The dilemma of TikTok: Isn’t TikTok a short video? !

Short videos have always been very popular. I remember the first time I heard about the concept of short videos and used a short video product was when I experienced Meipai in 2014. At that time, I felt that it was very powerful, cool and fun.

There were two main lines of logic for predicting that short videos would become a hot topic:

1. The infrastructure has been upgraded and improved, and smartphones with larger and clearer screens and 4G networks have become more popular;
2. The mobile Internet has brought about fragmented user demands and fragmented time.

Finally, the real winner in content products is Toutiao , which provides news in a feed based on recommendation algorithms. Toutiao, with its strong products, technical capabilities and growth capabilities, has finally pushed short videos to the forefront in the form of " TikTok ".

1. Changes and Constancy of the Market

There are many ways to explain why short videos have exploded in the market in the form of "Tik Tok". We can find an answer from the changes and constants in the market.

From the perspective of changes, 4G networks and cheap traffic , mobile terminals with stronger computing performance, larger and clearer screens and high-definition cameras, the iteration of new groups, etc., are all influencing factors. Although these changes are not qualitative changes like the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet , when upgrades in multiple dimensions change in the same direction, the combined impact may indeed open up a huge incremental market for certain products in the existing market.

From the perspective of constancy, everything is in a state of change, and nothing will remain unchanged. Therefore, the constancy we are talking about is relative constancy within a certain period of time. From this perspective, what can be defined as unchanging is the human heart, that is, the collective needs and psychological demands of mankind summarized by all user portraits .

If we take "infrastructure" as the X-axis, "traffic" as the Y-axis, and "user demand" as the Z-axis, we can establish a coordinate system:

Based on this coordinate system, we can label some Internet products, such as:

• Tantan = (LBS, mobile Internet dividends , hookups ),
• Pinduoduo = ( WeChat , traffic dividends from the lower-tier cities, cheap goods),
• Didi Chuxing = (mobile payment, mobile Internet dividends, convenient and safe taxi hailing),
• Toutiao = (recommendation algorithm, traffic bonus in low-tier cities, information demand).

Now, we also mark Douyin and Kuaishou separately:

• Douyin = (product and recommendation algorithm, new crowd traffic dividend, emotion and belonging),
• Kuaishou = (smartphone penetration, internet traffic in lower-tier cities, respect and self-actualization).

2. User needs from the comparison between Douyin and Kuaishou

In recent years, apart from VR , AI , and blockchain , there has been no special progress in the application of information technology. In the absence of substantial changes in technology and infrastructure, Douyin has been able to occupy such a position in the saturated online Internet product market as a dark horse , which shows two things:

1. User needs are never perfectly met, so most areas without strong barriers are likely to be reconstructed;
2. Products driven by user demand will always have opportunities in the pan-entertainment content field, and people will enjoy better products.

Pan-entertainment content products usually meet user needs at a higher level in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, higher than physiological and safety needs. Both Douyin and Kuaishou are short video products, and their sizes are close to the ceiling. However, the time users spend on pan-entertainment content products is relatively fixed, so many people may have discussed the mutual penetration between the two in the future. For example, Kuaishou’s strategy of surrounding cities from the countryside improves the quality of content production and penetrates into first- and second-tier cities. For example, Douyin's high-dimensional attack on low-dimensional, and dimensionality reduction attack on the market currently covered by Kuaishou, etc. The core difference between Douyin and Kuaishou is naturally the different markets they cover and the different user distributions, but in essence, if we reduce individual users to their psychological needs, Douyin satisfies users' needs for "emotion and belonging", while Kuaishou satisfies users' needs for "respect and self-realization".

Before analyzing these two types of user needs in detail, let us first talk about a phenomenon: the explosion of the domestic pet market. With social development, economic prosperity and growth in per capita disposable income, keeping pets has become popular in Chinese society, just like in Western countries. This logic is fine in terms of continuity. The problem is that the fundamental reason for keeping pets is not because people have money and free time, and Chinese people are not idle at all now. Considering that the pet market can explode so quickly, there is a strong demand behind it. This strong demand is the need for "emotion and belonging". Simply put, people need companionship.

