Wen/Muyu
In China, social APP for strangers is a mystery. When talking about it in public, everyone scoffed, but privately, they quietly registered various platforms. According to the statistics of Ai Media Consulting, in recent years, the scale of social users of strangers in China has been growing, reaching nearly 650 million in 2020.
Everyone wants to get involved in the huge lonely market. The Internet has ups and downs, and only social interaction remains unchanged.
There are more and more social apps, and it is getting easier for everyone to know people, but it is getting harder and harder to understand people. Social platforms help people establish connections, but they deepen their loneliness.
The social platform for strangers has developed for so many years, but it has never been able to get out of the 1.0 era of "pan-socialization", why on earth? Is it "real business" or "false proposition"? Where should it go in the future?
Metacosmic Socialization: Old Wine in New Bottles
The pattern of social apps is changing, but the essence has not improved.
Not long ago, on February 11th, the social APP "Gel", which was launched only three weeks ago, successfully ranked first in the free list of the App store on that day, and dominated the list for three days, becoming the first social application ranking beyond WeChat since 2019.
The breakthrough of gel has triggered a series of discussions. Yes, it is also a "meta-universe". Users pinch their faces through AI to create their own avatars in the 3D world, and then socialize online. After a brief burst of popularity, the gel was quickly removed from the shelves due to problems such as doll wearing, clothing infringement and user privacy.
After the excitement, it quickly cooled down. On platforms such as Xiaohongshu, many users said that it was "boring", "uninstalled" and "useless". In fact, from the product point of view, the gel is not unique. In recent months, whether it is Rainbow Universe, which is known as "the first social stock in China Meta Universe", or Queuing Island in ByteDance, Xirang in Baidu, etc.The core gameplay is "pinching face and dressing up+virtual socialization".
Gel APP
To put it bluntly, the so-called meta-cosmic socialization is just to make the original product 3D, which is far from the real meta-cosmic experience like Ready Player One.
In fact, not only the meta-universe, but also the social APP for strangers in China has never really evolved since its birth. It has always been in the 1.0 era of "pan-socialization" and failed to enter the 2.0 era of "deep socialization". That is to say, social apps have changed from "strict control" to "voice control" or from LBS matching to interest matching.They just let you "know more about people", not let you "know more about people".
From Mo Mo to exploring, to Soul, people just changed different versions of the "gun-making artifact", but did not make real friends and establish effective relationships on it. Apart from helping people pass the time, social apps did not really solve the problem of "loneliness".
Undoubtedly, stranger socialization is a "real business", but Internet companies have made it a "false proposition". Why?
Paradox between "True Business" and "False Proposition"
Stranger social apps can’t achieve the balance between business interests and social values, perhaps for the following reasons:
First, there are natural and essential contradictions in product logic.
The social APP for strangers is efficiency-oriented. Mainstream products have the function of instant messaging, and they are all committed to how to help users connect more quickly. Momo’s rise is because people nearby can move from online to offline faster. Soul’s rise is because voice has higher communication efficiency than text.
However, socialization is naturally an inefficient thing. The establishment of relationships takes time to precipitate, and the accumulation of trust requires multi-faceted interaction.In the acceleration of connecting people, social products will naturally dilute the emotional concentration of the relationship and lower the spiritual depth of interaction.
Source: Network
In the past, online dating was a three-year and five-year long-distance running. Today, online dating is just a three-day and five-day game. From a psychological point of view, the period of maintaining freshness is four months, which can’t be reached at all on social apps, and even a large number of relationships such as "throwing lovers in the sun" have been developed.
The fast pace of online and the slow life of offline have formed a strong tear. The social context built by social apps in the virtual world cannot make people in the real world feel emotional and spiritual satisfaction, creating a strong sense of unreality.
Second, the deliberate edge ball induction in operation.
Although Momo officials never admitted that they were "dating software", it is undeniable that it did induce this behavior of users, and it gave China an outlet for sexual demand that had been suppressed for many years. No matter how glamorous words were used on the surface, it was hard to avoid playing such an edge ball in the operation process.
Even Soul, which claims to be a social soul, has introduced the function of the square, where only good-looking people can enjoy themselves. Most of the information streams recommended by the algorithm are "sexy" beauty selfies and ambiguous copywriting.
Soul APP
It is not difficult to understand from the perspective of business model.Social APP is a product with typical network effect and scale effect.It doesn’t have substantive products like e-commerce, nor does it provide high-quality content like the content community, or other tool-based apps provide a specific service. It relies on frequent interaction between users.The social interaction of strangers is essentially an unsustainable and highly uncertain demand. If we want to gather enough users, the greatest common denominator we can find is Maslow’s underlying demand, which is both urgent and tenacious.
