On January 11-14, 2022, the "Tencent Technology for Good Innovation Week" jointly sponsored by Tencent Research Institute and Tencent Sustainable Social Value Division was held. Kyth, CEO of the Small Universe Podcast App, delivered a keynote address at the conference.
He answered a question that many people are aware of but have no answer to: Why is the Internet making us less and less happy?
Here's the full text of Kyth's speech:
I am Kyth, ceo of the Small Universe Podcast App, and the theme I share with you today is why the Internet makes us more and more unhappy.
The "Internet" itself has become anxious
I don't know if this title reflects a common state of mood lately. For us, the Internet, which we use every day, may no longer be something that will make us feel happy all the time.
Let's introduce myself first. Compared to most of my friends who watched the speech, I think my internet age should be a little older than that of the parents.
I started surfing the Internet around 2000. When I first started surfing the Internet, I would often browse through a variety of interest forums, and during that time, most of my classmates enjoyed playing computer games, including real-time strategy and first-person shooters. But I never played these games, because at that time I thought it was so much fun to go online, and I was very happy to see all kinds of information on the Internet and communicate with friends with various niche hobbies. At that time, it was very happy to go online.
But, perhaps now, going online is no longer a happy thing for us. We've been online for a lot longer than before, but now when we put down our phones every day, will everyone feel satisfied, calm and happy?
Maybe when we turn off one app after another every day, we are not necessarily happy, but there are some new anxieties.
Every day when we open our phones to read the news, when we see everyone discussing a new thing, we are always afraid that we will not be able to keep up with the rhythm. When we see some sensational headlines, we feel like it's selling anxiety again. Our emotions are touched by what we see on the Internet. Why did we become like this?
Over the past decade, I think society has undergone a lot of changes, and at the same time, the changes in the Internet itself are also shaping the way we see the world. Next, I will talk about my own observations from the perspective of product design.
How we got to this point
The first thing I want to share with you is the "timeline," which was probably invented by Facebook in 2005. In fact, as early as 2004, if you want to see a user's status on Facebook, you must click to his personal page. But Facebook felt that it was too tiring to check it over and over again, so it invented a product called NewsFeed, which is now known as the "timeline" of everyone. NewsFeed caused a lot of controversy when it first went live, and Facebook users felt that this seemed to be too privacy-oriented, but in fact it was very successful.
It allows us to see all the dynamics of the people we follow in one timeline. It was later used by Twitter, used by Weibo, and eventually became the standard form of social networking for the past 15 years. On the one hand, it's a very efficient way to organize information: when you follow one person or more people, you can see this information clearly at once in a timeline, without repeatedly visiting different people's personal profiles.
But on the other hand, when you use the timeline function every time, you will find that you can no longer sink your mind to carefully browse every link and every article in it (if one of the states also contains an article link, when you read that article, you will actually worry about missing the outside things, so the time you stay in that article will actually be less and less), we will become more and more unable to immerse ourselves, which is some new problems brought about by the product form of the timeline.
The second one I want to talk about is the comments section. There is hardly a content platform right now that doesn't have a comment section. As we all know, not everyone has the ability to create content, but most of us will have the ability to read comments, post comments, and like comments. Nowadays, when we evaluate Internet products, we will mention its community atmosphere and popularity, basically look at how the comment area is, how many people are in the comment area, whether the comment area is hot or not, whether the comment area has a stem, and whether the comment area will play with the stem.
On the one hand, the comment area is a place to create and carry a community atmosphere, on the other hand, it is also a channel for users to vent their emotions at the lowest cost.
No matter what kind of user, after coming to the comment area, they can actually comment on the blogger and comment. Most content platforms set almost no threshold for users when setting up comments. This incident will make the comment area become the place where social problems in the entire mobile Internet are currently concentrated. Whether it's Twitter or Weibo, we actually face this kind of problem every day.
Next, I would like to talk about the bullet screen function.
In fact, the bullet screen function should be regarded as one of the most successful product innovations in the past 10 years, I believe that many of you who have seen this video are like me, are daily active users of bullet screen products, and now when I watch some movies, I will give priority to the version with the bullet screen, when there is an experience of watching movies with the bullet screen, it may be difficult for us to return to the era of going to the movie without a bullet screen.
For users, the bullet screen can make people asynchronously get the resonance of a thing, creating a feeling of "the end of the world at this time". But at the same time, we will also find that the barrage is bringing all kinds of new problems. For example, in a video, the barrage brings emotions closer than the content; when we watch a video, in the first few seconds, the barrage is already floating over, and these barrages seem to tell you what kind of emotion you should have about the video.