Now that those born in the 2000s have become adults and those born in the 1990s are about to turn 30, the generation born between 1990 and 1999 has become the cornerstone of society, and those born in the 2000s and later are gradually entering the mainstream. Corresponding to this group of people entering the mainstream stage of society, they have long reached the age of marriage, and it can even be said that they are marrying late. Whether in ancient times or modern times, due to arranged marriages and social background, the average age of marriage for men and women was much earlier than it is now. In other words, the generation born between 1990 and 1999 should have been married long ago and even had children.

Therefore, the young people and new groups in today's society are not only not married at the age when they should be getting married and having children, but they don't even have a boyfriend or girlfriend. This situation has a fundamental and physiological impact on people. If we analyze physiological needs into spiritual and physical levels, at the physical level, Momo and Tantan are proof of this, and some geniuses have even extended this to allowing people to have sex on NetEase Cloud Music and Dianping. On the spiritual level, as mentioned above, people need companionship and their "emotional and belonging" needs to be met.

The short videos on TikTok are mainly created using the rear and front cameras of mobile phones, so the videos we see are basically from the first and second person perspectives. Before this round of short video explosion, what was popular in the field of pan-entertainment content was mobile live streaming , which is a typical second-person perspective. The second-person perspective is the best way to express a strong sense of immersion, especially when the second-person perspective is used flexibly in games (such as "God of War 3" and "A Way Out" ). Due to the content characteristics of the second-person perspective videos recorded by the front camera in Tik Tok, the second-person perspective for Tik Tok can also have a new name: girlfriend/boyfriend perspective.

It is not difficult for a product to suddenly become popular, but the difficult part is to maintain it and achieve a certain level of daily and monthly active users, which requires retention and user activity. If the Toutiao App itself does not allow ordinary users to feel the powerful technological driving force and product strength of ByteDance, the achievements of Douyin have well demonstrated the hard power of ByteDance as a technology-driven technology company.

As for Kuaishou, we found that it meets people’s needs for “respect and self-actualization”. Kuaishou's users are distributed in low-tier cities and rural areas. This group of people has a characteristic: they have strong blood and geographical ties. This strong blood and geographical relationship determines that they are not lonely. They are surrounded by family and relatives, and have friends and classmates who they have grown up with. What these people lack is respect and self-realization and expression.

For young people working in first- and second-tier cities, leaving their hometowns to move to other places is a result of their search for self-realization and expression, and their career achievements determine the degree of respect they receive. Compared with young people in first- and second-tier cities, it is relatively difficult for Kuaishou users to achieve respect, self-realization and expression in their work and life. So they discovered Kuaishou, integrated into it, and satisfied their needs for "respect and self-realization" on Kuaishou. Before Kuaishou's rectification, the bizarre chaos and the chaotic crowds of demons on it were actually the users' desire to be noticed, recognized and achieve self-realization. This is the core value of Kuaishou.

3. Tik Tok is not a short video

First of all, short videos cannot summarize the entirety of Douyin. Short videos are just one of the forms of expression of Douyin App product content. Tik Tok's product content is an almost perfect multi-media fusion of "text (including comments)" + "music" + "video", just like when we watch anime/TV series/ movies , it is always subtitles (and barrage) + BGM + video. The reason why Douyin is called Douyin is that it was originally an App product for playing music, creating UGC under the BGM that users like. For example, Musical.ly has always been a music app, and its users are happy to be called musers. When users open TikTok, the first image that catches their eye may be a beautiful girl/boy, but the first thing that arouses their emotions must be the music. It can be said that music (BGM) and short videos complement each other and have almost equal influence on TikTok.

