The author | Bai Qian
Edit | Tsukimi
The rapid expansion of user volume, the collision of different views, the exponential growth of total content volume, and the general controversy over the pace of commercialization are all characteristics of almost all content communities that have achieved circle-breaking.
In the 10-year development history of the mobile Internet, the content community often has to make the choice of "breaking the circle or dying", that is, abandoning the model of taking a small number of core users in the startup period as the main body of content production, and accepting more creators and different styles of content into the platform. Chen Rui, chairman of Station B, once had the remark that "Station B has become popular, it is mediocre", but it was quickly changed to "small and beautiful and development and growth cannot coexist".
Many times, expansion is a choice that has to be made. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei believes in "multi-gene culture": "Huawei culture is a single gene chain, and there must be conflicts to promote change and prevent entropy increase, precipitation and internal rolling." ”
Clearly, the concept of absorbing external genetic self-modification applies to content communities.
Before 2018, netizens can position the user portrait of any community without hesitation - Kuaishou is the old iron, Douyin is a dancing beauty, B station is a second dimension, Weibo is a melon fan, zhihu is an industry elite... With the popularity of the mobile Internet and the reduction of traffic tariffs, it is difficult to distinguish the user portraits of each platform, because the mainstream communities that have survived have entered diversification.
In the process, dilution of the community's early tonality is inevitable. There is a classic question of "why do you hate XX", and the hated platform includes all the mainstream content communities of the mobile Internet, and even Zhihu itself. Corresponding to the expansion of the platform volume, the fusion and collision of the old and new ecosystems in the community. How to deal with this intense and complex entropy increase determines whether the vitality of the platform can flourish.
01 Deconstructing community entropy increases
What is the manifestation of increased community entropy?
The first is the decline in the share of hardcore content. In the traditional PC community, more and more users complain that the interpretation of hard-core public events is becoming less and less, but the volume of paragraph players, marketing number content, and feed stream ads is growing rapidly.
To this day, there are still a number of old users of B station who do not accept the transformation of the platform to dilute the proportion of secondary elements. In their view, breaking the circle means that Station B gives up the tone and bows to the strong effect of vibrato.
The transformation of content is directly related to the transformation of user groups. The rapid rise of Zhihu and Weibo is inseparable from a large number of high-quality content created by core users in the cold start stage, and after the platform's user system is fully liberalized, ordinary people instead of industry experts and entertainment stars have taken over the main creative tasks of platform content, which makes the discussion topics and attention angles of the platform obviously turn to ordinary people.
In addition, while users and content change, platforms often make adjustments from the level of recommendation algorithms, trying to inject more content that meets the interests of platform traffic and business interests into the traffic distribution mechanism. The adjustment of the algorithm boosted the cooling and fading out of the early core users, and also weakened the proportion of high-quality content.
The phenomenon of entropy increase corresponds to the volume growth of the content community, whether it is the content uploaded by users spontaneously or the concern of merchants on the marketing value of the community, which is accelerating the dilution process of platform tonality.
For the content community, it is extremely difficult to reconcile the relationship between user value and business value, and the two can only achieve some coexistence through alternating growth, and it is difficult to achieve it overnight.
For example, many traditional communities on the PC side have encountered the double stagnation of user growth and business monetization in the mobile Internet era. In the face of the newly emerging mobile community, the traditional community often loses the competitiveness of users and falls into the anxiety of commercialization. Radical commercialization often accelerates the loss of core users, further plunging the community into a vicious circle.
This is related to the pc community's long-term lack of commercialization capacity, once the growth pressure is forced to enter the commercial acceleration stage, the high cost of transformation will soon push the product into the abyss.
02 Self-revolution of the community
In the social media advertising revenue formula Advance = DAU * per capita feed * Ad load * CPM, the number of active users and the number of views per capita are important factors in determining the final revenue. This means that the commercial value of the community's advertising is essentially determined by the user value of the community, and the latter determines the upper limit of the former.
For the content community, maintaining the balance between the two values is a process of continuous self-revolution, on the one hand, which requires the community to continuously strengthen its operational capabilities to cope with the growing volume of platform content and distribute the right traffic to the right content; on the other hand, it is to strengthen the supervision of marketing content.
Taking the consumer content community what is worth buying as an example, unlike the information and entertainment content community, what is worth buying is mainly consumer content, the section includes good prices, encyclopedias and communities, respectively, corresponding to the user exposure of high-quality products, product details and user experience, which determines what is worth buying The content ecology is different from other communities, the vast majority of UGC content points to clear brand goods, and the risk of confusion between conventional user content and marketing content is higher.
This prompts what is worth buying to adopt the strong operating model of PGC + UGC to manage the community, in addition to the algorithm recommendation, what is worth buying maintains the editing mechanism, that is, the editor conducts compliance review of the user's exposed content, and supplements the preferential policies of the product, encyclopedia content, etc., and then completes the distribution to the user. This means that the platform pays higher operating costs, but reaps the benefits of ensuring that the consumed content is authentic and reliable.
Another advantage of the strong operating model is that it can effectively feed back the improvement of user trust in the community.
