Image source @ Visual China
Wen | those things about the Internet
Douban sued Weibo.
Due to the "Super Talk Rising Star Project" launched by Weibo on March 29, the super talk names in the promotional map are copied and pasted the names of the Douban hot group, and even the accompanying pictures have a "Douban flavor".
At the same time, people with Experience in douban group management are recruited to the Weibo platform to establish a "super talk community" similar to the nature of the "Douban group".
Such as: weird problem research center, sunset enthusiasts, quarrels did not play well, the most pretentious group in history, etc., as of now, the Weibo super talk community has been unable to search for the "super talk nova program".
Douban demanded that Weibo immediately stop the infringement and demanded 1 yuan in damages. Soon, "Douban sued Weibo for unfair competition claim of 1 yuan" appeared on the hot search, and the familiar operation of Weibo Xiti Weibo hot search was staged again.
The response of Weibo is quite worth savoring, and the translation is:
Douban: Don't copy me! Don't dig me up.
Weibo: Who copied you? I think you have bad content.
Weibo made this kind of operation at this point in time, which is intriguing.
As early as last December, Douban was fined for a variety of violations, suspended the group reply function, and even asked by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to remove the App.
Throughout 2021, Douban was interviewed more than 20 times, and was fined 500,000 yuan for many times, with a total fine of more than 9 million yuan.
Some people joked: "The penalties are more than Douban earns a year." ”
This infringement is the fastest action of Douban CEO Abei. Why is the Douban side moving so fast?
Today, Douban's daily active users are more than 3 million, 8 years ago, this number was more than 4 million, the platform in 8 years to maintain this degree of activity is not easy, here has to mention the "toxic traffic" to Douban to bring the secret of activity - private group.
In the "Ideal Death" group where Douban is hidden in the snow, for example, 20,000 team members discuss the issue of death here, but the risk of this content is difficult to grasp, and if it is not handled properly, it may even become a fuse to induce suicide.
In addition, Douban "represents the moon to eliminate the ill-intentioned musicians", "parents are a scourge", "dirty goose group (囡 group)" and so on are all sensitive topics and controversial groups.
At present, they are in the "snow hidden" or "private" state in the Douban station, and the members outside the group cannot search and cannot see the group content, while the posts in the group are mainly managed by the group leader or administrator.
From about talking about freeze-frame fines, from removal to "functional copying" of Weibo, is Douban, a rare "spiritual corner" of the Internet, doomed? What kind of pattern problems are exposed in this? What role has Douban's private group played in the development of Douban?
Douban: The spokesperson for the split
Douban has been established for 15 years, and was originally well known as a book and video website.
In order to meet the social needs of users, Douban added social functions such as "group" and "interest" at the beginning of its establishment.
After 17 years of development, today's Douban is no longer a simple book, video and audio social networking site, but also a platform that integrates multiple functions such as social networking, scoring, and tasting.
Ah Bei often tells his colleagues an analogy: Starbucks coffee drinkers and people squatting on the construction site eating box lunches may be only a few hundred meters apart, but they coexist in an urban space, separated by an invisible barrier.
If you don't take the initiative to look for it, you may never know that the city is hiding corners that will amaze you.
All kinds of "strange-shaped" people live in Douban.
Every day, people share their embarrassing experiences in the "social death" group; the "hahahahaha
Many people feel that the differentiation of the user group makes Douban become fragmented, but in the eyes of Douban employees, the division is in line with the appearance of Douban.
Between "users who use the book audio-visual function" and "users who are active in some groups on Douban", two distinct groups coexist in one product.
From a product point of view, an information flow distribution platform has emerged community functions, the former based on efficiency, the latter based on UGC supply, which is a big hidden danger.
I don't know when it began, the spiritual corner of the young man of Douban has become tainted, and the division is particularly evident in some extreme groups of Douban.
Among them, the most famous goose group, originally advocated "dissolving the aura of stars", has gathered a lot of strength in many entertainment and social events, and is a unique existence in the field of Internet public opinion.
Accumulated over time, the influence has been able to match the former end of the world. Gradually, it also attracted the attention of fans, star teams, and even celebrities themselves.
But the more negative impact is that in order to maintain the image of star brokerage companies, it is inevitable to extend the hand of capital. In order to maintain the reputation of the idol, fans also secretly spied, so that the goose group account was also clearly marked and sold.
Needless to say, the group brought in traffic and the number of users exploded. But this also makes the watercress taste different. Douban audits are becoming more and more stringent, and even affect the normal expression of views.
The atmosphere is also becoming more and more hostile, and any topic can be quarreled. Other sections have also been seriously affected, and extreme and extreme scolding battles can be seen everywhere.
Now you enter the goose group like entering a mental hospital, where a group of people can insult each other for the sake of a completely unknown idol, and the language is vicious.
This is completely contrary to the original intention of the founder Abei to start the group: to prohibit discriminatory speech.
Users who speak extremely are often sued by many celebrities with Douban.
