Party three to remove Snowball Content team: UGC community completely let machine replace people?

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Fang Sanwen on Weibo response to this article: to practice Martial, brandished from the palace ...

"Guide" Snowball Finance's I stocks aggressively removed the original content team, machine algorithm completely replaced the original manual editing mechanism. On the technology of products on the road on the way to not look back on how to continue to "roll" down?

"The Internet one-stop solution to meet investor demand generally includes three aspects: communication, product community function, query, product data function, transaction, product value-added function." And Snowball chooses the community as the starting point for this solution. "The three-party article explains the Snowball's social investment website. This June, Snowball received from the morning Hing Capital, Sequoia China Fund 10 million U.S. dollars B-round investment.

The Twilight of the Gods

Information Station no content Team

July 22, Snowball Finance's U.S. stocks news site I stock online new version, the site page from the original portal to the waterfall flow type; I have links to content on the U.S. stock page that point to snowballs. I stock and Snowball is the snowball finance under the different positioning of the two products. I stocks were on the line in May 2010, and the snowball focused on investor socializing was released by the end of 2011. Snowball's early users accumulated a lot from the I U.S. stock import.

I the change of the U.S. stock page is just the appearance of this major revision. A more profound change behind this is that the I stock company, as a news site, completely abandoned its content production (including reprint and original), and the content team that originally was responsible for the I U.S. stock editing work transferred to the newly established I stocks asset management. Thereafter, the daily content update will be completely similar to the work of search engine crawler-by the snowball robot every day from the designated information site to grab the news, according to a certain number of word segmentation rules allocated under the stock. Some of these hotspots or the news that has been discussed by users will be recommended on the I stock page. In other words, the revised I stock is actually a snowball inside the U.S. stock related content aggregation.

"Let the machine replace the person, the user replaces the employee." "This is the most repeated word of the party three." Before the founding of Snowball, Fang Sanwen has served as "Southern Weekend" front page editor, to participate in the founder of the "Oriental Morning Post", as the "Southern Metropolis Daily" editorial board and vice president of NetEase, is a standard media person model. However, the implementation of the three-party product practice of Snowball is a far cry from his past rich experience in traditional media. Like snowball such drastic content production and recommendation to the user and machine to complete, in the domestic various UGC website or community is the first.

Snowballs don't push people.

If Web1.0 is an age of scarcity (which requires editors or professionals to create content), then Web2.0 is an era of information explosion, and the emergence of various UGC forms makes anyone a producer of content. And with the rapid expansion of Internet information, a major problem Web2.0: Information overload. In the Web1.0 era, the production and circulation of information need to be edited and filtered first. In the Web2.0 era, the content is "first released after Filtering", and the implementation of filtering mechanism by people into machine algorithms.

However, due to the limitations of the existing technology, personalized content recommendation based on algorithm filtering can not eliminate the problem of information overload. So before the advent of the Web3.0 completely personalized era based on semantic search, data mining and intelligent matching, many Internet products ushered in the return of editorial power, further expanded the content editing team, and increased the proportion of artificial screening. Such a situation in reading, electric business, tourism and other fields are particularly prominent.

How does the content of UGC Community products flow?

But it is undeniable that the human-centered editorial approach will inevitably face two problems:

1. Professionalism: Manual editing does not ensure that there is a higher level of professionalism than the user, and the involvement of people is equal to the content of the user's production value judgment, to a certain extent, will affect the fairness of the content choice;

2. Timeliness: Robots or reptiles can scan and crawl information on the internet without interruption day and night, but people have to rest, and the scope of attention is extremely limited compared to machines.

These two problems are particularly evident in the snowball, which is dominated by professional investors. "It is absurd to let a group of one-month editors take thousands of dollars to guide investors who can lose millions of a day." "As early as last August's Geek Park event, Fang San Wen has taken the new Oriental Muddy water short as an example of the Snowball users in the event and fermentation process of information dissemination, data translation, market analysis, such as completely automatic spontaneous behavior." This is the traditional editor, whether at the speed of transmission or professional interpretation of the difficult to match.

Authority goes down, the user stands up

Bacon said that "knowledge is power", from the point of view of technological progress, the people who master the channel of knowledge transmission really have power. As early as the Middle Ages, the power of the priest came from the right to interpret the Bible. However, after Gutenberg's printing, the public could interpret the Bible by themselves, and the priest's power was challenged. The same is true of modern society, we usually read the newspaper, watching TV, in fact, through the professionalization of the media workers and the production of editorial restructuring to be able to present. Traditional media used to exist on the basis of a channel monopoly, which has now been broken by the Internet, and anyone with insight can express their views on the Internet on an equal footing. The original pyramid-shaped discourse structure has become flattened, and opinion leaders have been set up in the high-speed information flow, and are constantly being dispelled.

In fact, in the snowball, the traditional investment analyst's authority has been challenged. In the past, the gold analysts of big-name institutions could monopolize the discourse and make investment decisions for ordinary investors, but in snowballs his views were not necessarily supported by other users. Party III himself is also a snowball in the active users, often can see this "The unknown truth of the masses" is always playing with others in the mouth battle.

"In addition to the obvious illegal crime information and spam ads, Snowball does not do any audit of content." "This is the principle that snowball follows in reviewing community content." Just as the market economy relies on the "invisible hand" to take on the main task of market regulation, the user with professional knowledge has enough judgment and consciousness to filter out the valuable information. The so-called quality content is only for the personalized needs of different users, judge whether the content of the value of the power of the user rather than authority or editor. Under the condition of full information flow based on machine algorithm, the editor who plays the role of referee gradually fades away from the field and becomes the inevitable trend of the future change of UGC website.

Where is the value of man

I U.S. stock Revocation content team is a necessary stage in the technical process of the whole snowball product. Last year, Yahoo's 30 million dollar acquisition of Automatic News Digest application Summly has been to a certain extent, the value of the proposed content through the algorithm. Editorial power has not been and will not be able to completely leave the content position before, but it is the duplication and mechanical work to the more efficient machine to complete it. In addition, UGC's content mode of production is mutually beneficial to the machine algorithm which has deviated from the referee mechanism, UGC's value mining and releasing is no longer subject to the professional level of editors, which in turn can promote the output of more quality content--human value is embodied in the creativity of product designers and content producers.