Dapeng Peng won the Sunshine Master of the Year in what is worth buying in the 2021 Top 100 Value Friends Selection. In the interview, he shared the creative experience of "obsessive-compulsive disorder" - after posting a milk dry, he saw the discussion of different brands of milk in the message area, and simply bought more than a dozen cartons of milk in one go and evaluated it, and this rigorous attitude was generally praised by readers. In a related article, Dapeng Peng wrote:
"Because of my personality, I definitely have to taste it before I dare to recommend it."
In the view of many creators, what is worth buying is closer to their own circle of friends that specifically records their consumption experience, and the purpose of creation is not simply to obtain material incentives, but to obtain more consumer recognition, and to confirm the value of creative content in user interactions such as messages and collections. This drives the platform to accumulate more diversified consumer content.
The original talent of the year "Ozawa is not Maria o0" has a high opinion of what is worth buying users: "Value friends are a very special group of people, they often have their own opinions ... I often learn things I don't know in the comments section. ”
This makes the comment section of her articles more like a debate, for example, users will stand in their own shoes and refute the author's positive views on the product, and this multi-faceted collision of views also makes the overall readability of the content stronger.
For users, this confrontation of views is also an iterative process of consumer decision-making ability, and the rational cognition of the product is about complete, and the user's willingness to buy will also increase. This is undoubtedly a true feedback to the content of the platform - once it is separated from the strong operational background of the platform, the basis for mutual trust between users and creators will no longer exist.
03 Compound interest of entropy reduction platforms
The glider theory of social media holds that the take-off height determines the take-off distance, that is, the initial user quality of the platform determines its vitality and development ceiling.
In the Internet enterprises, Byte has always prided itself on being an artificial intelligence company in the content field, and has launched Wukong Q&A, Watermelon Video and Zhihu and B station competitions by virtue of the advantage of recommendation algorithms, but the actual performance is not good, and related products have always lacked a strong community atmosphere of benchmarking platforms.
The reason is that the Byte community lacks the early high-quality user launch process, so it fails to form an effective user trust moat. For example, Watermelon Video does not have a long-term spontaneous support from a group of two-dimensional diehard fans, and Wukong Q&A does not use the form of invitation system to ensure the quality of content, the result is that the platform spends a lot of money to poach the head creator, but the overall effect is average.
In contrast, what is worth buying development cases has more re-examination value. The formation of its community is very simple - a group of "consumer geeks" with strong sharing desire and rational thinking have replied to their personal blogs to discuss mutually affordable and useful products, and even because the reply attracts too much marketing content, the original post has been deleted. However, after the formation of a community-based development model, what is worth buying Although it has experienced a substantial increase in user volume and an increase in the field of consumption coverage, its rational and professional user mental advantages are still strong, and the overall growth remains stable.
The reason is that this group of early seed users who uphold professionalism have laid the "take-off height" of the community and maintained it under the careful and stable operation of the platform. In the list of the top 100 value friends released this time, the listed users generally rely on professional content capabilities to obtain user recognition, the annual original master Juling Array has a background in scientific research practitioners, in what is worth buying platform, he released a sugar sweetener research article has received more than 2,000 interactions, and the article cites the national food safety standards, "Nature" magazine sugar substitute papers and other literature.
For the platform, this will make the community ecology more difficult to reproduce. Other platforms can incentivize creators to produce content of the same quality, but it's hard to replicate similar community tones in a short period of time.
Another compound interest of the entropy reduction community is the diversified advantage of content derived from the real user ecology.
Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, compared with platforms such as Zhihu and Weibo, Xiaohongshu has a better interactive atmosphere of content, and the content positioning of personal life rather than public events gives the platform a higher degree of tolerance, which promotes users to share more and more real life to the platform, which promotes Xiaohongshu to further move towards the life encyclopedia platform.
The same effect is also in what is worth buying. On the basis of the user's strong desire to share, the coverage area of what is worth buying continues to grow, based on the early 3C category, what is worth buying has covered all consumption areas such as food, clothing, books, washing and care, which also makes the proportion of young users and female users of the platform increase rapidly. In addition, the rational community tone also avoids the one-sided consumption evaluation, in the comment area of the product content, users see more of a "thousand faces" of multiple consumption views, which provides consumers with greater reference value.
If viewed from a long-term perspective, although self-revolution has deprived communities of opportunities to make quick money, boosting content authenticity and user trust is conducive to long-term growth. Platforms that can better handle the synergy between user value and business value will occupy more initiative in this era competition.
As mentioned in the award-winning greeting to the top 100 value friends, "Thank you for using your insights in the field of consumption to help value friends make the right consumption decisions and let more people get a sense of happiness in consumption." The platform and users form a consensus on high-quality content, and in what is worth buying, the community atmosphere of geek spirit, insight and rational consumption drives high-quality creation, and the professional, diversified and authentic community content formed by this also feeds back the benign development of the community.
In the future, what is worth buying will also build a benign and high-quality content ecology as the strategic focus of the community: discover and support high-quality content creators, build a more open, diverse and inclusive community environment, and form a more perfect creator hierarchy and incentive system.
Because this consumer content community has always believed in the value of long-termism: only platforms that maintain user trust with high-quality content can extract the advantage of compound interest in long-term development.