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The question of the title was directly borrowed from a friend's monologue in the group. This sentence was uttered in the early morning when no one was speaking, with no preface and no afterword. No one replied to it, like no one saw it, and someone else started a new thread with other links shortly after.

Everyone's love-hate relationship with WeChat Moments has been going on for a long time. Some here are shown off or used as work showcases regardless of the occasion, while others are careful to maintain multiple personalities through grouping. I belong to the type who basically don’t watch Moments, but I don’t have the guts to close this function directly.

WeChat "friends" are not real friends, and "moments" are not real friends. Is there an alternative to WeChat that can help us keep in touch with our chosen "true" friends online without the distraction of more complex relationships?

The answer is: yes . Path, a social networking product that was once regarded as a strong challenger to Facebook, and which has persisted for 8 years, announced that it will be completely discontinued at the end of this year. Examining Path's life is instructive for many of us.

It was born for a true "friend circle"

In the 1990s, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, proposed the famous "Dunbar's Number" Law (Rule Of 150), which deduces from the intelligence and social activities of apes that human intelligence allows The maximum number of stable friends you have is 148, rounding up to about 150.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%82%93%E5%B7%B4%E6%95%B0 )

While on Facebook you can add a lot of users as friends, Path deliberately limits the number of your friends. When Path first launched, it limited you to adding only 50 friends, and later this limit increased to 150 following the "Dunbar number".

At the 2012 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, Path CEO Dave Morin stated:

“We want you to stay connected with the right 150 people. Once you sign up for Path, it uses information from your existing social graph to try to highlight those friends with whom you are most likely to share a profile. It also means you You can't add friends as much as you want. Once you reach the limit, you have to delete some people to add others. …the 150 people you choose to share information with won't stay the same forever. It's a lot like real life, some friends may You'll break off and new friends will enter your social circle."

( http://tech.qq.com/a/20120316/000279.htm )

Path is notable for many reasons, and its founders are one of them. Path was founded by former Facebook product manager Dave Morin and former Napster duo Dustin Mierau and Shawn Fanning. As one of the people who know Facebook's strengths and weaknesses best, Morin is taking the Path in the opposite direction of Facebook's , which has led to expectations that it will become Facebook's most formidable opponent, reenacting a duo like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Industry showdown.

According to previous media reports, Morin has been exploring a suitable number of friends after initially setting the friend limit to 50. When he saw Dunbar's paper, he also called Dunbar himself to confirm the details of the research.

( http://news.163.com/12/0427/10/803F79ID000125LI.html )

Path's default "friend" concept is far more private and narrow than Dunbar's, and its product design lets users share whether they're "asleep" or "awake," and in the early 2010s , in the most budding state of the mobile Internet, it took the lead in cooperating with sports manufacturers such as Nike to obtain and share users' body rhythms and exercise records. At the time, the meaning of these states did not stop at the simple narrative itself, but declared a naked candor, so sharing oneself with "friends" was risky.

At the same time, a key point that has to be said is that the user experience of Path is also far ahead and ahead of its era, and it even leads many latecomers, and even affects the design specifications at the operating system level. It has created custom styles including pull-to-refresh, scroll bars, dialog boxes, cards and other controls, with delicate and tactile transition animations, and a set of design languages different from the operating system, but all-encompassing.

All this makes Path seem like a product from the future. Its pursuit of the ultimate in user experience also serves the ultimate goal of social networking—because there is always risk and resistance to sharing one's private heart, so Dress up this sharing environment like a real home, so that the little minds who live in it will not panic.

It's red to envy, and it dies silently

Path maintained a very high fundraising record in its early years and interest in acquisitions by giants including Google. At its peak, the service had about 15 million users and was once valued at $500 million. value fundraising. After only a few months of research, Google offered $100 million in an attempt to buy it. All told, Path has raised a combined $55 million from investors including top Silicon Valley VCs Index, Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint.

There are many reasons, including the co-founder's luxurious background, clear product goals and strict quality control, targeting Facebook's competitive positioning, and more. But the more this is the case, the less anxious the founders are. It took more than a year for Path to release version 2.0, during which only a few image filters were released symbolically.

This type of product will either really become an immortal one day and become red and purple, or it will go all the way down and disappear. There are few examples in the technology industry, but there are few examples of the latter , including a bunch of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs acquired by Yahoo and Yahoo itself, as well as Digg, StumbleUpon and the like.

There are countless unicorns and quasi-unicorns that have challenged the status of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. When they finally die, "Internet natives" who are ignorant of them will probably jump in surprise if they hear about their financing and valuation figures in their heydays.

Unfortunately, Path has also fallen into the latter category, and it has never returned to the peak it has ever created.

Morin, the man who built Path, left his position as Facebook product manager. He used Facebook more than his contemporaries and experienced the information overload and social fatigue that plague everyone today. His sense of the problem is so urgent that it is impossible for his old employer to help him solve his troubles. Perhaps only people with such primitive impulses are really suitable for entrepreneurship.

But in the first few years of the 2010s, when social networks were still "just right" or even "not big enough" for most users, Path was solving a less urgent and serious problem. At that time, Facebook only had an advantage on the computer network, and it itself, Instagram and WhatsApp had not yet ravaged on the mobile phone. Come to think of it, people were still getting excited about games like "Happy Farm" at the time; big issues like election meddling that prompted Zuckerberg to testify before Congress were even less of a thing.

So Morin's pain wasn't shared by most social network users, until several years later, when Path was already suffocating.

