Can’t trust, how to talk about social

Title Map|Visual China

On July 16, 2010, a young man named Strom took a picture of his girlfriend Schutz and a yellow puppy with his mobile phone while on vacation in Mexico. This is the first photo released by the photo app he developed. Soon, within a week, this App had 100,000 users. Two years later, Facebook bought it for $1 billion. This is Instagram.

Strom’s original idea for founding Instagram was because social platforms such as Facebook and twitter were too complex and the right to speak was monopolized. Young people need their own expression space, eager to find the same kind, show their beautiful life, resist the boredom of reality, so as to alleviate the loneliness of life.

Eliminating boredom and loneliness has always been an inexhaustible Internet bonanza, with a steady stream of fresh ideas and applications. This is true not only in Silicon Valley, but also in China. Taking the social field as an example, Momo after WeChat and Aichao after Momo are all the same. Relieving loneliness and fighting against boredom is also a basic law in China’s social field. . However, with the new development of the network and users, new requirements have been placed on social platforms.

Who stole the original intention of making friends?

In 1903, the great philosopher Georg Simmel said in “Metropolis and Spiritual Life” and “Bridges and Gates”: “The mutual relations and various affairs of people in big cities are often various. , Complex. This makes modern ingenuity more and more a calculation. With so many people living together, the stakes are vastly different.” “The complexity and extensiveness of life in big cities force life to keep time and plan carefully. To be accurate, while the external life is rich and colorful, the internal one has to accept a rational, regular, and most impersonal character.”

“This kind of mental state between people in big cities is generally called reserved. As a result, they become indifferent and emotionless.” This kind of urban ecology has caused people’s group loneliness. Young people are particularly lonely due to factors such as social relations and economic ability.

American psychology author Maria said that the Internet naturally has the attributes of alienating people. For young people, social media is becoming a black hole of time and attention. It firmly controls the entire life of young people.

In an article about loneliness economy “Why is loneliness a good business?” “Mentioned: “More than 20% of people check WeChat more than 50 times a day, and their age is basically under the age of 25. In NetEase Cloud Music, there are as many as 2,000 songs related to the theme of loneliness. There are only 160 albums related to Kaixin. On Douban, there are more than 150 pages of posts related to loneliness. Just the book One Hundred Years of Solitude has more than 99,539 comments.”

“As of now, on Zhihu, 130822 people have paid attention to the topic of loneliness, and there are as many as 15,898 related issues. “Can loneliness destroy a person? “, there are 16,787 answers, more than 45,000 likes. “When are you the loneliest?” “There were more than 27,000 answers, most of them were young people.”

On the one hand, it is the intense loneliness of the urban population. The data of real social apps love to chat shows that 21-22 o’clock in the evening is the peak time for users to make friends, because after a busy day, it is most likely to feel lonely in the middle of the night. On the other hand, it is the chaos of making friends on the Internet.Or People with unpredictable intentions take advantage of the loneliness at the bottom of people’s hearts and make illegal profits, which leads to chaos in the social field.

The original intention of making friends is to relieve loneliness, relieve loneliness, and meet interesting people. However, on the Internet, cloud blind dates, killing pigs, financial fraud, etc. have emerged one after another, leading to a large number of negative injuries caused by inadvertently making friends. At the same time, because of the virtual nature, it has brought a lot of harassment and harm to female users, thereby reducing the fun of making friends and the probability of success, casting a shadow on both users and the platform.

According to a report in China Youth Daily, from 2016 to 2020, only one institution of the People’s Procuratorate of Huqiu District, Suzhou City, “handled 46 cases of fraud using the Internet, involving 249 people, including 18 cases of online emotional fraud and 156 people. , Accounting for 39% of the cases and 63% of the people involved. These online emotional fraud cases present new features such as intertwining with pyramid schemes, linking with money laundering, and difficulty in recovering stolen goods.” “The marriage rate has fallen, the divorce rate has soared, and the unmarried population has grown… The problem of marriage and love is prominent, which has spawned a large number of online dating platforms, and online emotional fraud has become one of the main criminal forms of telecom fraud.”

Authenticity, the first day of making friends

The first driving force of social interaction is actually very simple, it is to eliminate and alleviate loneliness. WeChat is to connect friends and work relationships; Weibo is to share all kinds of information in time; Douyin Kuaishou is to watch short videos; Aichao is to provide young people with a platform for social and emotional communication.

But the Internet is virtual. In 1993, “The New Yorker” published a cartoon by Peter Steiner. A puppy sitting in front of a computer said to another dog: “On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog. “The anonymity of social networking allows anyone to play any role, good or bad.

It is precisely because of this virtual property that online dating has become complicated. It was originally to relieve the beautiful original intention of loneliness, but in the end it brought harm. According to incomplete statistics, in 2019 alone, the Beijing News reported that 570 people were defrauded in online emotional dating, involving more than 130 million funds.

The main reason why so many negative incidents have occurred is Some users who participated in social networking did not submit real information and used the cover of the network to harm the rights and interests of other users and undermine the safety factor and healthy development of the entire social platform . However, many platforms, due to positioning and historical reasons, are unable to further regulate the authenticity, which has formed a big pain point. Among them, more than 80% of the victims are women.

With the development of the times, users have a stronger need for social authenticity. New requirements have been put forward for policy management, platform and user words and deeds. Authenticity becomes a rigid demand. According to a survey of netizens in Shanghai, 60% of netizens value the authenticity of member information most. The top three requirements for social platforms are authenticity, safe dating, and high success rate.

