Alipay's use of hormones is just a small mistake, but using Tianya and Tieba models to socialize is a big pitfall

In recent days, the circles of white-collar diaries and campus diaries organized by Alipay have attracted a lot of attention. Some people (such as Wang Sicong) criticized Alipay for becoming a "payment pimp" without any sense of shame for the sake of KPI. You know what a pimp is.

Two days ago, my old boss @水洋 asked me on Weibo, “From the perspective of starting a community, what do you think?” I joked, “Well, I saw it on an iPhone 7 and it’s pretty nice.” At that time, I had just used it for a day and it was difficult to comment. I just told @水洋 on WeChat about some of my discoveries in the process of commenting, rewarding, and adding friends on Campus Diary, such as the problem of identity forgery.

Yesterday, Alipay issued a statement admitting its mistake. I think there is nothing wrong with hormones, but the operation was poor this time. There was no other content to set off the hormones, which seemed too abrupt. Even so, it was only a minor mistake. Alipay’s biggest mistake was the big company disease, plus it did not understand social networking and the trend of information dissemination.

Shuiyang and I both started working on social products ten years ago. He participated in Sina Blog, Sina Circle, Sina Space, and Sina Friends, and led the product and R&D of Weibo since the project was launched. I was responsible for Weibo product design in Shuiyang's team, so we are not unfamiliar with social products, and have also analyzed and compared forums vs. SNS.

Social networking is one of Alibaba's weaknesses

Alibaba's strategic department is the best in the Internet industry, bar none. I admire Alibaba's strategic planning over the years. From what I know, Alibaba sees social networking as its weak spot.

This is not difficult to understand. A typical example is WeChat red envelopes. In the past few years, WeChat red envelopes were popular all over the country and even overseas during the Spring Festival, which quickly prompted a group of people to open WeChat payment accounts. If I were the person in charge of Alipay, I would also be afraid. Therefore, Alibaba paid a lot of money to buy the opportunity to send red envelopes during the Spring Festival Gala this year. Unfortunately, it was not done well.

Also, Alibaba discovered last year that the rise of online celebrity e-commerce would severely hit its own advertising revenue (a guy who left Sina sold tens of millions of food on Alibaba’s platform last year, but didn’t pay Alibaba a penny in advertising fees. All the traffic was directed by Weibo, and Alibaba was supposed to pay Alibaba one-third of the advertising fees). Alibaba did not kill this kind of game, but promoted it internally and externally, realizing that social e-commerce is the general trend, and if it does not do it, Tencent will take advantage of it. Although the business integration of Tencent + JD is still in a sleepwalking state, what if it wakes up one day?

Willing but unable

Alibaba’s strategy is awesome, but it is still not fully operational in terms of execution in the social field. After all, its experience accumulated over the years has mainly been in e-commerce, and the ways of playing e-commerce and social networking are different.

Over the years, Alibaba has launched a series of social products, including Lakeside, Zhangguishuo, Laiwang, DingTalk, Weitao... However, not many of them are eye-catching. The most unsuccessful one is Laiwang, which was launched with year-end bonus as an incentive.

The reason for the failure is simple, a common problem among large companies: there is no relaxed environment for developing new products.

A law in the Internet industry: most projects that big bosses personally take charge of fail. I won’t talk about negative examples, as it would offend people. Positive example: When Zhang Xiaolong was developing WeChat, he was in Guangzhou, outside the core influence of Tencent, and was in a corner; Weibo also had a similar experience, where a project that the star team had no time to work on was given to a loser team whose product had just been killed.

Alibaba's social networking, especially LaiWang, was a big deal, and the company even used the group's year-end bonus as leverage. How could the project members not be under great pressure? Internet innovation requires a relaxed environment. When there is a lot of pressure, people tend to compromise with KPIs, engage in short-term behavior, and consider their own bonuses first, rather than whether the product will really develop well.

Therefore, my suggestion to Alibaba for social networking is: find a team that understands social networking and e-commerce and does not care about KPIs and let go of it. Perhaps you can hatch a few Zhang Xiaolongs.

Big Pitfall: Alipay Social Media Goes Against the Historical Trend

Alipay’s involvement in social networking this time is not a big problem, and critics should not be so sanctimonious. Date and Deal are the two main driving forces of social networking.

If we have to talk about hormones, this is a common phenomenon in Internet communities.

In foreign countries, Facebook started by displaying photos of female college students. In China, 51, Momo, and Douban are not to be mentioned. In the early days of Tencent, how many people used QQ to hunt for beauties? More than ten years ago, news of people being assaulted by netizens because of QQ chat was not uncommon. WeChat's Shake, People Nearby, and Drift Bottle are also powerful tools for many L friends and MY organizations.

Hormones themselves are fine, this need is human nature, and it's fine as long as it's not illegal. The mistake of Alipay in social networking is not here, but in using the Tianya and Tieba models to compete with the Weibo and WeChat models.

The Tianya and Tieba models are from ten years ago and are obviously outdated. Their characteristics are:

1. Interest forums;

2. Anonymous mode;

3. Too centralized;

4. The content is seriously watered down;

17 years ago, when I was studying at Peking University, I and some of my classmates were addicted to BBS, first YTHT BBS, then Unnamed BBS. For three years, I spent as much time as possible on BBS. I served as a moderator and also worked as a site administrator. This kind of BBS was actually the prototype of Tianya and Tieba.

