Is satisfying needs also death? The life decay cycle and countermeasures of social products!

The Internet has been experiencing a cold winter in recent times, and social products have been the first to be hit. Once upon a time, this field was full of competition and experts, but after a few years, only a handful of people have truly made their mark. The most frightening thing among these is the acceleration of the life decay cycle. Any product has a life cycle, and it is particularly fast in the social field.

In the social field, product managers often try their best to meet the psychological needs of users, but the reality is that even if they try their best to satisfy users, they will still be abandoned? What went wrong? Let’s first look at the following psychological dialogue.

This is a common process of psychological needs failing. As for the product name, I won’t mention it. So how do social products fail psychologically? We have to start from the beginning.

After satisfying basic physiological needs, humans develop complex psychological needs, which can be divided into curiosity, fear, superiority and belonging from the perspective of individual and group psychology.

Curiosity

In the early days of WeChat , when we opened our phones and shook them, we would look forward to who we would be matched with. How far are you from me? Is he/she good-looking? So many questions are the embodiment of human curiosity, which is essentially the same as "Where do I come from?", which is the heartfelt desire for the unknown.

Fear

When we open our phones, we find that many products have a function of daily sign-in. If you sign in for a certain number of consecutive days, you will get rewards. If you miss one day, the count will start again. So after you sign in for many consecutive days, because you have paid the cost of silence, the fear of losing the existing benefits will force you to log in every day and increase the platform's DAU.

This fear is also the underlying psychology formed by human beings' constant struggle with the harsh environment of nature during the evolution process.

▍Superiority and belonging

Many people ask themselves a question: What is the meaning of my life? It is very difficult to understand self-worth purely from a personal perspective, because an individual has no coordinates, and without a reference we will never know where we are. To solve this problem, everyone has developed two methods to find self-worth in comparison and connection with others.

In the first case, people will compare themselves with others and find a sense of superiority to prove their own value by proving that they are better than others. The identity and privileges of the VIP system make people feel secretly better than others. This is a sense of superiority.

In the second case, people will establish connections with others, find similar people, and empathize with the value of their existence in the sense of belonging to the organization. This situation often corresponds to various vertical community products. People are naturally lonely and desire to be understood. They are afraid of being isolated and hope to meet people like them. Highly similar interests and backgrounds can help people find a sense of belonging in an organization.

Knowing the above four underlying social psychology, let’s return to the question we mentioned at the beginning: Why do social products have a fatal decay law?

Social products often utilize various user psychology to achieve the purpose of promotion and user retention. The reason why Zuji was able to go viral on WeChat Moments in a very short time was because it directly hit the user's underlying psychology: when a friend in WeChat Moments posts a movie-like picture and text with subtitles, it will arouse the user's curiosity and make him try it. Most people who create such high-quality pictures at a low cost can easily develop a sense of superiority, so they will actively spread them. In the middle stage of dissemination, as more and more friends send out such pictures, others will feel afraid that they will be left behind if they do not send two pictures. Curiosity, superiority and fear led to explosive growth of the product.

But problems also arise: when more and more people post on WeChat Moments, the sense of superiority of the pioneers will be lost. After trying it a few times, curiosity and fear will naturally fade over time. The more you see, the higher your psychological threshold will be, and you will become numb. And because of this communication mechanism, Zuji is perceived by users as a tool for showing off, and the value of its self-positioning of "living like in a movie" is not conveyed to users. Once the psychological needs fail, users will flee.

Curiosity plus a sense of superiority can easily generate communication value, while fear plus a sense of belonging can easily retain users. A typical example is the vertical community: highly similar interests or common tags create a strong sense of belonging, and because of this mutual belonging, users face the fear of losing the circle when they escape. Such communities are often centralized: big V users create value and gain superiority, and junior users gain value and satisfy their curiosity. The products seem to form a closed loop and strong sense of belonging, but they cannot escape the law of failure of psychological needs.

First of all, the value of the platform comes from the content produced by big Vs, and the motivation for big Vs' creation is the sense of superiority of being supported by everyone; but as their psychological threshold increases, the platform needs to attract more new users to satisfy big V users and prevent user exodus caused by the breakdown of the value chain. Once a platform creates a strong sense of belonging, new users will be at a loss and find it difficult to integrate. Without the influx of new resources, the platform will surely die. Even if the relationship between new and old users is balanced, the influx of new users will dilute the tone that the platform itself has worked hard to create, and the sense of belonging of old users will weaken. Just like many old users of Zhihu and Douban complain about the decline in platform quality, it all ends up with users fleeing.