When it comes to media, people often use information density to stratify media, believing that video has the highest information density. Video is also the way humans perceive the world, so fragmented short videos that occupy fragmented time are the future and what-have-you. What he said is true and the logic makes sense, but his understanding of the media is a bit superficial.

Short videos as a medium can be divided into hot media short videos and cold media short videos. The main characteristics of hot media are "high definition" and "low involvement", while cold media, on the contrary, represents "low definition" and "high involvement". Simply put, thermal media will greatly increase the sensory ratio, such as turning off the lights at night and listening to music with headphones in bed, or watching a movie in a cinema. In the scenario of listening to music, the headphones are the medium and the songs played are the message. At the same time, the songs are also the medium and the language is the message. This is a hierarchical "media environment" where "the medium is the message". The message of the upper-level media is the media of the lower-level media.

So in the scenario of going to the cinema to watch a movie, the cinema is the medium, the movie is the message, and the movie is also the medium, with the language/picture as the underlying message. If we use our mobile phones to secretly watch movies at work, not only do we need to distract our eyes to see if the boss is around, but we also have to pay attention to the surrounding situation with our ears, and we have to be busy with other things with our hands. At this time, the ratio of your senses (eyes) mobilized by the movie is much lower than that in the movie theater, so the movie at this time is a cold medium with low definition.

Regarding the issue of "participation", for hot media, such as the movies in the above-mentioned cinema scene and the songs listened to with headphones in bed at night with the lights turned off, the degree of subjective participation required by people is relatively low, because people are naturally brought into certain scenes by the media, and the media's intervention on people is very strong, so people are "low-participated" in hot media. Under cold media, people are less interfered with by cold media. People can flexibly use other senses besides the media. For example, when working while playing music, the music is "low definition" and people are "highly involved". You need to concentrate to listen to the song and the message conveyed by the music. So the word "engagement" here refers to a process or state, not a result.

Although we say that videos have the highest information density compared to text and pictures, both Douyin and Kuaishou are essentially cold media with low clarity, which requires high human participation to obtain information. Compared with mainstream Internet products, Kuaishou is very special. It’s not that the content on it is so different, but that its user base is a group of people who have not been well penetrated after the mobile Internet has popularized and covered domestic users, or in other words, the application of the Internet in this group is still insufficient.

So when a product like Kuaishou appeared that met the needs of this group of people, it was able to explode among this group of people. Essentially, the logic was the same as the early days of the Internet and mobile Internet to reap the dividends of Internet user growth. Therefore, Kuaishou, as a cold media, also has high growth and high activity because these people lack spiritual entertainment methods.

Although Douyin is a cold medium overall, it contains many hot media elements if you look at it in detail. First of all, the music (BGM) we mentioned above is a very important thermal media element. Music is a magical medium that can instantly penetrate people's hearts and fully enhance the sensory ratio of the ears, with low involvement and high clarity. Secondly, there are a large number of second-person perspective videos created by the front camera of the mobile phone. The creator himself also sets the person behind the camera as a natural person to perform a conversational situation. This strong sense of substitution also has a very hot media effect.

Some people say they are addicted to Douyin, some say they are addicted to Zhihu. The so-called addiction is the effect brought about by hot media. Tik Tok is not a short video. Jokingly speaking, I think Tik Tok is about sharing girlfriends and boyfriends. Wasn’t there a movie called "Love Call Transfer" eleven years ago? I think Tik Tok is an upgraded version of the smartphone function. When you open Tik Tok, your boyfriend, girlfriend and so on are all there.

As mentioned earlier, Douyin is the representative of the technology-driven technology company ByteDance. The power of its recommendation algorithm is perfectly reflected in Douyin. Try to reduce user aesthetic fatigue, sustain user usage time and cycle, and continuously stimulate user emotions through content adjustment. (Not to mention the strength in products and operations ) We shape a comprehensive entertainment product experience around the core needs of "emotion and belonging". So companies like Tencent are spending billions to subsidize Weishi , and there are even rumors that short videos in Moments will be sent to Weishi by default. If they don’t understand the fundamental issue clearly, they will still be in trouble.