On the other hand, when the mood of the bullet screen is relatively uniform, people who have different feelings about this video are actually less able to speak, which is a bit like the "spiral of silence" effect. But this is not to say that the bullet screen function is bad, or that we have to give it up, but that when a function is used by more and more people, we may need to re-examine how we can get along with this function and adjust our relationship with it.
Next we talk about likes, in fact, likes for everyone, should be familiar with the function, Facebook company is more familiar with friends may know, this year they changed the logo to Meta before about ten years of time, Facebook's headquarters door, are hung a huge like symbol.
This feature minimizes the cost of users evaluating a piece of content, which also allows Facebook to have the most interactions, and this feature is also used in all subsequent social networking products.
Liking is the least expensive way to interact, but it also allows all of our content to be valued by data. When we evaluate a content as good or bad, the number of likes becomes a metric that no one can ignore. We may no longer care whether the evaluation system of those who like it is the same, and whether each of them has the same appreciation ability.
In addition, there are some functions such as fan numbers and Follow, which are actually more familiar to us, and they are constantly shaping our perception of people and content on the Internet.
Finally, let's talk about immersive short videos. In fact, this is also a product that we are all very familiar with and use every day.
In the past few years, immersive short videos, on the one hand, have become the most exciting entertainment we can find in the mobile Internet era. But on the other hand, it also makes us continue to increase the happiness threshold when we consume content, our patience is constantly reduced, and eventually we may become more and more addicted to such a product form.
Is this good enough for all of us in the long run? We know that short video products are constantly introducing some anti-addiction functions, but this function is still contrary to the operational goals of immersive short videos in general.
People need more than just efficiency
The era of mobile Internet has gradually transitioned from high efficiency to a period when we feel high consumption. If you remember, the era of mobile Internet almost began with Jobs's release of the iPhone, and it has been about eleven or twelve years now. During this period, the Internet industry has experienced a huge development, and it has obtained many more users than the desktop Internet era.
About two-thirds of the world's population is now a mobile Internet user. In the past decade, the mobile Internet has gradually penetrated into everyone's life from tools to content to life.
The mobile Internet provides us with news, provides us with videos, provides us with the opportunity to watch dramas and movies, and then every part of our grocery shopping, travel and life begins to penetrate into the mobile Internet. In our 24-hour daily life, more and more parts are infiltrated or controlled by the mobile Internet. In this process, we will find that the mobile Internet is synonymous with efficiency at the beginning, but when it is closely related to our lives, it begins to gradually consume our emotions and energy.
One of the main reasons for this is that at the beginning, the instrumentality of the mobile Internet will make most people migrate in, and the instrumentality can produce scale effects, and more people participating in the mobile Internet will have network effects.
On another level, the Internet environment we are in now can not be regarded as a particularly healthy state, many large-scale domestic Internet companies, still in a state of no profit, and even some of the top 20 or even top 10 large companies in China's market capitalization are still in a state of loss.
This is because in the past 10 years, the period of dividend growth that allows the platform to grow savagely has come to an end, and few new users can be introduced, and at this time, the fierce competition makes these Internet companies still need to pay huge new customer acquisition costs. Competition continues, but netizens have recognized the Internet as a free basic service.
In the process, we will find that the mobile Internet is beginning to reshape some of our old habits, such as the transformation of content channels.
Over the past 10 years, television and print media have been gradually replaced. At the moment, we're basically embracing mobile payments across the board, and we don't see paper money anymore.
The new habits of all netizens have gradually become our new way of life. The Internet began to become our spiritual abode, a medium for us to connect with the world. The vast majority of the information and content we see comes from the Internet.
At this time, we find that the Internet has become an Internet of high psychological consumption. On the one hand, the Internet is a mirror, it makes the flow of information and information more transparent, but it also magnifies the gap between rich and poor, it reflects the real world, and it also reflects the possible world for everyone, a world where we can see the state of life of others anytime and anywhere, all these changes will make it less and less difficult for us to meet the current state of life.
On the other hand, the mobile Internet actually experienced one of the fastest periods of population expansion in human history, and the result of this population expansion is that all of us survive here.
But human comfort zones actually exist in communities. After the mobile Internet has access to 6 billion people, we have to face a square Internet, but most people are not ready to live with so many people who have different values, different languages, and different understandings of the bottom of the world.
For us Internet people, the next question we can think about is how our products can make the world and people better in the high-consumption Internet era.
