Since the outbreak of the epidemic, home isolation measures have been taken all over the world, forcing people's social ways to concentrate on the Internet, leading to a large-scale and rapid growth of users of online social applications. Tinder users, a world-renowned social application, made 3 billion swipes worldwide at the end of March, setting a record for the application in a single day. In Britain, from mid-February to the end of March, Tinder's daily conversations increased by 12%. In fact, whether it is Tinder, CatchU and Connected2 abroad, or Soul, Jim and Exploration in China, there are growth peaks.
The author has noticed that as a new social force in recent two years, Soul, which socializes with the soul, has attracted the favor of many young users. A post-95 female friend was once fascinated by Soul and threatened to find her soul mate on it. However, it didn't take long for Soul to be uninstalled from the mobile phone. The reason seems to be quite typical: where there are soul mates, except those who want your money, everyone else wants to sleep with you.
Judging from the content of users' tweets on social media, uninstalling Soul basically points to the same point: the higher your expectations, the more disappointed the result may be. As a social product of strangers, the soul can not only escape the social laws of strangers, but also fall into its own "soul trap".
First, the double paradox of the soul.
In the social field, in addition to the two ancient social products, WeChat and QQ, there will always be new forces in the social field of strangers.
Why do strangers' social behaviors emerge endlessly? Besides the original physiological needs, there are deeper reasons. John suler, a professor of psychology at Reed University in New Jersey, said: "We need a public self to guide the social world of family, friends, peers and colleagues." "But we also need an internal space of private self, where we can reflect on our thoughts and feelings without external influence, and where we can maintain our psychology."
The social products of strangers just meet this psychological need. Here, there are no familiar friends, let go of self-defense, go their own way, and look forward to finding their ideal contacts.
In the field of social products, based on the social relationship chain of acquaintances, no one can shake the status of WeChat and QQ. However, in the social field of non-acquaintances, Soul, which fought its way out from the Red Sea, has experienced rapid development and fallen behind. Now, it seems that it can't escape the social law of strangers-the more value a stranger social application creates for its users, the more users will lose. In other words, after successfully matching two users' appointments, they will run away from the product.
According to the report released by QuestMobile, Soul had nearly 10 million active users in September of 20 19. However, judging from the latest iResearch data, Soul's performance is not optimistic. In the past year, the number of active users was only 5 million. Moreover, the average monthly usage time in the past year was only 15 minutes, and the user's stickiness was low.
What's more, just like Soul, he has to face the "soul trap". This is a major flaw in the positioning of Soul products. Success is also a soul mate, and failure is also a soul mate. The fundamental reason is that the community attribute of the soul focuses on the surface, rather than the really important content in the relationship of friendship, commitment and value. The higher the expectation of soul socialization, the greater the loss. Thereby accelerating the loss of users.
Soul trap is the fatal weakness of soul growth.
Second, the product experience from the perspective of men
On the whole, Soul is similar to foreign products such as CatchU, Connected2 and Bumble. Soul is a product based on artificial intelligence technology, with audio and video as the core, and matching friends through subjective dimensions such as personality, interest, and three views, as well as UGC content. The initial intention is to find a soul mate.
Because of the product design, the product experience is more friendly to female users. So Soul has won more female users. Female users account for 55.54%, which is significantly higher than that of male users (44.46%). On Soul, there are five ways for a user to make friends with strangers: soul matching, group chat queuing, voice matching, face Gini matching and love bell. In addition, you can also socialize passively through content and private chat.
After chatting with friends and personal testing, talk about the objective problems of this product:
1, voice chat to the extreme
There is a lot of feedback from soul users on social media. "Voice chat is simply the most embarrassing setting! No one! " ? A netizen named "Rachel Xiaopang" described the first day of ecstasy like this: "The first person who came up to chat asked for photos and collapsed; Inexplicably entered the voice chat, and the chat collapsed for a minute. That kind of beauty does not exist for me. "
A rough guy like me, no one asks me for photos, but Soul will actively recommend the opportunity to chat. I talked a few times, too, and it was awkward. Although I am engaged in the Internet, when I want to talk about other topics, such as the appreciation of ancient books, there is really no topic to talk about.
On Zhihu, there are some strategies about how to chat without embarrassment, such as how to chat for three minutes without embarrassment. How can the opening of soul voice chat alleviate embarrassment? Soul, how to play without embarrassment? How does the soul find a topic to chat with? In fact, these strategies also show that this phenomenon is widespread from the side.
