Slow bean how to get up?

In 2009, when the user size of Douban reached 10 million, the interior of Douban went through the most intense "route dispute" in history. The left is now the SNS craze sweeping the world, and the Douban team is engaging. Heat, operating first, the right is the watercress to start a media gene, books, movies and other products to connect users, the algorithm call the shots.

The controversy finally ended in agreement. In the upcoming off-season holiday season of the Spring Festival holiday, Yang Bo personally wrote an official blog about Douban and wrote an essay entitled "Douban Metamorphosis". He said: "We have also been worried about highly active Of the community may interfere with the service content of books, such as interpersonal conflicts in the community will affect the content of comments and entries, affecting tens of millions of non-community users. "After the reorganization, Douban communities have been aggregated into a master station, through Information flow - that is, the dynamic update of social friends - to maintain the user's adhesive, and books, movies, music, the three major modules, were put out of the sub-station (or channel) position, as a commercial product to operate .

This deformation, naturally aroused the routine bounce of watercress users. However, in a rattling no one did not realize that the future shape of watercress, but also inevitably be set in the direction. The most obvious testimony is that Douban, where you want to penetrate the social areas of the product - such as once valued Alfa city - are plunged into mediocrity, as long as the interest is extended and excavated - such as Douban reading (reading extension ), Douban FM (music extension) - but it seems full of tension.

In short, the users of Douban are between strangers and acquaintances, and the direct extraction of light relationships is of limited value. Therefore, in the operation of users, Douban does not have many ways to make money, and most of the ways to save the nation by curves are mostly. On the other hand, Due to the unique platform, Douban is relatively less affected by the new products such as Weibo and WeChat, reflecting the reflex arc is far better than the implementation, which also caused the reputation of Douban "Slow Company". I have said before that Douban is like an eternal life product that survives outside the jurisdiction of time. It has witnessed the rise and fall of generations of wave forums such as forums, blogs, SNSs and Weibos, and has resided itself in the place where time and space stagnate. Fang two days, the world has been millenium "exalted demeanor.

Watercress on the "slow company" holds the attitude of indifference, from a positive point of view, this "no humiliation, see the flowers in front of the house" evaluation, not only for the watercress "unchanged" relaxed Testimonials, but also disguised to help Douban resist the pressure from employers. But to pay attention to the rapid iteration of the mobile era, Douban found "slow company" has gradually reduced to almost epitaph spell, feared to avoid.

When the Internet peers are beginning to have "leopard", Douban want to speed up efforts also see the micro.

The most controversial, when the watercress suddenly burst out of the App line. Since 2013, Douban has disassembled the types of users' interests and introduced applications that meet the needs of segments one after another. This shows that things are not huge - for example, under the category of interest in reading, Douban notes three applications - While other Internet companies are trying to create a killer star products, Douban has been trying to break up in the mobile market, their business.

It seems that Douban is trying to replicate the "drop-station cluster strategy" it chose five years ago to digest a massive 82 million user base using a multi-center model, but Douban can do that on the PC side because of the presence of a master Platform as a unified support and connect users belong to the idea of ​​opening a private room in the cafe, but to the mobile terminal, App-specific islanding effect is easy to split the user, so that the original great user sticky platform advantage vanished.

However, from another perspective, this is again Douban in the "desire to practice" before being forced to "give up from the palace" let go, because its positioning and size are no longer "small but beautiful", while in the mobile Internet, there are Too many products that are really "small and beautiful" - just like the old watercress - have created a "siege of the world" for the current watercress.

As previously said, Douban has always been not afraid of "big guy", however, when the unfamiliar street (with Douban in the same city competition), cat's eye movie (and Douban film competition) and a belief that the so-called "single breakthrough" products frequently compete Dou Yeon, the watercress was dragged into his most not good at the rain forest: the scene, rather than interest in determining the user's habits.

PC Internet is built in the concentration of the scene, the user can fully follow the interest-oriented, to complete the use of a variety of network services, to stimulate, they open the game icon, saw the trailer of a movie, you can immediately seek to play Or download the address, read a funny paragraph, will be able to go down to the author microblogging spy on his footsteps of history, it is therefore, Douban interest in social can have a magnet like gravity, go hand in hand.