Therefore, no matter which of the four psychological methods you use, you will actually face the dilemma of psychological failure as time goes by. Curiosity dies from being no longer novel, fear dies from becoming commonplace, superiority dies from the ever-increasing psychological threshold, and a sense of belonging dies from the dilution effect caused by the influx of new users.

So, is there any way to avoid or delay this fatal law of social product attenuation?

The most successful product in the social field is WeChat. Let’s see how WeChat prevents such attenuation:

First of all, WeChat will utilize all the psychological needs of users . In the early days, voice intercom and shaking to identify nearby people were all designed to appeal to curiosity; the little red dots for unread messages and updates to Moments would make users feel an obsessive-compulsive and uneasy fear; WeChat has also established a sense of superiority based on the number of comments, likes, and readings; at the same time, WeChat has the social belonging brought by the entire chain of acquaintance relationships.

However, we found that voice intercom has become a daily habit and there is no curiosity at all. The "Shake Nearby" function was successfully whitewashed after becoming a hookup tool and bringing a surge in users. After completing its mission of user promotion and expansion, basically no one uses it. We are also getting more and more accustomed to the endless Moments, WeChat groups and public accounts, and the little red dot is no longer effective for us. At the same time, the number of likes decreases, and the increase in psychological thresholds makes the experience of superiority worse and worse. Finally, the number of friends continues to increase, the number of acquaintances decreases, the social pressure increases and the relationships are diluted, the status of friends in the Moments decreases, and irrelevant articles increase, all of which lead to a decrease in users' sense of belonging.

However, WeChat did not fail quickly due to the decrease in these psychological satisfactions. Isn’t it said that psychological needs will become ineffective? Why is WeChat still so healthy?

The core of a product is the value it provides, the essence of business is improving efficiency, and the core of Internet products is to improve the efficiency of production, dissemination and transformation of information. Looking back at the products that have dominated the market in recent years, you will find that their essence is to improve the efficiency of information organization and dissemination.

Renren increases the efficiency of meeting new friends and obtaining high-quality information flow in campus settings, while Weibo breaks down information and redistributes it, speeding up the efficiency of information transmission. WeChat is designed as an information flow + relationship chain, which seamlessly integrates IM, SNS and media to improve the efficiency of information organization and dissemination.

For a successful product, all satisfaction of psychological needs is just a means to promote and retain user usage, and serves the core value of the product .

When a product can improve the efficiency of information transmission, if it can utilize the above four psychological factors, it will achieve explosive growth and retention of users.

If a product leaves an impression on users that is too dependent on satisfying their psychological needs, such as a hookup tool, a pretense tool, a gathering place for literary and artistic people, and there is no corresponding iteration to continuously strengthen its value in efficiency, and these communication channels themselves occupy the minds of users, then it is very likely to become a short-lived product.

From psychological stimulation to efficiency dependence, from impressing users at first sight to making users unable to live without you, this is a love process and also the core wisdom of product managers.

So in my mind, social products can be divided into three realms:

The first layer is self-entertainment products. There are only formal improvements, but they fail to meet the users' underlying psychological needs.

The second level of products satisfies several psychological needs of users, but regards satisfying psychological needs as the value itself. Or simply improving efficiency but failing to meet the psychological needs of users, both methods will not succeed.

The third-tier products truly improve the efficiency of information organization and transmission, and at the same time have a product function matrix. Every detail in the promotion and sedimentation of users fully satisfies the users' curiosity, fear, superiority and sense of belonging. At the same time, in the iterative process, the impression that the product is equivalent to these functional means is continuously weakened. With value as the core and the satisfaction of psychological needs as the tentacles extending to all directions.

WeChat now seems impeccable, with its functional matrix complementing each other in offense and defense. However, any powerful empire has its weaknesses. Under the existing hardware platform, it is almost impossible for IM to subvert WeChat. As for the Moments, is WeChat's efficiency really high enough? Whenever you see inspirational stories or photos of parents showing off their children and affection, is there still a possibility of a complete breakthrough? And this may be the ticket to the next era.