So much so that in the past two years, every network platform remediation list has always had the figure of Douban.
Even after many rectifications and App removal, the rectification effect is still not ideal, Douban itself is also a major group of its own traffic pillar is also a maintenance, only a group of users and serious violations of the group.
For example, the goose group was retained after the end of the "snow hiding" period, and it turned out that the repeated rectification of Douban did not achieve good results.
Why is Douban so "biased" towards the big traffic group? In fact, the concept of "long tail correspondence" advocated by founder Abei has a profound impact.
The core of the long tail effect is to emphasize "personalization", "customer power" and "small profit large market", in addition to the head of the popular "hot sale", non-popular, differentiated demand will form a "long tail".
This theory is projected onto the Douban group, in addition to the huge entertainment group, another big point of the group is a variety of strange interest groups.
However, in terms of content review, Douban does not have the ability to review these "personalized", "niche" and "non-popular" content well, which requires a lot of time and energy.
"But after 2014, a large amount of capital hot money poured into the entertainment industry, and the combat effectiveness of fan quarrels has all been upgraded, and I have to spend a lot of time reviewing, and I need to eliminate too aggressive fans to ensure the atmosphere in the group," said a group leader of the Douban Goose group in an interview.
And Douban's decentralized BBS forum model, so that the group can be formed by anyone, the theme is open, free to speak, there are goose groups, there are parents are scourge groups, and weekend climbing groups, we all love Xu Zhiyuan group...
Groups are clustered with completely different groups of people, each of which is like an island because of the closed nature of its products.
Can you still trust the Douban score?
In addition to the severance between the groups, not only are non-Douban users dissatisfied, but there are also contradictions within Douban.
Book and video users feel that the group is smoky and has no nutrition, and should let Douban return to the original intention of book audio and video. The group users felt that the book and video users were "left behind", pulled down the Douban, and wanted to cut each other's seats.
Abei initially believed that by building a recommendation product with undifferentiated information, users could independently create a beautiful spiritual world: books, videos and videos. Thus inspiring a person, nourishing a person.
But the premise of this matter is that each user must have considerable ability to know how to use information, speak rationally, and establish their own social relationships in an orderly manner.
But in fact, the mobile era has actually accelerated the information gap between people and people, and now less than 20% of the highly educated people (bachelor's degree or above) among netizens.
Ah Bei overestimated the role of Douban, but also overestimated the user's ability to self-evolution, he is too optimistic about human nature and technology.
But Douban has done nothing, and in the stormy Internet arms race, it is more silent than in previous years.
And Ah Bei spent half of his time in the United States, half of his time in China, no one knows what he is thinking, and the most recent in-depth interview was an interview with CBN Weekly in 2013.
As the owner of a company, the user may feel that he is doing too badly in many things. But he will surely say that it doesn't matter.
The authoritative scoring system of book audio and video was originally the foundation of Douban, and today's judging system also has problems.
Last year, for a work like "The Great Escape Room," more than 3,000 reviews were scored. In the movies released in theaters, more than 10,000 reviews have been accumulated, and users want to avoid lightning through ratings but they are slow to score points.
Among them, douban old users will find that many movies that cannot be rated as soon as they are launched are basically in a state of inability to score in the hot broadcast process.
In the short comment area, Douban partially hides the comments and cannot check the reviews of all users. In response, the platform responded to "preventing the water army".
Many users are quite receptive to the "anti-water army" view, believing that the filmmakers have moved their hands and feet to shield negative views.
Not only that, the phenomenon of malicious scoring in the comment area is rampant, and the secret struggle in the rice circle seriously disturbs the scoring ecology of Douban.
Many articles have become a battlefield for tearing up the family, and fans have deliberately maintained a number for the weight of the account to score many works that have not been seen.
At the end of 2020, a new book suddenly poured in a large number of reviews. As a result, the book editor found that these comments were not right for the horse's mouth, and complained about this behavior with great dissatisfaction.
Behind this is more serious is that the gray industrial chain of the water army brushing points has penetrated into the scoring system of Douban, and even some users have broken the news, and there are gray production personnel who privately chat about doing their own water army, and collect money to fight bad reviews.
Recall the original intention of Douban technology and ideals, that is, in 2005, a year of Internet equality, everyone believes that everyone can access the Internet, equal access to information, efficient communication, and the world will become more and more efficient due to the emergence of the Internet.
However, this rosy assumption is not correct, and it completely ignores the cultural and economic fundamental differences between regions for hundreds of years.
In the past ten years, Douban has indeed maintained its "original intention", but the changes in the external environment will be alienated by the "initial intention" that does not change.
It sits unhurriedly in the entire Internet market, so quiet that it even seems eerie. He may become a ticket taobao, NetEase cloud music, and e-commerce platform.
Nowadays, Douban can't see any flashpoint of profitability, according to Tianyan, the most recent publicly disclosed financing is ten years ago.
Who can copy Douban?
