In the field of acquaintance social networking, WeChat was suppressed for the first time.
On February 11, the avatar social app gel, which has been on the shelves for less than a month, ranked first in the Apple App Store free list. Before that, acquaintances socialized on this battlefield, before there were Ali's contacts, after the multi-flash of bytes, or the ancient early rice chat... No matter the products launched by large factories and small factories, no one has ever surpassed WeChat in terms of heat.
Before the media could make a big splash, things took a sharp turn for the worse – on February 13, this fast-moving phenomenon-level product was exposed to infringing on user privacy, and the scandal was raging.
The gel side responded urgently, saying that this was "organized and planned slander against the gel app by competitors", and reported the case to the Chaoyang Branch of the Beijing Public Security Bureau on February 12.
But after the cry of injustice, the gel was hurriedly removed from the shelves, and it was not clear when it would return. In the social field of acquaintances, this imposing challenger retreated halfway through the attack.
Social tracks, more admission, less can insist on running down, from ClubHouse to gel, young people continue to make up stories for a short time, big brothers are also busy finding another way out, messing up tricks.
Lively to lively, panic is also panic.
The spiral of human nature
Gel is certainly not the only challenger.
This new social track dark horse, the main theme is "acquaintance social + virtual 3D image", users can create a virtual 3D image for themselves in the form of "pinching face", and invite friends to join in the circle of friends or community.
In the virtual space built by gel, users can express their state with expressions and actions, a total of 28 states to choose from, which belong to the four categories of mood, daily, rest, work and study, and each idea has a corresponding action scene displayed in the square homepage.
According to the definition made by the media, the gel is a "meta-universe" social APP, as to why it is "meta-universe", the media's explanation is that the gel is different from other social apps, and what interacts in the gel is not a friend's avatar, but a virtual image that can be moved, "as if QQ show is moving".
The wind outlet is big, and any pig can fly.
And the gel play similar to the project, the market has long been, such as the earlier equally popular 3D avatar social application ZEPETO, if you reduce these avatars to a dimension, the post-00s favorite Soul, and the post-90s childhood memories QQ show, the basic playing style is the same, the virtual image social.
The biggest difference is that there was no metacosm at that time.
Of course, gel is not completely without innovation, this main acquaintance social APP, in fact, cut to the current young people's "anti-link" social needs, but also has become a hit on the basic insight of human nature.
History is a spiral.
At the beginning of the rise of WeChat, in addition to the hard-core product design, it is indeed convenient enough and efficient enough, and it is also riding on the spring breeze of the rapid popularization of the mobile Internet, people urgently need to be online, need information, and need to be more strongly related to the outside world.
The information has been overloaded, unlike the QQ era, WeChat's default 24-hour online, and WeChat from the chat tool to the work tool function evolution, the consequence is social fatigue, users are trapped in the prison of panoramic open view, the circle of friends is no longer private, the chat box is no longer limited to chat.
The People's Network Research Institute paper "Social Media Burden in the Mobile Internet Era - Taking the Phenomenon of WeChat Usage Fatigue of College Students as an Example" draws an interesting conclusion from WeChat: 52.16% of the respondents said that they would reduce the use of WeChat, while 24.46% said they were unwilling but had to.
Due to the real-time online and over-efficient WeChat, users face the negative effects of information overload, social anxiety, and waste of time.
WeChat challengers are more or less aware of this, soul and other stranger social products, trying to meet social needs while reducing social pressure, and this explosive gel, is intended to make acquaintances social renaissance, giving users the opportunity to redivide the social circle.
From the pursuit of online, to the desire for offline, from the continuous expansion of columns, to the division of small circles, between the lack of social networking and excessive abundance, the needs of users have changed repeatedly.
WeChat has already sensed the danger.
In January 2021, WeChat launched version 8.0, adding a new status function, which can actually be seen as a patch on the WeChat itself mechanism, through this function, users can choose to display busy, business trips, sleep and other states, so as to achieve the role of informing friends that they are offline.
It's like the invisibility of QQ.
