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A community that promotes the good is accused of showing off its wealth; a platform that advocates authenticity is criticized for "cheating". When the user base of Xiaohongshu becomes larger and larger, the impact on the real life of ordinary people becomes more and more profound, and the "cognitive angle" of Xiaohongshu automatically emerges.
As a university professor and intellectual scholar, Liu Qing is widely known through "Strange Story" and the APP. His "Lecture Notes on Western Modern Thought" is a guide for contemporary young people to construct an ideological edifice, and book reviews and insights have spread to the Little Red Book.
Liu Qing once registered a Little Red Book account, and his biggest feeling is that compared with other active communities, Little Red Book has no words and swords, no hostility, and more of a statement tone, like neighbors communicating daily life.
The paradox is that Xiaohongshu has been pushed to the judgment seat of public opinion several times in the past year and has been on the hot search. A community that promotes the good is accused of showing off its wealth; a platform that advocates authenticity is criticized for "cheating".
When the user base of Xiaohongshu becomes larger and larger, the impact on the real life of ordinary people becomes more and more profound, and the "cognitive angle" of Xiaohongshu automatically emerges.
With doubts, Liu Qing visited the headquarters of Little Red Book and had a dialogue with COO Conan. He was curious about how the culture of the Little Red Book had grown, where did the vitality of a community come from, and why it was labeled so much?
Before answering this question, perhaps we should first explore, what exactly is the Little Red Book?
In fact, for a long time, this answer may be vague. In other words, in the 8 years since the company was founded and operated, the definition of Little Red Book has changed. From the initial cross-border shopping guides, grass growing communities, lifestyle communities, and now, in a more understandable way to describe the life experiences of 200 million people.
Just nothing has changed, xiaohongshu has given users a strong mind: useful. Users post content that comes from real life.
After the influx of male users, this feature is more obvious, how to decorate, make complementary food for the baby, and find a delicious restaurant. Especially long-tail content, niche needs such as vinyl can be met.
But Little Red Book is more than that, its genes are community, and sharing is the biggest driving force for the production of Little Red Book content. From this point of view, the Little Red Book is another existence in the circle of friends. The circle of friends is based on the social relationship of reality, and the little red book covers the dimension of interests and hobbies.
The basic tools that the Internet allows everyone to extend are search and interpersonal communication, both of which are small red books. Moreover, the Little Red Book pierces the most basic unit of life of food, clothing, housing and transportation. Perhaps at the traffic level, Xiaohongshu cannot compete with applications such as Douyin and Kuaishou, but from the level of lifestyle and consumption decision-making, it has a far-reaching impact on ordinary people.
The strange thing is that all this is not planned and designed by Little Red Book, but the result of the self-evolution of the product. What Conan and Liu Qing explore in the video "Meet little red book" is how little red book achieves self-evolution.
Groups evolve themselves in the system
Zhang Xiaolong said that people are the reactors of the environment, and the product should create an "environment", and this environment determines what kind of reaction the user will do. He argues that product managers should build a system like God and make rules for groups to evolve themselves in the system.
WeChat is a successful "system", and the name people have given it to a national-level application shows its importance to everyone. The Little Red Book also creates an "environment" where the evolution of groups also takes place.
The most typical manifestation is the generalization of the concept of planting grass.
One of the points that Little Red Book is remembered by users is planting grass. The starting point of cross-border shopping strategies and the good things shared by users have been given the status of "grass planting base". The meaning behind this term is the influence on user consumption decisions. Therefore, you can see that apps such as Taobao and Douyin are trying to strengthen their own grass planting functions.
However, the object of the Little Red Book planting grass has long jumped out of the category of commodity consumption. Around 2018, there was an influx of local life information, some people sharing delicious restaurants, favorite gyms and even travel guides, and these valuable information now account for a high proportion of Little Red Book notes.
In fact, in the lifestyle dimension, Xiaohongshu basically covers the efficacy of vertical content platforms such as dianping + mafengwo. Young people define their way of life in the Little Red Book, camping, learning to punch cards, making small sweet wine in convenience stores, script killing... Here they discuss, collide, and then become a social phenomenon.
This gradually led to the evolution of the second level of the Little Red Book. Here, everyone can also be called a resident, and residents of different ages, different cities, different occupations and even different genders join, enriching the user structure of the product.