4. Douyin’s Dilemma

Let’s first talk about a very realistic problem that Tik Tok faces: music copyright, which will also be the killer weapon of Tencent and Alibaba . For example, NetEase Cloud Music naturally has the money to buy the copyright of Jay Chou's songs, but they are no longer selling them. The seaweed dance on Douyin has also become a swan song because of this. Although the music copyright issue is a big pitfall for Douyin, it will not be difficult to overcome it given the background and strength of Toutiao, its recent ambiguous relationship with Alibaba, and its training and discovery of independent musicians.

The main dilemma of Douyin lies in a very fundamental question: what exactly is Douyin and what does Douyin provide and satisfy to users. This determines the user sedimentation of Douyin and how to retain users. The reason why phenomenal products are only a short-term phenomenon is that they fail in user sedimentation.

Let’s look at the Internet products that have become mainstream:

• Zhihu: Find knowledge and solutions (Baidu Knows), read jokes and stories;
• Bilibili : watch anime and follow series;
• Toutiao/ Tencent News : read news information;
• iQiyi / Tencent Video : watch dramas, variety shows, and movies;
• QQ Music/NetEase Cloud Music: Listen to music.

As for other life service app products, they have even greater value and significance in retaining users. And what is Tik Tok? The best description might be "I'm idle, bored, empty, lonely, uninteresting, and in a bad mood, so I open TikTok to entertain myself." From a communication perspective, Tik Tok has actually created a new medium, and this medium has had a certain impact on the general public. Such live broadcast products as Douyu / Panda / Huya , Yingke /Huajiao/Yizhibo are also a new medium (although the form of live broadcast itself has appeared very early), and the emergence of such products has truly defined "watching live broadcasts" as a need on the same level as watching dramas, listening to music, and watching anime (compared to higher-level needs such as leisure, safety, and emotional belonging).

However, when it comes to Tik Tok, we really can’t find out which specific functional needs of users it meets. Like the former Footprints App and Face Meng App, it is essentially a new medium. In its development as a new medium, it did not form meaningful functional needs and was quickly abandoned by users.

When we look at the functional information provided to users by the above-mentioned mainstream Internet products, we can find that these messages are all hot media, and the products are also all hot media. The Internet was born a few years after McLuhan proposed the concepts of hot media and cold media, and that era is completely incomparable to today's Internet world, so we might as well put forward a hypothesis: "Pan-entertainment content products that can be popular for a long time within a certain period of time must be hot media (or have high hot media attributes)." Unlike talkies, which transformed from a cold medium to a hot medium with the help of cinema environment and film production technology, TV programs are still a cold medium today. Moreover, due to the existence of the Internet, TV has lower clarity and requires higher levels of human participation, so the ratings of TV programs have dropped significantly.

Therefore, in the process of finding its own functional positioning, Douyin must be in a process of transforming from cold media to hot media. Tik Tok's music (BGM), second-person perspective videos, video descriptions, and comment areas are the elements that constitute Tik Tok's current main hot media attributes, but overall Tik Tok is still a cold media. I believe that most of the users of TikTok are like me, who mainly use TikTok to scroll. Although they like or follow some people, the main way to receive information is still through algorithm recommendations, which is a bit like " read and burn ". In terms of product form, product logic and functions, Douyin is unlikely to make major changes, so let’s try to imagine what Douyin should do next based on its current form.

When we look at mainstream Internet products, they retain users because the products themselves are accumulating something. Zhihu has its "answers", Bilibili has anime series, video websites have dramas and movies, news clients have news information, and WeChat and QQ have social relationships. Weibo is a little bit complicated. It is a social media platform that accumulates information of various attributes. If WeChat Moments is the residential area where you live, then Weibo is the big square in the city center. Compared with these products, it is indeed too difficult for Douyin to accumulate hot media information. What Douyin is currently accumulating is algorithms and the algorithmic portrait of each user (of course, this is actually more amazing).

