Looking back at 2019: Dangerous games in the social world

01 Social Explosion

At the beginning of the year, the “Three Heroes” fought WeChat;

At the end of the year, "Seven Swordsmen Descend Tianshan".

The social networking track has ushered in a long-awaited bustle. Serial entrepreneur Wang Xin has repeatedly failed and fought again. New and old players such as Alibaba, JD.com, Sohu, and Baidu have re-entered the market. Tencent, unwilling to be left out, has also restarted its social networking war chariot... If we count those entrepreneurial products hidden in the gray area, there are more than 50 social networking products launched in 2019.

Among them, Wang Xin, who was eager to find the next "Qvod", created a "production line" of social products and tried almost all mainstream social segments.

"MT Toilet" launched at the beginning of the year was probably Wang Xin's most popular product this year. It chose to start with anonymous social networking with "weak connections and short connections" and claimed that it could solve the core pain points after the real-name social networking, pointing to a large blue ocean market left by predecessors such as Secret and WuMi. Unfortunately, it failed to withstand the ban by WeChat.

The failed MT Toilet app was transformed into a product called "Haoji", which put an e-commerce shell on social networking and quietly shifted its positioning from stranger social networking to seeding transactions. The "chat and share money" gameplay even has some shadows of "Chatbao". However, judging from the popularity of the topic, "Haoji" is far from being successful.

However, Wang Xin did not stop exploring the social track. "Shike Video", which combines multiple elements such as making friends, video, maps, and merchant displays, stood at the new starting line of "map social networking" with Baidu's "Tingtong" and Alibaba's "Real Like Me"; another Vlog recording product "Wanzi Video", after several twists and turns, aimed at video social networking.

Tencent, which has always been challenged, finally couldn't hold back in the second half of the year and launched seven new social products in just two months: "Maohu" focuses on video social networking, "Qingliao" focuses on high-quality stranger social networking, "Youji" helps users record every detail of their lives, "Pengyou" is mainly for social networking with semi-acquaintances, "Huiyin" focuses on real-person voice social networking, and "Dengyu" and "Huanyu" are upgraded versions of the drift bottle and video blind dating products respectively.

It is somewhat regrettable that among a series of social products, there are only a few short-lived products such as ZAO. Even "Fox Friends" which Zhang Chaoyang has supported many times, "Oasis" which Weibo has high hopes for, and "Douyin" and "Feiliao" which ByteDance has bet on, are mostly in a lukewarm state.

The social market began to expand rapidly, but it still failed to produce any hit products.

02 Traffic Anxiety

Some people compare the social craze in 2019 with the social track on the eve of WeChat's popularity. They seem to be somewhat consistent in terms of timing, but they are essentially two different natures.

Wang Xin, who has unlimited ambitions in the social arena, has also become a rearview mirror for peeking into the original intentions of this generation of social media.

Although MT has been labeled as a dark web of connections and redundant relationships, and Wang Xin himself has strongly endorsed it on social media, he has also been questioned for plagiarizing Secret's inspiration. The drama of hastily launching, hastily removing the app, and hastily changing its name makes it difficult to believe that Wang Xin has given the product deep thought.

"Shike Video" and "Wanzi Video" are more straightforward. The former is similar to Spot, which once topped the App Store social charts, while the latter is a somewhat overused Vlog derivative. Lacking sufficient industry insights and basic product innovation, the products "produced" on such an assembly line are nothing more than trying their luck in the social field.

But this mentality is by no means uncommon; even Tencent, a company well versed in social networking, is not immune to it.

"Huiyin" is very similar to ByteDance's "Yinyue", "Youji" is considered to be a social product designed to compete with Oasis, "Pengyou" and "Dengyue" are just the independence of some functions of WeChat, and it is not difficult to find similar products such as "Maohu" and "Huanyu"... Rather than saying that it is the continuation of Tencent's horse racing culture in the social track, it is better to say that it is Tencent's natural reaction to challengers. After all, offense is often the best defense.

Therefore, although the social market in 2019 seems to be lively, the life cycle of new products is not optimistic. A product was terminated and abandoned in less than half a year, and most products did not make much waves.

Back to the overall environment of the Internet, in addition to the popularity of the social track, more and more Internet giants have adopted the "sea of ​​​​machines tactics" of APP factories. Products with suffixes such as Express Edition, International Edition, and Professional Edition have emerged. They also use the routine of rapid attack, rapid trial and error, shifting battlefields, and starting again.

The reason is not difficult to understand. As the Internet shifts from incremental growth to stock, traffic is divided among a few giants, and the competition for new traffic is naturally becoming more and more brutal. In order to maximize resource utilization, copying mature product models, investing a small amount of resources to see the output effect, and then evaluating the input and output has become an established rule in the Internet world, and the tolerance for new attempts and new directions is getting lower and lower.

The so-called social explosion is nothing more than a chain reaction of traffic anxiety.

03 The Economics of Loneliness

If using APP factories to fight traffic anxiety is still brute force, then social networking is undoubtedly a clever way of doing things.

