Glimpse the present and future of the Forum from the grass-Liu community

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[Core Tip] with micro-BO, SNS The rise and growth, once a hot forum began to decline. Has the traditional forum really begun to decline? But we also see some vertical types of communities (such as grass) not only do not show any weakness, or continue to be embraced by users. Where should the forum go?

With the rise and expansion of Weibo and SNS social networks, the forum that once became popular has begun to show a decline. CNNIC just released the "30th China Internet Development Statistics Report" data show that the current BBS forum users about 156 million people, although compared to the previous two reports, the number of users have stop-loss rebound, but for the more than 10-year-old BBS forum, The gap between the new microblogging and social networking sites continues to widen. Has the traditional BBS forum really begun to decline?

But in contrast, we found that some of the vertical forum community is not likely to have a similar impact, still hot and unusual, the famous adult forum site-grass is one of them. Despite the government's crackdown on pornographic content and the destruction of the server room, its appeal to users remains unchanged. Data show that the current number of members of the grass-Liu has more than 200,000 (after the server fire event, the community has briefly opened the registration, two days registered members more than 130,000, the total moderator was forced to close the open registration, the average user's stay of 10 minutes (compared with the end of the Earth, mop the user stay less than half), One-day maximum posting volume reached 98617, which is a very alarming number for a Web site that is not normally accessible at home. In the forum generally began to decline today, why do grass continue to be embraced by users?

What's wrong with the forum?

How to improve the quality of user communication?

For those who often visit the forum, I believe that many people need to reply, or even charge to view content, download resources of the post is quite a headache. On the one hand, we understand that this is to encourage more interaction among users, really can be focused on the topic of discussion, enrich the Community content and create an atmosphere of incentives, so that users will not just look at the content, take the resources to leave (this phenomenon is quite common, we often see a post with hundreds of of resources to view or download, Very few responses). But from the user's point of view, if a user really want to discuss a topic, he must not be directed to the points of the replies, the download of resources, so this incentive to him does not have much significance. For more people, they may not really have any ideas to publish, mandatory response to the measures so many posts filled with such as "Thank Landlord", "Support", "top" such as the water paste, although not to say they meaningless, but the forum of excessive hydration but let a lot of valuable reply was submerged in the sea.

For this problem, the solution is not only do not need to post to see the full content of the posts and download, even users do not need to have registered account. This open posture is very courageous, and its risks include but are not limited to: 1 users take away resources, no one dedicated content, resulting in a lack of community activity; 2 The malicious competitor will crawl its resources and build a community, diverting users from the original community ... Theoretically, this approach is effective for mitigating the excessive hydration of the forum, but perhaps because of the user's habit, the problem of water sticking on the grass is still there, although it is much smaller than other forums.

The practice of the grass is to adjust from the system, but for forums like Xda-developer, the technical approach is used to solve the problem. Download, view content also do not need to reply, but if just feel that a certain post said good, want to express approval, there are special thanks and share the button (many domestic excellent forum also adopted this way), so as to avoid similar to the overflow of thanks.

For malicious ads or water stickers, most of the current forum is handled by the moderator manually delete, but in fact this forum can not try to introduce UGC mode, through the user's vote will not be bad content to hide.

To sum up, increasing the visibility of meaningful posts is the best way to encourage discussion, after all, not to get thanks, but to think about communication and collisions.

How to make it easier for users to find and find content?

For ordinary users, traditional forums are not as friendly as searching for topics and discovering new content, especially in the traditional Gateway forum. After opening a sub forum, can only view the post in chronological order, and the title or summary of the post is often unable to tell us useful information, search for a keyword, the result is often too much to choose (not to mention many forums to search for fees); The interface is full of advertising banners ... The forum has not made any changes in its organization and presentation of information since its inception, and it is no wonder that the social networking, social question and answer era seems so backward.

In response to this problem, grass-Liu also adopted the form of the system to standardize, the home page to remove all interference elements (or even no advertising), to ensure a clean and refreshing, while stipulating the post should be published in what form (refer to the figure below). In a unified style, let the whole station information in the original old forum framework to achieve as clear as possible.

If all the forums were to enforce the rules so rigorously, it might be useful to have a community of forums like this. But most of the time, the user is not so obedient, then the technical solution to this problem? Let's compare traditional forums and social networks, where all users open a Web site to see the same content, without any customization, often with a lot of irrelevant information interference (of course, Now many forums have also provided the collection function, but the importance of this function is often not reflected in it; on social networks, users see the content of their own choice of attention, targeted very high, but there is a lack of information diversification, one-way perspective to strengthen the risk. If the forum can appropriately introduce the elements of attention and personalization, to present more targeted content for users, may be a good solution.

In addition, the Forum on the theme of the premise of the introduction of the tag system, the Forum content organization is also a possible solution, know that is a good example. Of course, how to do better search is also a place to delve into.