For Kuaishou, its user base has fewer entertainment options, so Kuaishou can live a relatively comfortable life. For Douyin, users have many more choices, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy user preferences and continue to stimulate users. What I can think of at the moment about what Douyin has accumulated is that it is similar to Weibo, and it has accumulated a kind of pan-social relationship and connection relationship. But this does not mean that we can develop social relationships like Tencent. It is unrealistic to want to develop social relationships beyond Tencent before there are breakthrough technologies and new terminals.

In terms of social relationships alone, none of the projects I have seen on the market can achieve the same level as BiXin (YuPaopao) and YueBaoBao. Compared to Weibo, the clarity of the information that Douyin can carry is too low. As an app that makes users happy, Douyin's content is extremely fast-food style. It does not have the current affairs and other high-definition long articles like those on Weibo. Therefore, there is indeed no breakthrough in the content itself, and too many second-person perspective videos will cause aesthetic fatigue among users, who are the most difficult to please.

Tik Tok aims to accumulate pan-social relationships and connection relationships, which is actually to accumulate PGC users. For example, Fei Qiming, who became famous thanks to Tik Tok. This is simply the fastest way of creating a star I have ever seen. This way of becoming famous is simply a miracle. There is also Dai Gulala K, who recently became popular on Tik Tok. However, Fei Qiming's connections are still concentrated on Weibo, even though the number of Fei's "fans" on Douyin is nearly four times that of Weibo. This also reflects the low clarity of Tik Tok as a new medium. So is there any potential and value to be explored in the personal homepage and comment area of ​​​​TikTok?

It is almost impossible to say that TikTok will decline as quickly as a phenomenal product, but it still has a long way to go before it can gain a foothold in the user market like Toutiao App, a news and information product, and become another cash cow for ByteDance. In short, precipitate relationships and content, and transform cold media attributes into hot media.

5. Continue to be optimistic about the next pan-entertainment content product

Although TikTok is a product incubated within a large company, its success can be copied or reproduced. Musical.ly became popular in overseas markets even before TikTok. Tik Tok's advantages lie in its technical algorithms, products, and operations. Relative growth is not difficult. After all, you can achieve it with money, and there is no shortage of money for starting a business nowadays. Therefore, if it is a startup company, it is also possible to create TikTok, but it will definitely be much slower and more difficult, and there is a possibility that it may be copied by big companies. But there is definitely a chance and the chance is not small.

Musical.ly's current achievements are commendable to its team, but musical.ly can indeed do better. At least it has to aim for tens of billions of dollars as investors want. However, its team cannot have the accumulation of Toutiao, and this is not something that money can solve. So, if a stronger team were to create musical.ly, would there be better results? I think there is a high probability that it would.

The public's spiritual entertainment needs are far from being met and will never be met. This is the core logic behind my continued optimism about the next pan-entertainment content product. In addition, there is a relatively pessimistic underlying logic: technology drives social development and economic progress, but it also pushes humanity into the abyss of pain and madness.

I wonder if anyone has noticed that at the beginning of the article we mentioned the "emotion and belonging" needs of Douyin users and the "respect and self-actualization" needs of Kuaishou users. From the perspective of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the "pursuit" of Kuaishou users is more advanced than that of Douyin users. This is not a coincidence. The lives of urban residents are more painful and depressing than those of urban and rural residents. I believe most people can understand this. The view that technology is pushing humanity into an abyss of suffering certainly does not just stem from such a phenomenon or a feeling in social life. Kaczynski took "great pains" to publish his arguments in The New York Times and The Washington Post more than 20 years ago.

What supports the meaning of human existence is an experience/need that we can call the "power process ". The "power process" is mainly composed of three stages/processes: goals, efforts, and achieving goals, among which some people need autonomy. Compared with primitive society and ancient society, modern industrialized society has interrupted or seriously hindered the process of human beings realizing their rights.