Contradictions and false prosperity
According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, after satisfying survival and security, people need to pursue love and belonging, that is, social interaction.
Human nature changes with the times.
The People's Forum Network article "Changes and Characteristics of Contemporary Youth's Social Needs" pointed out that modern society has entered a "society without a chance", and with the alienation of interpersonal relations in the Internet age, social relations such as geography, academic relations, karma, career relations, and social relations in the traditional sense are weakening and disintegrating.
The failure of the logic of traditional social interaction represents that a new paradigm is rising, and the network has become a new field for people to generate links, and it is also accompanied by the rapid development of related industries.
Data show that in the decade since 2011, a total of 474 financings have occurred in the stranger social circuit, with a total amount of 29.299 billion yuan. The segmentation of the social track is also becoming more and more obvious, voice social, interest social, workplace social, short video social... Countless different matching logics are speculating about how young people want to get friends.
In 2011, Momo based on LBS technology was launched, opening a domestic stranger social war; in 2014, The Exploration Halfway out of the way, leaping to become the largest stranger social platform after 95; in 2015, Soul launched the so-called "soul social" model to do the "lonely business" after 00.
The three-legged pattern of stranger social interaction has continued to this day.
Led by the Pathfinders, most of the possible gameplay in this field has been tried, from location-based LBS, to matching by activity and interest, to mysterious and mysterious souls, no matter how new they are, around nothing more than scenes, needs, and even metaphysics.
As for the socialization of acquaintances, it is a battlefield that small and medium-sized enterprises do not dare to attack at all.
As a social WeChat of acquaintances, due to years of precipitation, has long become an indispensable tool for user contact and daily life, new social products are difficult to subvert its status, and even cannibalize the share of WeChat, the same as acquaintances social QQ, its monthly life has now fallen to half of WeChat.
Even the big manufacturers have rarely successfully ventured into this field.
Since 2019, Baidu, JD.com, and Ali have successively launched campus social products earpieces, pear vortexes and Real such as me, focusing on a small range of acquaintance social networking in a single scene - students, as an active group in social products, have more time to use to make friends, and theoretically can quickly achieve user accumulation.
The reality is bone-chilling.
These three apps are high and low, and soon no one cares, among which Ali's "Real as I" stopped operating on June 17, 2021, announcing ali's failure in the social field again, and Jingdong and Baidu's social APP have also quietly taken down the shelves, and there is no more aftersound.
The new Internet giant ByteDance has also tried to impact the social market, launching short video chat Apps and interested social Apps flying chat, even if it is placed high hopes, it has not escaped the fate of insufficient user retention and off-shelf shutdown.
In the final analysis, the essence of social applications is to be efficient and can quickly achieve information transmission, and in the face of WeChat, which has formed stable usage habits, it is really difficult for challengers to tell too novel stories.
But this "normalization" is a double-edged sword for Tencent, when users are too accustomed to UsChat as a simple real-time communication tool, their curiosity about new social methods will naturally germinate - between the red and white roses, it is always the more beautiful one that has not yet been obtained.
Tencent has also tried to plant other flowers in its own garden.
From the friends network born from QQ alumni, to the pixel wind game social platform Nok Nok, to the virtual image social super QQ show similar to the number of gel roads.
Unfortunately, so far, there is still no one that can subvert the dominance of its own WeChat.
Former space unexpired, social precedence
At least on the surface, the timing of this "subversion" has already emerged.
As the boom in the meta-universe continues to grow, more and more companies are betting on the "next era", and investors are also going their separate ways, looking forward to running a future on the new social track.
In this worldwide frenzy, the gel is just a small wave.
Zuckerberg simply renamed "Facebook" to "Meta", Baidu launched the meta-universe social product "Xi'a", NetEase launched the online virtual activity platform "Yaotai", and ByteDance allegedly began testing a meta-universe social APP "PaiDao".
The "surprise attack" that climbed to the top of the free list looked fierce, and in the end, nothing could be shaken.
As for when the metaverse will come, and whether it will change the pattern of the social industry, there is no shadow, it is too early to talk now.
END
Source 丨 Golden Horn Finance
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