Such psychological changes have also aroused the interest of related researchers. A study by the Harvard Psychology Group shows that in the short term, the virtual nature of the Internet allows people to play any role at will and publish various speeches. At the same time, you can use beautiful pictures and filters to beautify your image and life, and give people a sense of pleasure to vent and beautify.

but In the long run, the virtual nature of social networks will increase people’s insecurity, loneliness, and distrust, thereby reducing people’s social well-being. . True and trusting communication, psychologically, will greatly enhance happiness. The sense of connection between people will also greatly increase. Over-virtual and over-packaged social relationships will reduce people’s sense of connection and happiness. It can even produce depression and anxiety.

In response to frequent social fraud incidents, the People’s Daily published an editorial in May 2020, “True identity is the public’s most basic expectation of dating websites. If this is fundamentally shaken, then dating websites will lose their value of existence. Today, A large number of dating websites use real names as marketing gimmicks to attract users to register and charge service fees. However, the reality of media exposure is still worrying. Some dating websites’ “release water” on the authenticity of their identities are obviously driven by interests. .”

In September 2017, the three ministries and commissions jointly issued guidelines for youth marriage and love work, requiring social networking sites including marriage and love to strictly implement the real-name system, “Strictly implement the real-name system for online dating and dating platforms, link the real-name system with the credit evaluation system, and improve marriage and dating information Platform, matchmaking agency supervision and evaluation system, multi-departmental coordination and co-governance.”

Who will meet the needs of users for making real friends?

The results of the seventh national census were announced. As of November 1, 2020, the total population of the country was 1,41178 million, and the total fertility rate was less than 1.5.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, “In 2018, my country’s single adult population reached 240 million, of which more than 77 million adults lived alone, and the ratio of men to women was imbalanced. The population living alone increased year by year, and it is expected to rise to 92 million by 2021. “Among them, the post-90s accounted for 47.68%, the highest proportion. This is destined for emotional social interaction, which is a long-term rigid demand for young people.

In China and the United States, a group of new social apps that focus on solving the pain points of making friends stand out. The capital market has also increasingly recognized this track. Including overseas match, bumble, domestic love chat and so on.

Match has more than 45 dating App brands. Including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, TWOO and other different types of dating sites, which are currently listed in the United States, with a market value of 38 billion U.S. dollars. Bumble, which is characterized by being friendly to women, has a market value of US$5.7 billion and a price-earnings ratio of 70 times. Domestic love to chat, focus on real social interaction, close to 100 million single young users, more than 10 million users chat and interact every day, and women are very active on the platform.

One of the biggest differences between the popular social apps and the previous ones is that they emphasize authenticity and safety, while at the same time being easy to use, fun, and efficient. From the perspective of the development process of making friends, from strangers to marriage, there are generally four stages: safety acquaintance, relationship breaking ice, feeling warming, and holding hands. Among them, authenticity, ice-breaking, and efficiency are the three key elements for making friends. Who can really solve these three key pain points can win new social user groups.

It is precisely the rigid demand for authenticity. All the starting points for the social interaction of Aichao platform are based on truth, “seeking truth and being pragmatic.” Aichao focuses on authenticity and brings emotional socialization back to the original intention.

From registration to operation, a series of machine + manual measures have been adopted to ensure the authenticity of the platform, and the “review before posting” and “triple review” mechanisms are strictly implemented. The content posted by users, including avatar photos, manual review, System face recognition, voice signature authentication, 7*24 hours of uninterrupted manual review, and finally multiple reviews by the editor-in-chief. Currently, more than 90% of users have passed real-person authentication.

Through AI intelligent investigation + big data recognition, for early warning of abnormal login behaviors, it automatically identifies high-risk users and high-risk actions, such as fraud, pornography, etc., and provides risk reminders to users who may be victimized by fraud and SMS dissuasion reminders. Strict measures such as banning or even permanently banning users and accounts suspected of fraud and violation of regulations.

Because the structure of the single population in real life is more men than women, this has also resulted in far more men than women on social networks. In the past, traditional social platforms met the social needs of users and often caused excessive harassment of women. In this way, the success rate of men making friends is very low, and guiding users to socialize effectively, sincerely, and with a high success rate is the key.

From the perspective of caring for women, the Aichao platform sets up points and other mechanisms to protect women and socialize friendly This effectively filters out a lot of invalid harassing information and draining advertisements, and protects women’s rights and interests, thereby helping women maintain high-frequency activity on the platform. For male users, this also helps them improve the efficiency of social interaction.

The efficiency of social interaction has become the core of whether a platform can continue to attract users. Starting from the function, Aichao has set up many interesting functions, including “emotional warming”, etc. When both parties have the willingness to understand, the design of the platform’s intelligent recommendation and guiding language will help break the ice, and the two will interact with each other to give gifts and become intimate. Degrees rise rapidly, and feelings heat up. All functions can be unlocked only after reaching a certain intimacy value. It not only protects female users, but also helps to strengthen the full understanding of both men and women in the chat process.

Give the user the initiative to make friends. For those who want to know more about the friends, check the information, tags, dynamics and other materials to deepen their understanding, and establish contacts through text, voice, video and other methods. When encountering the opposite sex, take the initiative to contact and communicate. If you are not interested, you can terminate friendly at any time. You do not have to bear the social pressure of traditional apps, let alone time-consuming.

The English poet John Donne said in the 17th century: “No one is an island, alone in the sea. Everyone is like a small piece of soil, connected to form an entire land.” This is actually the driving force for social platforms to continue to innovate. In every era and every group, there are social products that belong to them.

In the United States, the new social platform MATCH GROUP has been listed, and its stock price has skyrocketed from US$8 to a maximum of US$174. As of June 2021, the company’s market value was US$38.1 billion. The emerging real social networking will surely trigger a new round of capital craze. More domestic investors began to look for the next possible MATCH listing.