We divide human desires into three categories:

1. desires that can be satisfied with minimal effort;
2. Desires that require a great deal of effort to satisfy;
3. A desire that cannot be fully satisfied no matter how hard you try.

The power process satisfies desires of the second type. The more desires of the third type people have, the more frustrated and angry they become, and eventually they will develop defeatism and depression. In primitive society, material needs belonged to the second category, while in modern society, material needs belong to the first category. Therefore, in modern industrial society, humans have developed "surrogate activities" to resolve the mental pain caused by the inability to realize their rights. Such as devoting oneself to science, loving art, personal hobbies, etc.

But substitute activities are not as good as pursuing "real goals", and people who are deeply involved in substitute activities will never be satisfied and will never be able to rest. Advertising and marketing are also artificially creating some needs that humans do not need. The development of advertising and marketing makes people feel that they need things that their parents never dreamed of. They need to work hard to earn money to meet these artificial needs, so these needs fall into the second category. Modern people who want to satisfy their needs for the power process must rely primarily on pursuing artificial needs and surrogate behaviors created by the advertising and marketing industry.

Modern society requires people to live under a completely different set of conditions, under which human life and behavior patterns conflict with the behavior patterns developed under earlier conditions. For primitive societies, the natural world (which generally changes only slowly) provides a stable framework, from which they feel secure. In the modern world, human society dominates nature rather than the other way around, and because modern society changes so rapidly due to technological change, there is no stable framework. This explains why residents of cities, especially megacities, live in pain or depression, while residents of rural areas and low-tier towns live relatively comfortable lives. Modern industrial society has catalyzed the concentration of population, breaking down the original villages, groups, tribes, and small communities, and humans have gathered into larger systems.

In modern industrial society, human beings are not free and are becoming less and less free. Of course, the lack of freedom mentioned here does not refer to indulgence, but to the fact that human beings live in a certain large system and exist as a small component of the system's big machine. Especially in today's highly developed Internet society, is everything about you decided by yourself, or by your mobile phone, or by these big companies/organizations? When the future era of super AI and the Internet of Things arrives, are people really sure that free will still exists? Restrictions on freedom are inevitable in an industrial society, and the industrial technological society cannot be improved.

Technology is a more powerful social force than the desire for freedom. The emergence of this situation has nothing to do with whether the technology is guilty or not, or whether the people or organizations that control the technology are guilty or not, because since the birth of technology and industrial society, it has been moving irreversibly in this direction, and at an increasingly faster pace. The enthusiasm for "progress" is a peculiar phenomenon of the modern social form. The negative effects of technology cannot be separated from its positive effects. We will find that progress driven by technology will eventually create other problems, or even more serious ones. We may introduce the concept of God. Modern industrial society is a collection of the entire system. Only God, not other regimes, organizations or individuals, controls this system. The system is not guided by ideology but by technological needs.

So after understanding Kaczynski's ideas, I believe more and more that the future will be a cyberpunk world. From the earliest "Blade Runner" and "Ghost in the Shell" to "Gotham City" where Batman is located, and even the background world of the recent "Ready Player One", they are all cyberpunk, but the great director Spielberg did not directly describe the dark side of cyberpunk. The latest article by Chenhai’s Yuetian said that “all content companies will eventually become game companies.” As a hardcore gamer with a passion for games for nearly twenty years, I think this conclusion is more of a vision and love for future games, and I naturally hope this will be the case. But no matter how all content companies develop in the future, they must be a medium, a hot medium.

I can't stop the development of technology and the progress of industrial society, and I really don't want to stop it. After all, I want to see what the future will be like. Since human beings are inevitably pushed into the abyss of pain, there will be a continuous need for pan-entertainment content products. This is not only a big market full of opportunities and unlimited ceiling, but also a career that allows humans to find some satisfaction in long-term pain. It is also a good deed, so why not do it?

This article was compiled and published by @崔植源 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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