Zhang Xiaolong: I am deeply concerned about the impact of expanding the WeChat friend limit to 5,000 friends

Over the years since WeChat was born, the setting of limiting WeChat to 5,000 friends has become a pain point that many people complain about.

Today, Zhang Xiaolong, the founder of WeChat, said that people are the sum of social relationships. Nowadays, social relationships are increasingly reflected in the interactions among WeChat friends, groups, and friend circles. For example, middle school and college classmates become active because of groups.

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In the past, there was a term in academia called Dunbar's number, which said that a person could have a maximum of 150 friends. But in WeChat, this number has obviously been broken. Compared with the era before mobile Internet, people's ability to maintain friends has suddenly increased a lot.

"We previously limited a person to 5,000 friends, but now nearly a million people have close to 5,000 friends. Although they are not true friends, it has prompted us to expand the number of friends."

Zhang Xiaolong said that he remembered feeling vaguely uneasy when people nearby came online, because the boundaries between him and people nearby would be broken, and he didn't know whether it was good or bad.

"This kind of thinking will actually run through the evolution of WeChat. Just like it was very easy for us to expand the limit of 5,000 friends, but to be honest, we are very terrified about the impact it will bring, and we will think about it again and again."

Zhang Xiaolong also said that information spreads faster than before. In a moment, an event can spread exponentially in many groups. On the other hand, there is a saying that "rumors spread a thousand miles", and sensational content may have a greater chance of spreading. This is human nature.

"It may be difficult for us to use technical means as a standard for judging the quality of content, but as a platform for information transmission, we also have many ways, such as using more participants and powerful mechanisms to help the platform make arbitration, just like how we treat originality and plagiarism."

"It seems that we can freely choose which information to read and which not to read when faced with a huge amount of information, but in fact, we don't have time to filter them one by one, which leads to that we always see part of the information." Zhang Xiaolong said that including public accounts, it seems that you can follow any of them, but your choice is actually limited. We have experimented with social recommendations in Kanyikan, and it seems to work well. It is a way to expand people's range of choices through mutual recommendations between friends.

“Although the top-tier accounts will have the largest number of views, in an era where everyone can create, we hope that the long-tail accounts will have their own living space.”

Zhang Xiaolong believes that WeChat made two small mistakes during its development. One is that the public platform has only had a PC web version for a long time, which limits the scope of content creators.

Another, and more important, original idea of ​​the public platform is to replace SMS as a mass messaging tool based on connecting brands and subscribers, and effectively avoid spam SMS. The content of the mass messaging is not the focus, and all kinds of content should be acceptable, such as text, pictures, videos, etc.

However, WeChat accidentally made it a carrier of content, which made other forms of short content not present, which made WeChat lack in short content. This is why Zhang Xiaolong said before that the public account itself is not prepared for the media.

Zhang Xiaolong said that WeChat attaches great importance to content that everyone can create. The reason why the Moments are set to post photos and videos by default is because I had a perception at the time that it is not easy for a billion people to post text, but everyone can post photos.

"Compared to public accounts, we lack a medium for everyone to create. We cannot expect everyone to write articles every day. WeChat's short content has always been the direction we want to focus on. If all goes well, we may see it in the near future. After all, expression is everyone's natural need."

Currently, more and more people are using WeChat to search. When talking about this, Zhang Xiaolong said that compared with the web Internet, the various apps of the mobile Internet are more fragmented, and information is difficult to connect and search. When WeChat made mini-programs, it had a dream that search could enter the interior of each mini-program, so that a large number of mini-programs could support various long-tail search needs.

“Mini Programs are still an area we need to improve. Only when Mini Programs are prosperous enough can they support the richness of search content.”