In addition to the "long tail effect", another concept advocated by Abei is called "non-vulgar commercialization", which has a profound impact on Douban, "commercialization is not vulgar, vulgar is vulgar".
Once upon a time, one of the closest opportunities for Douban to "success in the secular sense" was the commercialization of Douban movies.
At that time, the film team rushed the movie ticket market share to the second place in the market with a team size of 2 or 30 people, and "the cat's eye was stepped on by us.".
There were rumors inside Douban that at that time, investors "very much hoped that Abei could all be in to make movie tickets", and many internal voices also supported this choice, "it was difficult to catch up with an outlet".
But Ah Bei quickly stopped the business, and the reason he gave was that selling movie tickets did not make money.
But the clear-eyed people understand that even if they don't make money, selling tickets is also a magic weapon that can control the channel, the commercial significance is quite large, with Ah Bei's intelligence and foresight, he can't not see it, "He just doesn't want to make this money, he thinks this job is too dirty." ”
"Dirty" does not refer to the "copper smell of money", or the question of whether the posture is elegant or not. Making movie tickets means throwing money and laying manpower, which may expand the team to hundreds or thousands of people in a short period of time.
This kind of "pile up a lot of people and look labor-intensive" is something that Ah Bei is absolutely unwilling to do.
Rejection comes at a price, but it also pays off.
In Douban, there is almost no commercial content, in addition to the entertainment group and the star-chasing group, many users stubbornly chase pure interest discussion, reject advertising content, and the overall development of the group does not lean in the direction of profitability.
It may be that the number of Douban users and monthly active users are not ranked in many Internet products, but the attention received in Internet public opinion is extremely high.
"Thirty-Three Days of Lost Love" is adapted from the Douban God Sticker. The author originally shared real people and real events, but because of the high discussion, it became a novel of Nichiren. Finally, it was discovered by the director, bought the adaptation rights, and unexpectedly became a box office hit.
The fourth season of "Talking to Strangers" is based on the "Cutting Door Women's Federation Group", and the anecdote of "cutting out two suites in 5 years" has attracted a lot of attention, and the consumption concept of the team members has also triggered a lot of discussion on the whole network.
There is also an interview that caused a hot discussion some time ago, "It is normal for a migrant worker to think about Heidegger." A help post derived from the Douban Heidegger group: "I am a migrant worker, how can I get into college?" "Let us see the value of curiosity.
The good atmosphere of content production has formed a high-quality content pool, and it is easy to produce high radiation in the Chinese Internet under the inertia of public opinion.
Different from Douyin, Kuaishou, Today's Headlines, Weibo and other platforms that actively extend vines into the sinking market, Douban's user portraits are relatively clear, and after sixteen years of development, the protagonist is still a "literary youth" who loves books and videos.
This also determines the niche of Douban.
Characteristics such as "literature and art, high quality" have led to the high stickiness of Douban still mainly distributed in first- and second-tier cities, mainly young people with higher cultural levels.
In the underlying logic, the decentralized mode of "non-vulgar commercialization" and "long tail correspondence" and the model of not taking KOLs as the origin make users more engaged and more able to produce non-homogeneous content.
The traffic probability of BBS's model distributed to each Douban user is roughly the same, and the more active and high-quality such a community atmosphere is.
The group leader is the role of maintaining order in the Douban group, not the opinion leader, and even the leader of multiple groups such as the group is overturned by the user for improper speech.
Finally, if Douban is measured by the commercial success criteria of mainstream Internet companies, its commercialization has not been ideal, and the commercial performance of monetization models such as knowledge payment and information flow advertising is average.
But Douban is the "strange flower" in the Internet, and even within Douban, employees rarely talk about growth, data, revenue, and indicators.
They are more concerned about literature, art, social science, philosophy, the fate of mankind, and the essence of mankind.
On the large scale, Douban's profit model not only has traditional advertising, but also electronic ticketing websites, e-book sales shares, and related movies and book promotions.
At the same time, Douban's movie rating is the only one in the domestic Internet, directly benchmarking IMDB, the data in which is relatively real enough to feed better algorithms to feed back to the film producer, distribution and other to c users to provide guidance to improve the box office.
Not only that, Douban's private group is only a small part of Douban.
From the perspective of traffic, the proportion of private groups in the entire traffic of Douban is negligible, but the harm caused by the existence of private groups far exceeds the value brought by its existence.
It is better to say that the cancellation of the private group will make Douban completely let go of a burden.
Douban and other products may represent two product concepts in the Internet world.
Douban is quite idealistic, believing in the unity of the world and good information, he is anti-business and seriously lacks the sense of competition.
Other products believe in realism, believe that big does not fall, efficiency first, traffic is king, so we have Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou.
The mainstream products of the Internet are worthy of flowers and magnesium lamps, and Douban can also be the spiritual corner of contemporary people who are occasionally rummaged through.
It's just that the "toxic flow" really has to be washed well.