Conan said that the user generalization of Xiaohongshu in the past two years, not only male users, some middle-aged and elderly people have also appeared in the community, you know, Xiaohongshu is a female APP label in the past deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, this gender color rendering, sometimes deepen the outside world's prejudice against products.
Men clearly have their own logic of content consumption. For example, their appeal is very clear: I am the one who solves the problem. Where to go on weekends, how to decorate the home, and the grandfather with the baby came to the Little Red Book to find complementary recipes and tutorials. They are typical users who use Little Red Book as a search engine.
At this time, perhaps we regarded Xiaohongshu as a national application, and finally changed from a niche group to a mass user.
Although the process was slow, rather than rapid, Conan confided to Liu Qing their concern that if the crowd was diverse and too fast, the original values and culture of the community would be diluted.
The Internet faces users, and many times it is impossible to figure out the whole, and it is difficult for you to deduce the behavior of them after they form a whole through the investigation of individual users.
The book "Out of Control" tells a story. A flock of flying bees, although the number is as high as a few thousand, but they know where to fly, and from a distance they seem to be a whole. Where is this overall "brain" and what determines the direction of their flight?
What is certain is that a product with DNA will evolve itself, like an organism. This DNA is values and perceptions.
Although at different stages, the Little Red Book community has basically continued the tone of "true diversity and beauty". You'll find that new users adapt to this culture and atmosphere. For example, phenomena such as raising bars and scolding are relatively rare in the comment area.
When the Xiaohongshu platform appears with a large density of consumer content, which is interpreted as an excessively extreme consumption display, and even labeled as consumerism, in fact, the community will trigger a self-correcting mechanism - the emergence of anti-consumerist behavior.
Some people advocate subtraction for life, and one quantitative indicator is that the living room has fewer than ten items. Another manifestation of anti-consumerism is that more and more young people are less enthusiastic about big names, and they are more willing to pursue customization and handmade.
Even if there are over-glorified scenes in the notes and the self-performance is too good, someone in the comment area will remind him to pull him back to reality.
Correction, correction and hedging, the diversity of group behavior characteristics, which cannot be defined and planned in itself, are the result of the natural growth of the community.
The dynamics of self-evolution
Why does little red book have the ability to grow naturally?
The Internet group effect has a characteristic: everyone is a contributor, and everyone is also a beneficiary. For Little Red Book, the most important embodiment of community vitality is sharing.
Conan's first identity in Little Red Book was that of a sharer. Conan wrote a guide to cross-border play and shopping for Xiaohong at that time. It was the early days of little red books, and the guide was presented in the form of a PDF, and Conan shared it out of the help of friends.
When she joined Little Red Book, the platform's approach was also to encourage sharing. Conan said, "A lot of platforms are more about recording, self-expression, and what we cut into at that time was sharing. Sharing must be hoping to help others, encourage sharing itself, and become a community atmosphere that makes everyone more willing to share. ”
The life experience of each generation comes largely from the father or family, but the changing family structure, the specialization of the social division of labor, and the increasing tendency of young people to define life by themselves, the real impact on us is more from people who have similar life concepts and experiences with us, and may even strangers.
Many young people decorate their houses, and the first thing they think of is to go to the Little Red Book to find a strategy. Whether it is the renovation of new homes, the renovation of second-hand houses, or the renovation of self-built houses in rural areas, you can find samples that can be referred to.
A girl shared her experience of spending 70,000 yuan to decorate a second-hand house, down to how to do a cloakroom in a small apartment, a wall lamp of 100 yuan, a bathroom separated from wet and dry, and the detailed operation and expenditure of each step were listed. As long as someone finds decoration ideas, read them often, and enjoy the joy of hands-on, but also greatly save money.
From this point of view, the Little Red Book has played the role of a circle of friends. It's just that it's not acquaintances that connect, but interests, hobbies, and similar life experiences.
This is also a vein that echoes the evolution of the Little Red Book grass. Users share content ranging from material goods to lifestyles and even emotional resonance.
The terms "renovation of old things,camping," and returning to the hometown to start a business can be accurately interpreted and expressed in the Little Red Book. Even an abstract state such as "sense of atmosphere" will be seriously recorded and shared in the Little Red Book.