2. The sense of loss is multiplied.
As mentioned above, the "Soul trap" of Soul is precisely because the appeal that the product delivers to users is to "help you find your soul mate", so users' expectations when deciding to use SOUL will be quite high. From the user's point of view, when the user believes that there is a soul mate or something, it will make the user feel that the most ideal state is that he and the other person are perfectly combined in all dimensions. If they are not given unnecessary extra expectations, their relationship will be difficult. The soul is like this. In terms of probability, the probability of meeting a soul mate is extremely low, and the user's sense of loss will increase exponentially, which naturally leads to a higher user turnover rate.
3. Become more bereaved mentally.
A study by the University of North Texas found that strangers' social products make users focus on the surface, rather than what is really important in online dating relationships. This is reflected in Soul's contradictory behavior towards users. From the point of product design, Soul is friendly to female users. If female users don't show any attractive behavior in Soul, it may be difficult to attract the opposite sex. However, if you want to show more attractive behavior than you want, it will destroy your self-esteem and make your spirit more painful. Of course, this question varies from person to person, and some people may be like a duck to water.
Third, the external difficulties of the soul
Open the home page of Soul, and you can see that the number of real-time online users is basically around five or six million (more in line with the data of iResearch). Regardless of whether this data has moisture or not, Soul, as a new star in the social field of strangers, has a good momentum. No, the problems and challenges faced by Soul are not small. Earlier, we talked about the product defects of Soul. Next, let's take a look at the internal and external challenges encountered by Soul.
1, because of soft pornography, was investigated and removed by the Internet Office.
From June 2065438 to June 2009, the National Network Information Office, together with relevant departments, severely cracked down on the use of the Internet to spread obscene pornography and "soft pornography" and severely investigated and dealt with a number of illegal website platforms. This includes the soul. But to make matters worse, in order to crack down on competing products, Soul's partners deliberately spread harmful information about pornographic violations on their opponents' apps, and then made malicious reports, resulting in heavy losses when their opponents' apps were removed from the shelves. Eventually, the incident broke out, and the relevant personnel were arrested by the procuratorate on suspicion of damaging business reputation and commodity reputation. I have to admire such a "Sao operation", and as a result, I will harm others and myself.
On the issue of pornography, Soul's censorship mechanism seems to have failed again. Many netizens said: "The main reason is that there are too many dummies in this software, and there are countless stolen pictures, songs, videos and words, and some even cheat money, but the government has never cracked down on these phenomena, and the censorship system is also very problematic, often giving some stolen content a top."
?
2, fraudsters gather and become an Internet love slaughterhouse.
Soul, like some social platforms, has inevitably become a gathering place for fraudsters. It is particularly noteworthy that because of the voice and video chat function, fraudsters can easily gain the trust of the victims, and the probability of successful fraud is higher.
In early July, China Youth Daily reported a story called "Gentle Trap", in which two victims met their beautiful online girlfriends through their souls. In addition to daily chat, there is also voice chat. In the process of communication, online girlfriends lure victims to buy illegal lottery tickets, and illegal lottery platforms are the same. After solving the case, the police found that this was an organized professional collective fraud.
The two victims mentioned just now are male users, and the loss amount is tens of thousands. In contrast, female users on Soul have suffered more, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions.
In Baidu Post Bar, the victim directly reported the "gifted scholar and beautiful woman" liar on Soul.
3. "Deterioration" of products is resisted by users.
Any dating platform that is not for the purpose of charging is a rogue! For Soul, the payment model is also the only way. However, compared with other strangers' social products, Soul users seem to be cleaner and tend to reject the purity and charging function of the platform.
Soul socialization has become money socialization. In the words of old users, it is called "not a smell."
Take voice call as an example. Chatting with the other party for more than 4 minutes, if you want to continue chatting, you have to constantly recharge and extend the call time. Compared with the monthly payment model, Soul's charging method is more like boiling frogs in warm water, which makes users unconsciously fall into it. The key point is that Soul develops differentiated VIP privileges based on the logic of soul matching, and the fees are still the highest.
Due to dissatisfaction with high fees and community purity, soul users once accelerated the loss.
Write at the end:
For soul users, choosing soul socialization or money socialization may always be a difficult multiple-choice question that puzzles them. If you can socialize your soul through money, it's not bad. Just "one in a million interesting souls", I don't know how much it will cost to find a soul mate. For Soul itself, how to solve the contradiction between the continuous weakening of community atmosphere and the high expectations of users may directly affect the future direction of products.