The changing and unchanging of the online world
One angle I would like to mention here is that we can think about what things are constant. First of all, I think this point may not be something that many people have thought about: in fact, almost all of us born after 75 years will probably be a netizen for a lifetime, and we will not stop surfing the Internet after the age of 50 or 60.
Everyone will be a netizen, because all the information is already on the Internet, so the Internet will continue to call for the design of various Internet facilities for the survival and life of middle-aged and elderly people.
Second, in the next era, all of us will be online. This "all people" are all the people born on the earth, sooner or later we will be connected to the Internet, in this process, if the problem of food and clothing is solved, everyone will care more about themselves. Because no one wants to be a second-class citizen on the Internet, we will put more emphasis on identifying with ourselves and identifying with the groups to which we belong.
The third thing that I don't think will change is that people will pursue efficiency, but people will also pursue deeper emotional sustenance. The content of the Internet is now extremely rich, but in this rich and instantaneous Internet, true care and love are scarce, and the attention that can be divided into everyone will become more and more short, and at this time some deep emotional sustenance will become more and more valuable.
Fourth, I think that in the coming period of time, the diversity and collision of the world will become more and more obvious, including the collision of some ideas and values between the East and the West in the past few years, so that everyone can feel the difference between people, because of the flow of information, our collision will become more and more direct. Then the Internet may need to call for more channels of understanding and communication.
How to make the Internet more like "going home"?
Here I would like to share with you some of my thoughts. In the past decade, some of the large Internet companies that have developed in China can actually be more or less understood as commercial real estate.
For example, if we go to a shopping mall on the weekend, there are restaurants, movie theaters, bookstores, and places to sell clothes, then these shopping malls will go inside because we have these facilities.
For us, whether it is a content platform or an e-commerce platform, or a life service platform, for us, these products are because there is the corresponding content, the corresponding services and goods, we will open these apps.
In addition to commercial real estate, there are also residential real estate in that city. All residential buildings, apartments and neighborhoods, these are residential properties. But why do we go to these places? It's because we live in it, and our home is in it. It doesn't need to have anything external to attract us because that's our own home.
I think in the next decade, more and more products will innovate further in this direction. In the future, more and more Internet products may be like residential real estate, rather than like commercial real estate.
These Internet products will make us feel more of the attributes of home, we open it every day not because there is any external stimulus inside, but because we will feel that the space inside is our own, is the home we can live in. Such a thing, I think the future will be more hopeful to achieve greater achievements.
Below I would like to share with you some of the new experiments I have seen, some of the more impressive examples that I myself have come into contact with in my daily work. Not that they solve much of a problem, just that their patterns are different.
First of all, let's introduce the small universe, which is the product I am responsible for. Small Universe is a podcast client, what is a podcast? Podcasts are more like Internet radio stations, a long audio program that can be subscribed to, updated regularly, and has a fixed host. Many friends may feel that compared with graphics and videos, the efficiency of podcasts to obtain information is relatively low.
But in auditory scenarios, such as commuting scenarios, podcasts can do more companionship and establish a deeper emotional connection with users. We probably started doing small universes at the end of 2019, and the product was launched in March 2020, and it has been almost two years now.
For podcasts, low information density is a feature, but it can make emotions and sincerity denser at the same time. When communicating with some friends before, they would feel that celebrities were more likely to be distracted when doing guest podcasts, because there was no camera facing people when recording podcasts, and guests would more naturally relax their guard.
On the cover of a first two-month issue of Triptych Life Weekly, next to the headline "Podcasts Are Popular Again," there was a line of small words: "The Antidote to Accelerating the World." The world doesn't have to be what we call an "accelerated world," but there's something to it that goes into the same thing as the one I'm sharing today.
Podcasts can provide more listening value, conversation value, including the value of long-term companionship and the value of trust, and it provides a kind of content that allows us to slow down and also bring us warmth. The trust of small universe users in each podcast is accumulated through time, and there are currently more than 300 programs in the small universe, and their total listening time is more than 10,000 hours, and the maximum listening time of a single episode has exceeded 200 years. For listeners, the podcast is more like a family member who lives in the ear but has never met.
Next, I would like to share with you a product called NewsLetter ( e-newsletter ) . From last year to this year, email communications have made a certain resurgence on the Internet in the United States and China.
In fact, NewsLetter has been around for a long time, probably since the 80s. But starting in 2020, starting with a service called SubStack in the United States, Newsletter has gradually become a new and emerging platform for content creation. Substack brings the newsletter service back to life.
