Author|Sixty-nine's trumpet
E-mail|[email protected]
QQ, an ancient social product that many people thought had long been "abandoned", not only still has a large number of users, but is also becoming one of the products with the highest "AI concentration" in China.
In February this year, on the 25th anniversary of QQ, the public paid attention to this product for "nostalgic" reasons, but found that in Tencent's previous financial report, "there are still 500 million people who insist on using QQ". This topic appeared on the hot search on Weibo, triggering a wave of "who is still in the body" - basically sighing about the size of the user who is like a dead camel, logging in to the gray QQ number to take stock of unfamiliar products or functions. sighs that this is the world of the post-00s, and by the way, I look back at the green and black history that has not been deleted in the space, and the youth that I can't go back.
But in fact, QQ is far from being a skinny camel product. A very interesting change has taken place in it over the years, this change comes from the social needs and usage habits of younger users, this change has happened before, but it has caught this "splash of wealth" in today's AI community explosion. To put it simply, this change is the Discord of QQ.
What are 500 million people busy with on QQ?
If you (unexpectedly) still have a stable QQ group communication habit, blowing water with sand sculpture netizens every day, and being an Internet recovery dog, there must be a high probability that you have experienced something like this: netizens who play games together (star chasing/or other paid fishing activities) have basically never met each other. One day, we went to an offline event together, and large netizens met at the scene, and before the meal ended, they showed the QR code and added WeChat friends.
As a party concerned, I feel that this scene is a little weird every time: why do you have to add WeChat friends again after meeting offline when you are already a QQ friend?
In a word, WeChat is more of an extension of real social relationships, while QQ is more suitable for building purely online, virtual relationships. When two people meet offline because of similar hobbies, it is equivalent to extending the relationship from virtual to real and building a social relationship.
On WeChat, users have their own social responsibilities depending on the role they play, such as students, employees, or relatives. Therefore, when they post moments, they tend to take into account the social group they represent, so they are more cautious when expressing themselves.
QQ, on the other hand, provides users with a "socially isolated, private environment" that helps them position themselves and present themselves. In this safe atmosphere, people are more inclined to share their life stories, express their opinions, have equal conversations, release emotions, and seek empathy.
Therefore, perhaps because topics such as "customized keyboard kits", "independent game exchanges", and "post-00s star-chasing little fresh meat" have an extremely limited impact on the social and public sphere, users prefer to discuss on QQ without social identity constraints. QQ provides an environment that is re-embedded in the community of social interests. In such an environment, they have a strong desire for expression, but also a sense of identity, belonging, dignity, presence and gain.
This feature has attracted a younger user base to QQ, and QQ has also revamped its product functions based on this. At the end of 2021, the QQ channel was first rumored to be in internal testing, which is a feature that makes people think of Discord at the first time.
Discord is a social product in the United States, and its history is simply summarized as a simple summary of its origin, from a chat tool that opened the game to become a private domain channel that can provide high brand stickiness, expand the scale of users, and finally form its own unique product system. In this evolution, valuations have climbed all the way to becoming an important social product.
And the QQ channel made people officially talk about "QQ's Discordization" for the first time.
However, these product transformations that happened a few years ago didn't really ferment, and it wasn't until today's era of generative AI that they really changed.
AI aboriginal petri dish, how to practice?
Let's take a look at a set of QQ-related actions that occur in the era of generative AI:
- In May last year, the AI drawing artifact Midjourney began internal testing on the QQ channel, and an insider revealed that QQ was providing support for the Midjourney channel and iterating on the Chinese version during the testing process.
- In January of this year, after the launch of the "Coaxing Simulator", a chat system based on large models with values and feedback, on the one hand, the daily active users soared to 10W in 3 days, and on the other hand, developers were confused about the large-scale traffic - "like it came from a black hole", and finally found that the traffic came from QQ space and QQ groups that could not trace the source of link jumps.
- Finally, there are many practitioners of AI products or development ecosystems who say that QQ groups are more active in the communities they operate.
QQ midjourney频道
If you have chased hot spots such as large models in the technology industry and the metaverse in recent years, there is a high probability that there are more than a dozen servers lying in your Discord list, and you may even have helped the web 3 project above.
AI products are thriving in the QQ ecosystem, just like no overseas AI product will give up Discord as its main community front. There is even a full-fledged plugin on Github that is dedicated to synchronizing messages between Discord and QQ groups, giving users on both sides the opportunity to communicate around the same topic.
Discord has become the first choice for all kinds of AI products to gather the ecology, and QQ has gradually become one of the main fronts for Chinese netizens and developers to discuss and play with AI.
So what do these two have in common that can make the discerning "AI natives" willing to exchange and discuss here?
The first is that, as mentioned earlier, on virtual social platforms like QQ and Discord, users can express themselves more freely, regardless of social identities and roles. This openness encourages users to experiment with different expressions.
Of course, more importantly, in terms of products, both platforms can freely create channels and groups, as well as well-functioning management, permission settings, and even give a lot of room for customization. This allows users gathered entirely on the basis of common interests to develop their own set of rules of communication, and the production of innovations and creative results in a particular field is nothing more than a by-product of regular discussions.
Even, in terms of Discord's very creative promotion of bots, not only QQ officially provides official AI bots, but also "tutorials for integrating chatGPT into QQ groups in the form of bots" can be found everywhere on the Internet. QQ and Discord use bots to manage the social environment, essentially using AI as the infrastructure of the virtual world.
Without the basis of social relations, the virtual chain of weak relations is ultimately fragile. Hasty expression of opinions may not usher in valuable discussions, but unnutritious emotional responses, and it is naturally difficult to have a desire to share in such an environment.
Therefore, what QQ and Discord do is not only to give people with the same interests a platform to get together, but also to give them the right to establish their own rules and discussion methods to protect this discussion environment. For those who want to discuss, this sense of security is precious in today's stinking Chinese internet.
Each Discord server has its own rules
Just like Discord's understanding of the community at the beginning: young people, gamers, and lovers of cutting-edge products mostly have the spirit of "studying", you give more functions and greater freedom, and they will explore the appropriate way to use it by themselves.
For those who use QQ as a youth recycling bin, it's time to take a good look at it again.