Therefore, no matter how rich the interactive functions provided by social apps are, they will go to a wider market and eventually become an "appointment artifact" irrevocably. No matter what the initial intentions of Momo founder Tang Yan and Soul founder Zhang Lu are, for the sake of traffic, the product operation process will inevitably move towards action deformation, turning a blind eye to certain behaviors, and watching the platform fall into a smog step by step.
Finally, it is difficult to get rid of the fate of making wedding clothes for others.
Chinese Internet users are not sticky at all, especially in the social field. All founders of social apps for strangers will face a "soul torture": What if users add WeChat after they know each other? This is almost an unsolvable problem. In China, strangers socializing and acquaintances socializing are two distinct existence, and the high barrier of WeChat in the acquaintance relationship chain is unshakable.
Source: Network
As a result, the social APP for strangers can never form a closed-loop product. As a social platform, it cannot precipitate the user relationship chain.
The operation is facing an extremely embarrassing situation: the matching efficiency of users’ friends is low, and the loss of users is accelerated because of unsatisfied needs; The matching efficiency of users’ friends is high, and the loss of users due to transfer is accelerated.
How to solve this problem? Change the answer sheet.
Back to the original product starting point, all internet products are essentially in the same time battlefield, as long as users can spend time on the APP.So social platforms don’t need you to really make friends on them, as long as you are willing to spend time.Taking socialization as the table and entertainment as the reality, Momo’s resurrection depends on the live broadcast business, and Soul’s game functions are also increasing.
Social apps don’t really want to help you find friends, just want you to spend time and recharge. Entertainment-consuming socialization is a typical "ineffective socialization", which naturally does not give users a "sense of gain".
In addition to "about guns" and "games",
What else can strangers do when socializing?
The evolution of the mainstream stranger social APP product form represented by Momo is also the result of interaction with the needs of the people of the times. It is an outbreak of repression of emotional and sexual needs by Chinese people in the past years, but it is also staged.Social needs will inevitably move from the bottom of Maslow to the top. Today, everyone’s "loneliness" is no longer a lack of playmates, but has risen to spiritual resonance and recognition.
Zhang Xiaolong said that the essence of social interaction is to find the same kind.
In today’s atomized society, the mobility is increasing, the original social interpersonal relationship structure is disintegrated, people are forced to be divided into isolated islands, eager to be connected by the same kind, and it is this bridge that strangers need to play in social interaction.
In addition to producing hormones and dopamine, social apps need to provide more incremental value to connect with their peers. Stranger social tracks have also made different attempts to find the same kind for users.
Such as social activities.
Around 2015, there was a lively social activity. Taking the former head of someone as an example, with the concept of "everyone is the organizer", users can launch offline activities online, similar to Douban City. This model was first popular abroad. Founded in 2002, Meetup was one of the earliest active social networking sites. In 2017, it was acquired by WeWork for 200 million US dollars. In 2019, Meetup had more than 44 million users worldwide.
Meetup APP
In fact, the starting point of social activities is the real social activities under the tropic of cancer, with parties as the main product, but this model has met with acclimatization in China.
There is considerable uncertainty in offline multi-person activities, especially in China, which is generally not good at social, and it relies heavily on the planning and organizing ability of the organizers. Moreover, users in China are not used to paying for non-functional services, and a mature business model has not been explored for social activities. In March 2020, someet announced its closure, and many users expressed their nostalgia. They had a reputation but didn’t make money, which made the form of social activities never really develop.
Another typical representative is the interest in socializing.
The essence of interest socialization is to stratify users based on hobbies, so that they can find their own vertical circle. The forum exists on this basis, from Baidu Post Bar to Douban Group, which are all classic products.However, from the content community to the social APP, although based on the same product logic, there are essential differences.
Content communities rely on high-quality content to attract users, while interest social apps rely on tagging to gather users, which are not the same in viscosity. Social APP is centered on efficiency and immediacy, and its information flow naturally cannot produce and precipitate high-quality content like the content community, so it is difficult to form a real interest atmosphere. However, Chinese’s interest in cultural life is generally vague and popular, which also determines that social interest can only be sticky in a small circle.
Source: Ai Media Consulting
In July 2019, the product was acquired by Yingke Live, and its circle of interest still exists, but the homepage of the product still focuses on LBS-based face-to-face socialization, and the difference is that it depends on people nearby to recharge their members; In February, 2021, QQ closed the interest tribe, and in December, 2021, WeChat stopped the WeChat circle … The road of interest socialization, whether it is an emerging player or a giant, was finally defeated.
At least for now, stranger socializing in China is still a world of hormones and dopamine.This can’t be entirely blamed on the lack of hard work of social apps. Although everyone shouted "Good-looking skins are the same, interesting souls should choose one in case", they kept carefully taking selfies all the time, and their values kept rolling in, and their spirits remained calm.
However, the world of beauty is illusory after all, and the spiritual loneliness will only become more intense. Perhaps when the desire for deep socialization exceeds a critical value, the 2.0 era of strangers’ social interaction will slowly come.
