On the difference between traditional community and network community

Question: What are the differences between the usage scenarios (moving and not moving, stretching and not stretching) brought by the mobile Internet and the Internet to users?

What are the key elements to be grasped in the development of mobile community products?

Answer: Good question. In fact, I have been thinking about this problem for a whole year last year, but unfortunately, the conditions are limited and there is not much practice. I hope I can get more good results this year.

Say some current views:

First of all, the "sense of space" of the community will become weaker and weaker.

In fact, this difference is easily overlooked. The biggest difference between the network and the real world is the neglect of geographical attributes. In the traditional sense, space is in a three-dimensional world, and people in the community can carry out various community activities in a fixed space, such as Christians worshiping in churches, otaku watching performances and interactions at exhibitions, and so on.

In the network world, different websites and different webpages are used to simulate the real place, so that people can form their perception of cyberspace.

These cyberspace services for community activities are Internet community products, which is what we usually call online communities.

In the past, the design of online community products was largely the design of group space. The cyberspace of a community (here refers to the cyberspace of people's cognitive experience, not the cyberspace of technical level) needs to meet at least four basic conditions in order to satisfy people's cognitive habits of space:

Need to have a fixed access address or can be reached by a fixed access method;

Need a unique and independent interface design;

People can leave their own traces in space and simulate their relationship with space;

People can exert their own influence on space, and people's actions can cause some changes in space.

The more obvious these four points are, the stronger people's perception of cyberspace will be.

For example, the names of Internet products such as "Personal Space" can give people a strong recognition and conform to people's understanding of space. Because it has a fixed url and access path, and space owners and visitors can influence the space through personalized settings, posting logs, leaving messages, etc.

On the other hand, a web page like Baidu search will give people a feeling of "place" (because Baidu has its own UI), but it won't have a strong sense of space, because the information it presents is completely out of our control, and we can't feel our existence in Baidu's search page.

In other words, the function and interface design of online community products are used to define the community.

Now the mobile internet will lead to two changes, one is anytime and anywhere, and the other is anytime and anywhere.

Anytime and anywhere means that people in the community will carry out community activities, no longer limited by space, and will be more closely integrated with the offline environment, thus eliminating the strong dependence of online communities on "sense of space" in the past.

It turns out that members of traditional communities have diverse activity spaces and interactive ways. Christians can go to church or pray at their brothers and sisters' homes. Members of a bicycle club are in Beijing today and may be in Tibet tomorrow. For traditional communities, community spirit and members are the most important, but the activity space of the community is not important.

In the PC-based online community, community members usually interact in the web page where the community is located, that is, the community space. The functional design of online community space determines the interaction mode among members, and community space is often the only place for members to interact.

To put it bluntly, in the past, under the conditions of web structure and wired environment, there was no way to emphasize the "sense of space" of online communities. The mobile Internet allows people to contact at any time, and the community products of the mobile Internet will be closer to the original appearance of the community, breaking the restrictions of online community products on the community in the past and no longer relying strongly on the cyberspace of the community. For example, the host and readers of Luo Ji's thinking form a community, but the community activities of these people are

This is why I have always stressed that "community" should be understood as "community", not "community" (the word community is too strong in place space).

Second, community values will be redefined.

Groups have a great stimulating effect on people's creativity. If the community is regarded as a productive force, its contribution to high-quality content and high-quality users is almost unparalleled. As Mob said, the IQ of a group is usually lower than that of an individual, but a well-guided group can also show unexpected enthusiasm and vitality in generate.

In a community, the relationship between community spirit and members can often be a more effective incentive than material rewards. And a stable and cohesive community can also make members have long-term spiritual dependence, thus forming a strong product stickiness.

In this context, the past community products mainly have two kinds of value output:

First, high-quality content is also the most common community output, including post bar, douban, Zhihu, hornet's nest and most vertical forums.

The second is the influence of the crowd. This kind of community mainly does not produce high-quality content, but mainly produces the influence of community members on society, industry, relatives and friends. There are not many communities that play the influence output stream. The most typical ones are Meizu forum, Xiaomi forum and Cocoachina developer community. The value of these communities lies not in the number of essence posts or feedback, but in the fact that members of these communities can amplify the influence of the main products of the community (Meizu mobile phone, Xiaomi mobile phone, Cocos2dX), thus indirectly creating value.