The interest forum model is an early product form of the Internet. It is easy to start and promote. However, this way of aggregating content based on interest dimensions is not as good as FB, Weibo, and Moments, which aggregate content based on relationship dimensions, from a strategic perspective. Therefore, we see that FB, Weibo, and Moments occupy the time of many people at home and abroad, while Tianya, Tieba, and many other forums cannot develop. Regarding the comparison between interest-oriented (forum) and interpersonal-oriented, Discuz! founder Dai Zhikang (Big C) wrote an article eight years ago (2008) to make an in-depth analysis. After Big C made the big forum program, it once made efforts to make UCH, which was a good exploration, but it was later acquired by Tencent and ended in vain.

The anonymous mode leaves a huge space for scammers, which is also one of the weaknesses of the community. In the early days of Weibo, in order to prevent fake celebrities, V certification was specially implemented. V stands for Verified. Not VIP, not VIP, not VIP, it is important to say it three times.

V-certified users do have privileges. They existed when I designed it seven years ago. However, the core of the V user system is not privileges, but authentication and anti-counterfeiting.

There is a joke from the entertainment industry on Tieba. A celebrity went to a Tieba with his own name and said he was so-and-so. As a result, he was treated as a liar and banned by the forum owner.

Interest communities aggregate content based on interests. Users are generally anonymous. The moderator is the administrator. He is similar to the editor of a portal website. He maintains the order of the community by his own efforts. Two extremes often occur: giving up halfway due to physical and mental exhaustion, or doing evil for personal gain.

Alipay community has a real-name system, right? This method of using ID cards for verification is not on the same level of trust as Weibo's V certification. Weibo's manually reviewed V certification is still exploited by some people, not to mention Alipay's. If you don't believe it, go and give rewards to a few beauties and you will know. (If you are a man, you can find a female college student's ID card to authenticate and join campus life, and then post a few revealing photos to get hundreds or thousands of yuan in rewards. Will anyone do this business? In fact, there is no need to ask, some people who are quick and nimble have already done it)

Over-centralization and watered-down, let's talk about these two things together. Where there is eye-catching, it is easy to attract people with various motives to post content you don't like, or selling goods or selling Y or advertising links or Internet scams, and there are also content that is not false but does not conform to your values ​​(such as various chicken soups)

The advanced nature of Weibo lies in the fact that the content you see is mainly from the people you follow (I can only say mainly, not all, because there are ads), and six years ago I thoughtfully added a follow-but-block function to Weibo, specifically for those people you have to follow (such as bosses, classmates) but you don’t like. But some people don’t understand and think it’s nonsense, but I firmly believe that this is very important. (Friends Moments now also has a similar function)

Interest-oriented places like Tianya and Tieba are similar to large WeChat groups with hundreds of people. The content there is likely to be watered down, and no matter how hard the administrators try, it is useless. This is an objective law, similar to the tragedy of the public pasture.

The subtlety of WeChat Shake, People Nearby, and Drift Bottle, especially People Nearby, is that it decentralizes millions or tens of millions of people and brings them into small rooms (Hey, you opened People Nearby and I opened People Nearby too. Are you lonely? I’m lonely too, let’s chat…) and disperses many people into different scenarios for communication based on geographic location, time, action and other dimensions, rather than gathering thousands or tens of thousands of people in one place. This is where Zhang Xiaolong is better at WeChat than the Alipay team - social networking must be decentralized.

Decentralization is a very complex issue. It does not mean that decentralization can be achieved by simply delivering content based on relationships. Weibo also took a detour a few years ago when it was overly dependent on influencers. This year’s U-turn is also related to decentralization.

On November 28, the long article " Revaluation of Weibo's Value " in Caijing described that Weibo has successively implemented three tactics: user sinking, verticalization of interest communities, and improvement of information flow algorithms. The purpose of user sinking is to increase the number of users, and the latter two things are to increase user activity and stickiness. This is also an important measure for Weibo to rise.

Is the above too long-winded? Let me talk about something more refined. In the process of studying online celebrity e-commerce, @时趣张锐 and I analyzed several stages of information dissemination:

1. The traditional media stage includes print media, radio stations, and television stations. Typical representatives are News Corporation, People's Daily, and CCTV. The production threshold is high and the dissemination threshold is also high (including economic and policy aspects), so it is very centralized.

2. Online forums and portal websites. This wave started in China around 2000. Content was digitized and internet-based. A large number of forums emerged. Although users gained some freedom, for example, you read finance, I read technology, and she reads entertainment, but in fact, moderators and editors still manually controlled what everyone read, setting the agenda in the Internet era. The best ones evolved into portals (Sina's predecessor was a forum), and typical representatives are Yahoo, Sina, Sohu, NetEase, Tianya, and Mop.

3. In the search stage, there is too much content and it is quite troublesome to find it. The built-in search functions of forums and portals are very weak, so search engines have emerged, such as Google abroad, Baidu in China, and Taobao search. Algorithms help everyone, but of course, such algorithms are often affected by advertisements.

4. Relationship stage: In the era of FB, Weibo, and Moments, people no longer view content based on the preferences of editors (moderators) or search engine algorithms, but based on their own follower (friend) relationships, which gives them greater freedom and further realizes decentralization.

5. Artificial intelligence stage, using more intelligent algorithms to provide personalized information to the "master". Currently, typical representatives are Toutiao and Yidian Zixun, but it is still in the early stages.

The way information is disseminated is changing, and the way of marketing is also changing accordingly. This is the theoretical basis for the rise of e-commerce influencers, and it is also a major trend that many Internet product designers must understand.

Alipay is engaging in social networking, and at a time when the industry has already advanced from the fourth stage to the fifth stage of information dissemination, it is using the second stage of gameplay. It is like others are playing with supersonic stealth fighters, and you are playing with propeller biplanes, which is a big mistake.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.