A set of numbers reflects their enthusiasm: the Little Red Book has more than 30,000 notes on the renovation of old objects, and in 2021, the number of notes related to "sense of atmosphere" has risen from 40,000 to 1.4 million.
In the Little Red Book, the psychological state of young people can also be found. Topics of self-growth, descriptions of emotions in different states, and psychological test learning and counseling content are all in a state of high-heat search and release.
Xiaohongshu has formed an "environment" and established a "field", that is, the usual sense of community atmosphere, so that there will be such a large number of users here to confide in and express their preferences. Further into this, this is also a form of social interaction.
The real experience from reality, through online community sharing, users draw nutrients from it, practice in reality, and finally return to online, forming a positive cycle.
This phenomenon reminds Liu Qing of the scenes of "cigarette paper shops" and "small shops" in the streets and alleys. Especially after the epidemic, young people began to pay attention to and find themselves in the physical objects in their living environment. "A city, a community, really interacts, not just out of narrow good, but out of concern for your feelings and experiences."
Conan told Liu Qing, "Captain Potato, in fact, can be understood as the big brother of the neighborhood committee of the traditional community. ”
Community autonomy and management
In the conversation with Liu Qing, Conan frequently mentioned two words: resident and user.
Residents are members of the community, both real and virtual. The user is an expression in the context of the Internet, involving supply and demand in the consumer market. Liu Qing wanted to know that these two logics existed in the Little Red Book at the same time, what kind of relationship was there between the two?
Conan explains, "What we've been doing is how to apply the product methodology of the Internet to the understanding of the community, essentially how to better understand people offline." ”
In fact, residents and users involve another layer of propositions: residents often have a set of convention autonomy of public order and good customs, and users need to guide and manage.
Especially for platforms such as Xiaohongshu, there is a bilateral effect, which requires both production and consumption. Compared with e-commerce, the producers of content platforms are also people themselves, and there is uncertainty in supply. Therefore, the problem of platform governance is more serious.
The cognitive angles that Conan mentioned are one of these manifestations. Previously, the Little Red Book emphasized the "good life". "Whose good life is it, and what is good? Is afternoon tea in first-tier cities a better life? ”
When standards cannot be quantified and adjectives are used to describe a product's philosophy and values, it is easy to be alienated and deviated. The "good life" is understood as the "beautified life", and show off the rich and fake notes appear in the community.
But there is also a question of how to characterize it. Go to a Michelin restaurant for a meal, share the process, or all the content related to the luxury brands, is it a show of wealth?
The practice of Xiaohongshu is not to blindly kill these contents, but to pay more attention to the motivation of users to post. One of the most important metrics is whether it meets the characteristics that are "useful" to other users.
In April 2021, Xiaohongshu launched the "Community Convention", one of which is to "avoid showing off consumption power far beyond ordinary people": whether it is useful to others will be an important criterion for judging the behavior of showing off wealth. Fiction and fabrication far exceed the spending power of ordinary people will also become the focus of platform governance.
Conan saw the "Community Pact" as a contract of consensus between residents, what to encourage and what to oppose. After repeated communication with some users of Xiaohongshu, the community values were condensed into "sincere sharing and friendly interaction".
In addition to resident autonomy, platforms also enforce intervention when necessary. For example, the governance of "false marketing" is special, cracking down on the upstream and downstream of the gray production chain of "ghostwriting and distribution", and a number of brand accounts suspected of false marketing have been banned. The platform has a professional team engaged in this work for a long time.
Especially when the scale of users continues to expand, community ecological governance is an eternal proposition, and even the magnitude of content accumulation continues to break through, and the more diverse the creators, the more complex the problems encountered by the platform.
Community governance is also part of the evolution of the product. Zhang Xiaolong shared in "The Product View Behind WeChat" that the most interesting point of the group effect is that we can't control what happens to them by pulling all groups into an environment and setting rules for them. Unpredictability and unpredictability are the meaning of Internet products.
Zhang Xiaolong's words after this are especially suitable for Xiaohongshu, "Users will operate on their own, they will have a lot of stories on their own, and the world will become very exciting." We just need to provide such a mechanism to come out. ”