User expansion and control

For most communities, the growth of the number of users is the goal, how to attract more users is an important issue, but at the same time how to maintain the quality of the community, this is a very delicate issue. User growth is a good thing, but many of the early good communities with the growth and expansion of users, often bad currency to expel the problem of good currency, and long-term quality of the user's loss is a forum, a community unbearable pain.

For the forum, the most important capital is the first group of users, it is they shape the atmosphere of the whole community, and the form of the forum itself is not important. In the ideal situation, excellent managers and reliable initial members can be widely driven to participate in other members, to create a good atmosphere of discussion and content. With the word of mouth to attract new users to join, with the atmosphere of the forum to break into new users, thus forming a virtuous circle.

But this is not only for the old users, or new users have put forward a high demand, and the end will be with the user to expand the goal of conflict. Compromise the quality of users, or control the size of users? Many forums have chosen the former, and the result is a large influx of non-compliant users that will completely disrupt the forum and eventually lead to a collapse of the community. For today's management of a forum, the rise of micro-blogging and SNS has been doomed to the public topic has been forever left the forum this platform, the only way to continue is to build a high-quality vertical community, and this is the current most still successful forum common features. Success is not determined by the number of users, a sustainable small community can also be successful, so in the choice of Angel users, when adding new users, the appropriate restrictions are fully feasible, should be said to be very necessary. Throughout the grass-Liu Forum, the Vision Forum, many well-known HD, PD resource Download forums, have adopted a new member of the invitation system, through the recommendation of members to expand. (For grass, the privileges of its members include download acceleration, search, video library, Post replies, invite members and other functions.) Because the invitation code is few, the grass-Liu Community invitation code has even become an industry chain. )

This classical club invitation system, though ancient, but it still works today, so many new products have been used in this way for product testing and Word-of-mouth creation in the early days (but if it's a mass-market product, this is a way that, even if it's early, it doesn't feel like it's going to last long. Because in this era of new things, long closed products generally will soon disappear from the public view.

Operation is king

Of course, for the grass-root, the strong operation is also the reason for its longevity. The characteristics of foreign countries determine their social sensitive hot events, compared to the domestic site has its own advantages, the purpose of the grass-Liu community is: all people aged 18 years, in compliance with the version of the premise, can freely release speech, speak freely, the community to follow the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 19th article. Whether it was the Wenzhou motor car incident, or the recent Shifang incident, the "technical discussion area" has gained more in-depth discussions than at home. Especially in the Wenzhou motor car incident, in the official repeatedly blocked media interviews, grass Liu netizens in the Forum on a large number of upload events detailed picture and text reports, in the netizen aroused a strong resonance, many netizens in the post with the most familiar with the "1024" terminology to reply and support.

Although it cannot be said to be an official operation, the incident has attracted a large number of new users. Although these topics are not so much related to their central topic, but because of freedom of speech, greater exchange of views on social hotspots has played a positive role in bringing more eyeballs to communities such as the rigid needs of the general public, and, of course, the domestic community is totally incapable of learning. But how to choose the corresponding operation method for their target users is worth learning, after all, for a community, operations in general still has important significance (watercress may be a rare exception).

Under the impact of Weibo and SNS, does the forum really have no power to fight back? At present, it is not so, compared to the new community form, the focus of the community in the topic, and Micro-bo, SNS focus on the relationship, we see the heat of the forum decline, precisely because before the forum's relationship layer began to micro-BO, SNS transfer; But for the forum, the traditional two pillars are social and resource, although social elements have been diverted, but the resource class is still difficult to reproduce on Weibo and SNS (it is hard to imagine a video exchange on a social network for a technical issue), Therefore, we also see the most popular forums are mainly resource sharing, in-depth topic discussion. In addition, the Forum published content more comprehensive, low reading threshold, and from its public characteristics, everyone can see all content, more convenient for users to find content, and microblogging users see only the content of their attention, although the forum in the content update speed and interactivity of less than meager, but compared with the huge amount of information, Constantly refresh the meager time line, the forum is easier for people to digest the space.

There is no doubt that this form of forum is already very old, although there are still some advantages, but with the development of micro-blog, SNS, the increasing substitution function, the Forum also faced with the risk of continued marginalization. The success of the grass stems to a greater extent from the positioning of its adult content, which determines its own capital to carry out a variety of institutional constraints, although this way can be achieved in the old forum system under the optimization effect, but it is a special case. In the wider field, should we abandon the forum, explore more on Weibo and SNS, or learn from the new Community model, and change the form of the aging forum? Two directions should be tried. But one thing is for sure, even if the forum survives in the future, its shape will be a huge difference from now on.

Quote a well-known comment: "The evolution of the forum can be learned from two examples: Twitter and watercress." (digression: A forum where you may be able to belong to a new form?)

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