On the mobile Internet, users' "purpose" is obliterated and their focus is also replaced by debris. It is no longer their interest to decide that they should draw the screen of a mobile phone. Instead, they are managed by specific scenarios that can not be predicted in advance: Can not sleep, wait, go to the subway, eat alone, meet ... these aimless scenes are the natural enemies of interest and the most expensive price Douban has for their own "slowness."

So Douban started with split interest and wanted to first find a "fast company" on the rhythm and, in the face of mobile-side competition, it appears that Douban's strategy is - if the value of "noodle" is "dotted "Dilution, then simply remove the" face "as" point ", since the tip of the needle on the wheat.

In the process of building an App Matrix, Douban also shows the intention of an independent user: In addition to having shared relationships at the database level, Douban does not seek to distribute users. Applications and applications are perpendicular to each other, A small number of users, and users open an application under the watercress, but also see the highly scene of the individual functions.

The quick response based on the scene is a banner move to move the watercress. In addition, the light reading revival brought by the fragmentation makes the watercress another thing that it has never had before: try water media. Douban hopes to change the use of mobile terminals habits, matching a variety of scenes focused App, to complete the new content integration and brand education.

One comment that made me impressed: "If thousands of new pieces of content are created on a website every day, it's hard for operators to restrain their desire to be a media." This is for the UGC model The best annotation, but also an important reason for the proliferation of new media. Douban has the highest quality content in the Chinese Internet, but how to make it commercially valuable has always been a Goldbach conjecture.

On the Internet, popular events such as "where the object is," "Du Fu is busy," and "unbearable childhood photos" have been widely circulated in the Internet. Their origins are in the watercress, but they eventually boiled over Sina Weibo. Sina microblogging is also a UGC platform, but Sina's media culture, Sina microblogging from the beginning of the birth of the configuration of a professional editorial team, used to capture the front of the communication cycle also has the potential to explode the topic, and then use the resources within the station To fully promote and maintain the user's trust in the quality of the content. This is a common problem in the UGC platform in China. Even though the system of concern gives the user the highest freedom - letting them decide what they can see - many users are not good at digging or judging good content sources. Easily because of their own limitations, and missed those who did not see the brilliant, so from the blog to microblogging, public users want access to quality content, are extremely dependent on the editorial team of artificial recommendation, Douban certainly believe the power of the algorithm, but Objective algorithm recommendation is sometimes more than subjective intervention, however, especially in the face of the moment, people's experience is still better than the machine program.

Again, the influence of the media role, can not be directly replaced by money, but the attention economy, the emphasis is to go by the sea, especially in the limited area of ​​mobile phone screen, using PGC means to revitalize the UGC Content, it is conducive to users to carry out a coherent brand education.

Watercress recently released a called "moment" of the App, it is the industry that its starting point is exactly the same as known daily newspaper, the same editorial force is to daily selection of quality content in the UGC community, and reduce user exposure to it Threshold, so that a novice who knows everything / watercress, but also to find a place from the promised land of paradise.

The "moment" of the official introduction is very brief, and even spread its use of the scene specifically placed in the copy: "open at any time reading - to send free time, wait for seats and other food, and other public transport subway, before going to sleep," its momentum Very full, released less than a week, they occupy the AppStore book classification list of the first (the highest ranking of the total list to the sixteenth), which is not only the income of Douban for himself, but also proved Douban There are many more values ​​that can be extracted from the content data of reserves.

In the watercress lab - I happened to be a beta user of the experimental product - it is said that there are still many mobile applications focused on the scene waiting to go online, when the "point" of the breakthrough trajectory intertwined into a Zhang network, "face" of the contours of the surface again, if the watercress content restructuring on the move into the mature stage in the future, it may also turn to try to integrate these regional products.

Watercress seems to be trying to prove to the public that its slow-moving speed is not a hasty move, its composition is greater than its strain, and it has a lot of potential to tap into on the move side.

Author arid e-mail public account: techread