In the past, when we said that a community was a good community, we often meant that there was good content in this community. Usually, "good content" in our eyes refers to heavy content with many words such as strategy, analysis and evaluation, which is deep, meticulous in typesetting and weak in timeliness. However, under the influence of the mobile Internet, the measurement standard of "community value" is changing-when people's interaction becomes anytime and anywhere, the value of the community will be more and more biased towards interaction rather than content quality, that is to say, in the future, we will look at whether a community is good or not, and more will look at the cohesion of the community and whether the interaction between members is frequent, and less will pay attention to content quality (who will you show the whole 20,000-word project to).

Give a vivid example: A few years ago, "Jia, your mother called you home for dinner" received more than 300,000 replies. Whether it is a main post or a reply, it is no different from spam in terms of content quality, but it is a rare post in terms of community value-although coincidence accounts for a lot of reasons, although this example did not happen in mobile community products.

Third, the ways of content production and interaction will become more diverse.

The picture below is called "My predecessor was the best"

In the past, on PC, people's communication and content production depended on keyboard typing. But in the final analysis, words are just a form of carrying information, not all.

The information input methods of mobile devices are more and more abundant, such as photos, voice, video, location information, real-time video, etc ... and more behaviors of people on mobile devices have also become content consumption. Games, movies, music, novels ... Based on the community of interest and content consumption, under the mobile Internet, people's interaction methods and content production methods will become diversified.

For example, services such as kamcord and everyplay, which realize automatic video recording and one-click uploading by users by embedding SDK, are a new way of content production, and so are the overwhelming stippling in Miiverse community.

For another example, although it is mainly aimed at PC games and video games at present, the success of twitch proves that "live broadcast" is a huge demand. Maybe this model can be copied to other fields. What will happen?

In addition, by the way, due to the anytime and anywhere characteristics of the mobile Internet, instant interaction will become more and more popular. In fact, there are many signs of this trend. For example, YY's live broadcast room, such as forum live posts, can also be regarded as a way to simulate real-time interaction. For example, in the recently popular Secret, many people are playing "Set X likes to reveal the news", which can actually be regarded as a reflection of the demand for instant interaction.

In fact, Douban film itself is a community, and the most interactive and productive content in this community is actually not film reviews, but screenshots of its stills. People record a classic moment and then reminisce and communicate. If these interactive contents are linked with the film and television drama itself, new chemical reactions may occur.

There is a lot of room for imagination in this respect. In the future, with new hardware devices (such as home cameras), there will definitely be more ways to play.

The above is the question "What differences will the mobile Internet bring?" I think the biggest difference is these three points. Most of the differences stem from these three changes (such as business model), so I won't go into details.

Finally, let's talk about the second half of the question, "the key is to grasp", or where is the biggest pit:

The biggest product difficulty in the mobile community is the lack of crowd filters.

Simply put, the core of community growth is to screen people and bring like-minded people together. In the past, even if there was a bare forum on the PC Internet, as long as the administrator carefully accumulated the content, the popularity of the forum would always explode after three years (the so-called three-year rule). The reason for this is actually very simple, but it is often overlooked-that is, forums have enough pagerank, and the accumulated content begins to be recommended by search engines, and then people who search for these contents are naturally filtered into these forums.

Most vertical forums and the largest Baidu Post Bar are so long. Douban group is special. Its main filter in the early and middle stages is Douban's book video itself, but it still depends on Baidu in the later stage.

In other words, in the past, as long as the content was exported as a value, there was basically no need to consider the problem of crowd filtering, because the search engine naturally did crowd filtering for all communities.

However, in the mobile internet ... you and I both know that we will use Baidu several times a day. If you only make a bare community product, because there is no natural flow and no flow filter, pure community products simply can't gather enough entrepreneurial users, and finally die alone.

Say some negative examples: LOBI in Japan, LINE CAFE in South Korea and Taiwan Province Province, and XXX in the United States are all lightweight traditional community products. Now close the door, get ready to close it, or struggle. In the final analysis, it is impossible to filter out users.

Say some positive examples: instagram, aunt group, Momo bar, beauty experience group, mom gang.

Did you find anything?

Instagram screened photographers through awesome filters and then became a community.

Auntie, Beauty Experience, Mama Gang, Momo ... all screen out a large number of target users through their core functions of tool attributes/social attributes, and then cultivate their own communities. Even if the product form is still primitive (still the same as the old bbs), for the community, filtering people is everything.

The key to the growth of community products is not the community products themselves, but the crowd filter.