu Tieba encountered a crisis due to the "hemophilia incident" at the beginning of the year, its forum owners had "nowhere to go". QQ Interest Tribe took the initiative to contact the forum owners, inviting them to serve as chiefs (moderator positions) in the hemophilia tribe and promised not to engage in similar behavior. "Unlike Tieba, where the management rights are mostly in the hands of the forum owners, the management rights of many Interest Groups are in the hands of Tencent," this is what the head of Interest Groups previously told the media. Under the mechanism of strong operation and strong review, Interest Tribes has obviously been deliberately avoiding the problems of Tieba.

From an industry perspective, Interest Tribes is Tencent's move to penetrate deeper into the social market segment, thereby attracting more users and increasing user stickiness. For most companies and institutions, the role of Interest Tribes should be seen as a new gathering place for young people. For users, this is a completely "parallel world", a place that is separated from the real world and can accommodate another self.

Whenever it’s late at night and everyone is asleep, many people will toss and turn, wondering how to get along with “young people”. They must be wondering, when the post-90s generation has not been fully researched yet, the post-00s generation has already stood up; they must also be thinking, whether they are the post-90s generation or the post-00s generation, where are these young people? They must also constantly ask themselves in their hearts, when words like non-mainstream, personalized, and two-dimensional appear one after another, "How should I get along with this world?"

No one can deny that the speed of change in this era exceeds all previous changes, which makes it impossible for everyone to accurately predict what will happen next and what new things will emerge next. In the real world, the situation may be even worse. People often have to hurry up and catch up with something new before they have time to think, judge, or even predict. Because no matter what the future of this thing will be like, at least it cannot be abandoned by the times now.

This will remind many people of "Kuafu". In "Classic of Mountains and Seas", Kuafu chasing the sun is regarded as a yearning for light. However, in fact, the motive and purpose of Kuafu chasing the sun are incomprehensible to people today. Some scholars believe that Kuafu chased the sun because the tribe was looking for water and wanted to reach Yugu where the sun sets. Obviously, this is a wrong decision that lacks scientific common sense. But in the primitive society at that time, such action was undoubtedly correct and there was no other choice.

Following the same logic, just as our ancestors knew nothing in the ancient times, we are also completely clueless about what new things will emerge in the world in the future. According to the same logic, we can only be like "Kuafu" and keep learning and adapting to new things happening. So, instead of trying to understand how the world is changing, it might be more practical for us to see what these new things are and where they happen first.