Most of the social products launched in 2019 chose stranger social networking. The most common explanation is Tencent phobia. After all, no one can easily overcome the two mountains of Tencent in acquaintance social networking. Perhaps there is another explanation. "Loneliness" may be one of the best traffic growth engines.

As Haruki Murakami wrote in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

"I am the type of person who likes to be alone, or rather, the type of person who doesn't find being alone painful. I don't feel bored if I don't talk to anyone for an hour or two every day, whether I'm running or writing an article alone. Compared to doing things with others, I prefer to read silently or listen to music with full concentration. I can think of many things to do just by myself."

This lonely monologue is not only a psychological topic, but also a realistic business topic.

Moreover, the psychology master Rogers once proposed the concept of "basic loneliness", which means that everyone has a loneliness that cannot be escaped or comforted. If you think about it carefully, we often have such feelings in interpersonal relationships. Even if we are with relatives and friends every day and spend five or six hours on WeChat every day, there will always be an inexplicable "uncomfortable" feeling, which is probably the loneliness that cannot be cured by socializing with acquaintances.

In reality, most people don’t fight “basic loneliness” by running or writing like Haruki Murakami. We leave “loneliness” to the Internet world.

Whether it is BBS, blogs, forums, or early QQ, Weibo, and WeChat, almost all of them started with social interaction between "strangers", and "virtualization" has always been the original impression of the Internet left on people. However, the ancient Internet era is gradually fading away, and WeChat and other acquaintance social networking have long become the social venues that consume the most of our time. The demand for "basic loneliness" naturally requires new products to carry it.

To some extent, stranger social interaction is not just a niche demand, but a mass demand waiting to be explored.

For example, some people divide social interaction into empathetic social interaction and utilitarian social interaction. Empathetic social interaction refers to social behavior that occurs for the purpose of gaining emotional connection and emotional experience, killing time, or having common interests; utilitarian social interaction refers to social behavior that occurs for the purpose of achieving a certain goal or gaining benefits from the other party.

When the relationships on WeChat are becoming more and more utilitarian, if we can find a breakthrough point for empathetic social interaction, it is tantamount to grabbing another huge traffic entrance. Just calculating the economic account of trial and error and output is enough to attract hundreds of unbelieving players to join this gamble.

04 The Invisible Abyss

Unfortunately, the business of curing loneliness is not easy to do. Most stranger social products have misunderstood the "loneliness economy" as the "hormone economy."

Apps like Alibaba's "Real Like Me", JD's "Li Oh Oh", and YY's "Zhui Ya" are more or less related to dating and making friends. Tencent is no exception. The "Sogan" given by "Mao Hu" is "Let you meet truly interesting people and start a zero-distance online video encounter", and "Huan Yu" is directly positioned as a video chat blind date...

Just a quick search in the app market will reveal an endless stream of products focusing on female bestie social networking, same-sex social networking, local social networking, dinner date social networking, 90s social networking, and photo social networking. What has attracted attention from the outside world is just the tip of the iceberg.

This situation is not without reason, as a stranger social entrepreneur concluded: "As of the stage of China's mobile Internet development in 2019, more than 95% of the products in the stranger social track, which seems to be flourishing and has infinite possibilities, meet pseudo-demands that do not exist or cannot be sustained. To be more absolute, there is no stranger social track at all, there is only OnlineDating."

Once linked to the "hormone economy", the so-called stranger social interaction has become a disaster area for vulgar content and emotional fraud. Corresponding to this is the special rectification action launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China against the chaos of online audio in the first half of 2019. Tantan, Zhiya, Yinyue, etc. have all been required by the regulatory authorities to be removed from the shelves for rectification because of the problem of "pornographic content".

However, the intervention of regulatory authorities is ultimately just a way to remedy the situation after the fact. The social craze in 2019 is gradually creating new invisible abysses. For example, some stranger social products target middle-aged and elderly people for "recruitment".

According to the "Silver Hair Population Insight Report" released by QuestMobile, most of the "Internet-addicted elderly" spend their time on social, entertainment, and information applications, among which social applications rank first. And data released by Guohai Securities shows that dating fraud for middle-aged and elderly people has squeezed into the top three types of fraud for middle-aged and elderly people, second only to transaction fraud and rebate fraud.

Perhaps we should be grateful for WeChat's "ban" mechanism. Fortunately, those links that use rewards to induce users to share Moments are banned. Otherwise, as long as "spending money" can be exchanged for user forwarding and fission, it will inevitably become a breeding ground for some people with ulterior motives to do evil through stranger social interaction.

05 Advise you to be good

Someone once compared the virtual online world to the "world behind the toilet", where the ugliness and shamefulness of the real world are reflected online. However, when the Internet gradually became a part of most people's lives, under the cover of law, morality and even hypocrisy, people finally found the "flush button" to hide evil and ugliness.

When the battle reignites in the social track, will anyone, driven by traffic and profit, use new technologies, new concepts, and new stories to reopen the "world behind the toilet"? Perhaps we should not interrogate the original intentions of this group of social players in 2019 in a heart-breaking way, but social interaction is ultimately a need that grows out of human nature, and human nature is often unpredictable.

I hope that “Technology for Good” is not just a slogan for giants to give back to society, but the original intention that all entrepreneurs identify with.