Now, Facebook is flooded with "Happy Birthday" wishes automatically generated and synchronized by various third-party applications, game invitation links and messages generated by not interacting on the platform. Even if you leave a message on Facebook, you may not see it yourself. . That's not even counting the "fake news" that has been criticized by governments around the world. Path was originally designed to also allow users to sync selected portions of Path's status to Facebook for their occasional need to "broadcast" to friends, family and outsiders at the same time.

Even with Facebook being riddled with "zombies," bots, and facing an accelerating average age of users, people are counting on Facebook to fix the problems themselves; and even if those problems are never solved, they'll just put up with it. Few people will actually #deletefacebook, the cost is unbelievably high.

Path, which was intended to challenge and solve problems, didn't know much about Facebook's existence until it finally died.

It dies of user temptation and betrayal

People are too lazy, they complain, but never really want to make sacrifices and changes; people are too greedy and capricious, they don't want to stop at the needs they once said, don't want to be The demand is limited, and I want more.

Many people remember the "user research" Henry Ford did before he invented the automobile: he asked people what kind of transportation they needed, and many said they wanted a faster horse. So what if you did build a faster horse? Users will probably be further framed in the concept of "horse", constantly complaining to you that it still doesn't run fast enough, getting on and off the horse is too troublesome, and it also creates more horse manure.

Even if users have shown sworn commitments, it's best not to listen to them completely. You set the rules they want in your product truthfully, and they will feel very uncomfortable and impatient, and even take anger at your product for not doing well.

In "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", Dumbledore, the old headmaster, had to drink poison in order to obtain props. Before taking the medicine, he told Harry, who was accompanying him, to assist him, saying that he might become so miserable that he would even go back on his words, so that he could not continue to drink the medicine, but Harry's only duty was to urge him to drink it dry. . At this time, Harry was also similar to the "wrong person" duty when the Japanese samurai cut his belly to commit suicide.

A product that wants to use rules to constrain user behavior and ensure that they adhere to the original design goals is like a "wrong person" like Harry, who forces the user to do what the user promised to abide by, like forcing him to drink Common poison. However, software products, especially social networks, are not as coercive as novels and bushido.

Most of the time, the original purpose of users voluntarily using a "non-mainstream" social software is to obtain physical and mental pleasure and relaxation, but the "rigidity" of sticking to the rules and the "kneeling and licking" of changing the principle at any time seem to be inappropriate . The balance is rather difficult to grasp. In order to acquire users who can not only adhere to the principles, but also create value and revenue, I am afraid that we can only encourage students to check in like a pilgrimage like today's "knowledge payment", but Path certainly does not want to gain such users.

In Path's practice, they screened out the vast majority of users who were dissatisfied with Facebook and fled, leaving only those who were strict with self-discipline, had a clean obsession with friends, and were willing to bear the negative impact of deleting their friendship at any time. some users. As a result, Path was simply unable to reach the originally set user and profit targets, which also caused the company's own uncertainty about its development path.

In the case of no improvement for many years and no hope of profit, Path launched Path Talk, which allows merchants to run "public accounts" to promote business information, and then tried functions such as "drifting bottles", and finally it completely cancelled 150 The most iconic feature of the limit of people's friends. Path's betrayal of the past principles marked the company's overall confusion and directionlessness , but it neither helped it recover from its decline, but also violated its original intention of existence. While driving away old users, it could not attract new users.

In 2015, the main founder Morin left Path and the company was acquired by the parent company of Kakao Talk, South Korea's largest social network. Kakao bought it mainly for its remaining strengths in Indonesia, where it still has 4 million users; but Path couldn't continue to grow no matter how much it struggled, and it had to be abandoned.

Just like some other products that have been abandoned one after another, or can't be saved - QQ Pet, Renren, etc. - Path has also brought good memories to those who make full use of it, carrying the true feelings in it. . Considering that the original intention of its product design is to share the most private part of the mood in a small area, its loyal users will be hit harder when they hear the news of the outage.

But that doesn't help much. A small circle where everyone is equal like a utopia may bring short-term and beautiful illusions to those who live in it, but when the bubble of illusion bursts, these "most loyal users" should have turned the tide and rushed in. Get a little more active or something (donate to the developers?), but that's too much for them. They are more happy to see it happen, and they don't plan to help. If they leave, they won't have the slightest concern.

Path tells all developers with his own life: don't take the needs of users themselves too seriously.

In the end what you want?

Speaking of which, do you think our Facebook — that is, WeChat Moments — is still saved? Where is the next "circle of friends" with fireworks and friends?

It looks like what you need is a software that limits the number of friends to a Dunbar number to make your circle of friends look less crowded; or it looks like you want a locked diary, like a WeChat mini No. or grouping can be seen the same.

——Yes, in fact, why don’t you really use WeChat trumpet or group visibility to achieve it? These are all functions that come with the software.

So different from what it looks like, what you need is actually far more than simply reducing the number of friends . It also includes adding some friends in time when you need it temporarily, but blocking it when you don’t need it, but you still have to. Keep the right to unblock at any time. Almost every action you do desires to be regretted, to be undone, and after a few days of experiencing the simple rules of grouping or living without groups, you will soon invent another complex grouping system.

You must have seen the so-called "6 people in a girl's dormitory established 5 WeChat groups", which perfectly explains why there may be a world of difference between the originally expected functions of the software and the end-users' practical use. .

No one can really satisfy the erratic, back-and-forth needs of you, the end user, the devilish "product manager". What WeChat, Qzone, and Facebook can do is to put as many needs as possible into one product and let you choose freely.

When users can't even give an accurate definition of what is "good", whether or not to establish a more "good" circle of friends can only be solved by the users themselves.

2018.9.19

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