Many of the people who run email services on Substack are journalists, analysts, and experts in a wide range of industries. Newsletters are essentially when you subscribe to a person's email newsletter, and whenever he writes a new article, it is sent to all the subscribers' mailing lists. It's a more egalitarian, more definite relationship, and a longer-term dialogue.
When we subscribe to a newsletter, every piece of content is not liked or ranked. Users don't know how many followers the newsletter blogger they subscribe to has, but for users, every piece of content can initiate a direct conversation with the author. The feeling of writing a letter can also bring some cordial and warm taste.
I'll share another collaborative project: it's a podcast called "Sooner or Later Update", a "Sooner or Later Disclosure" program with the small universe, and we set it to a state where after 1,000 people pay for it, it will be unlocked for the whole network to listen to.
That is to say, it was originally a paid show, but after 1000 people paid for it, it would become a free show, and the event was actually a little experimental. The anchors of "Sooner or Later Update", Ren Ning and Gun Gun, want to see with us whether there will be enough people to carry out such seemingly "altruistic" behavior.
The end result was that we sold 1,000 copies of the show in 36 hours, because we were going to sell 1,000 copies and then the show was unlocked. In the process we feel like there are enough people to unlock a good piece of content faster than we thought, and then we also find like-minded companions in the process.
The thing I want to introduce below is called Letter, and its URL is letter.wiki. It is an English-language online debate platform that was launched about last year, and all the views and conversations in it are epistolary, including politics, science, economics, culture, etc.
There are some big-name authors in the letter, including Harari, the author of "A Brief History of Mankind", the best-selling author Harari, and one of the most famous intellectuals in the United States, Chomsky. The peculiarity of the dialogue here is that they are all discussing the same issue back and forth in the same form as in the form of correspondence similar to the letters of the Republic of China era.
Compared with many things now, the feature of this product is not to reply immediately, but to reply after careful consideration, and one person does not make a brief comment to another person, but after carefully organizing the language, calmly exchange comments. What this product makes us feel is that we don't really have to convince strangers, because convincing others is likely to fail. But public dialogue is valuable, and to publish the content of this friendly, friendly, and calm dialogue will make people feel the power of civilization.
There is a game that everyone may remember, probably 2 years ago more popular a casual game called "Traveling Frog", this game I am more impressed with is that when you turn off the game, put down the phone, the world in the game is still happening, when you raise frogs in it, frogs are sometimes at home, but most of the time frogs will travel with their bags. I think this game setting is very interesting.
This game creates a world without anxiety and too much excitement. Sometimes you open the game Traveling Frog and you will find that the frog son is back, but more often, it will travel outside, and whenever it comes back, it will bring some photos of the outside attractions. So this product makes a lot of people feel like a mother, and they think of this frog as a son.
The enlightenment of this product to me is that in fact, we can have a world that does not have to open the phone all the time, does not have to look at the screen all the time, and still makes people feel a faint concern and good feeling.
This game must be more familiar to everyone, that is, Nintendo's "Animal Forest Friends", many people are still playing this game two years after the launch of "Animal Forest Friends". I think the biggest difference between this game and other similar games is that its game purpose is life itself. In the beginning, the game will give you an island, you will have 10 animal friends on the island, these friends will also come and go, you can build your own home or not to build your own home, but this world is your world.
In this world, your friendship with these animal friends will continue to deepen, and the game will make you really feel that the island is your home, this home may be more real than your home in real life, and it will make you attached. So I think this may be a direction that the next generation of Internet products will be closer in the future, that is, to make people feel at home.
Well, I think that this kind of Internet product that goes to the "feeling of home" is more or less a resistance to the high psychological consumption of Internet products. For example, the Internet, which has high psychological consumption, is actually power-consuming, and "home" should let you charge. Of course, staying away from the Internet may be less likely to consume power, but in terms of getting you to charge, the Internet should still have a lot to do.
The Internet should make the world a better place
Finally, I would like to say that in the next N years, Internet products, designs and platforms will definitely continue to evolve, and we may need to pay more attention to how the Internet is making the world a better place. The Internet of the next era should be a warmer and more equal Internet, and it should also be an Internet that is more able to solve problems in the real world.
It should also be an Internet that is more focused on specific individuals and their well-being than the Internet of traffic. Finally, it should generate more social value.
We Internet practitioners, whether as content producers or content consumers, can think more in this direction. As a practitioner of the Internet industry, I am here to encourage you, hoping that we can all create more interesting, fun, valuable products that can make more people feel at home.
That's all I'm sharing today. A lot of ideas are not necessarily right, I hope to give you some inspiration, thank you.