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Perhaps the real wealth is the friends we have made along the way.

Divine Translation Bureau is a compilation team under 36Kr, focusing on science and technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on introducing new technologies, new ideas and new trends from abroad.

Editor's note: Why are there so many chaos in Western social media such as Facebook and Twitter? What lessons should the next wave of social networking start-ups learn? Most of the most famous western social applications choose to combine social graphs with dynamic messages. A product manager believes that using social maps to generate interest maps is the original sin of western social media. The article comes from compilation and space, and we publish it in three parts. This is the third part.

Image source: Pixabay

Focus on:

Instagram will start showing users the contents of accounts they don't care about.

Some applications use some form of theme or content selector.

Many social networks have no special design considerations when building maps.

The key point is to think about which type of social graph can provide the best user experience in the long run.

In fact, the real wealth is the friends we have made along the way.

This is the fundamental problem of western social networks: to die, not to die.

This is the fundamental problem of western social networks: to die, not to die.

Recently, Instagram announced that it will start showing users the contents of accounts they don't care about. In many ways, what we see from Instagram can be regarded as

As far as possible, compromise to the superiority of pure entertainment buildings in Tik Tok.

Some applications use some form of theme or content selector. Tell us what kind of music or movies you like. What news topics are you interested in? Then they will try.

Use machine learning and signals from the whole user group to provide relevant dynamic messages.

The effect of this practice varies greatly. Why can Spotify generate such a good playlist from a song, but its podcast recommendation feels ordinary? Why does Netflix's recommendation still feel common after spending years and millions of dollars on research? And why it doesn't really matter? Why are books recommended by Amazon more reliable, but articles recommended by news websites feel casual? If you want to know why some content recommendations are much better than others, you have to use an article alone, because this topic is too complicated.

However, the focus of this paper is map design, and the main point we emphasize is that things like content selectors should be significantly away from social maps. Twitter allows users to pay attention to accounts and topics at the same time, which can be seen as a half-step attempt to map pure interests.

This doesn't mean that apps can't become more interesting if they are socialized, nor does it mean that people won't share things that everyone is interested in with people they know. We all care about the interests of ourselves and the people around us.

When the interests of both sides overlap, the effect will be better.

. It's just that after we have used the current social app for more than ten years, there are enough cases to illustrate this point, that is, the completely relevant assumption is flawed.

The second thing to consider is what kind of interaction the app will develop in the long run. Is it one-on-one interaction or broadcast to a large audience? How many users do you want to consume and create? What kind of atlas is best for your app? Is it a map of people you know in real life? Or through a map connecting strangers with common interests? Or a mixture of the two? Is your app for people from the same company or organization? Will interaction cross cultures and national boundaries, or is it best to divide it into different maps according to different geographical areas?

The next generation social product team can and should be more forward-looking and think about which type of social graph can provide the best user experience in the long run.

I'm not sure about the answer, but based on the history I have heard, I think.

When building maps as an exercise, many social networks have no special design considerations.

. This makes atlas design an exercise, facing more open questions than getting answers. To some extent, Facebook was originally developed only for Harvard students, which may have happened to impose some useful map design restrictions.

Unlike some types of design, atlas design itself is not suitable for prototype design. Social network is a complex adaptive system at least to some extent, so it is difficult to prototype what kind of interaction will happen when the graph reaches a certain scale.

However, although the traditional complex adaptive system is so complicated that all predictions are futile, social networks are different in two aspects.

First, human nature is consistent. Second, we have many very large-scale social networks to learn from.

. These are a large number of real-world test cases that can be used to illustrate what happens when you make certain choices in map design.

They also exist in many markets around the world. This makes it possible to study different path dependence, especially when comparing the unique cultural and market conditions between China and the United States. Although the background is different, problems like spraying seem to be widespread, which shows that some effective potential mechanisms are at work.

Once we grasp the clue of atlas design, we can dig many rabbit holes. If the contact person is a complete stranger, how to build enough trust? If the backbone of the app is dynamic messages, do these messages have to be extracted from stories published by accounts that users pay attention to? Do I have to choose a candidate from these customers? Is dynamic messaging the right framework for healthy interaction between users?

Who should consider the problem of atlas design? When should I think about it? For example, map design should provide information for developing team strategy. The growth team should not be regarded as a rogue team, thinking that its only job is to expand the map in every possible direction. They need to know what is good map growth and what is harmful map growth, so that they can formulate strategies that are more in line with the long-term vision.

Recently, Tik Tok began to push me to establish more contacts with people I know in the real world. I was prompted by them to pay attention to people I might know. Now when I share videos with people, I often get a notice telling me that they have watched the videos I shared. These notifications are usually the only way for me to know that they have a Tik Tok account and their username.

So far, I like Tik Tok very much, and I can see interesting content without paying attention to anyone I know in real life. Perhaps Tik Tok is trying to make its video sharing endogenous to the application itself. But obviously, so far, I think we should be more cautious about making any changes to the map of any social product. Most people I know don't do Tik Tok themselves, so paying attention to these people won't have much influence on my recommendation page. For young people, the proportion of users making ikTok themselves is higher, so it may be more meaningful to pay attention to each other.

On the other hand, as long as any app has a default public map structure, it will exert the innate judgment impulse of human beings. Wait, what accounts does this person I know care about in Tik Tok? ! Oh dear.

Should Tik Tok encourage users to copy real-world social graphs? This answer will not die. The reason why I want to raise this question is just to show that atlas design is a subject that needs more in-depth thinking. As the name implies, it can adopt a certain design.

The word "attention" is very appropriate. We are concerned about who can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. First, you build your own map, and then your map in turn shapes you. A large number of studies show that human beings tend to have the same rhythm as those who spend the longest time together. Nabal Ravicante, a character in silicon valley legend, has a very popular theory of five chimpanzees. This theory says that in the field of zoology, you can accurately predict the mood and behavior of a chimpanzee by investigating which five chimpanzees are playing.

The social media version of this theory is that we can predict the behavior of any user on the application, whether it is Facebook news or Twitter timeline or other structures, through who users care about, who cares about users and the "space" where they are forced to interact with these people. We all know that some people are the worst of themselves on social media. Basically, due to the wrong prediction, we would think that they were born bad, but we didn't expect that they might just react to the environment and stimulation.

Humans are not chimpanzees, and we can often play the role of members in dozens of different social groups at the same time. Reed's law predicts that the utility of the network will increase exponentially, because not only everyone in the network can connect with all other nodes, but also the number of possible subgroups of the network can reach 2 N-N- 1, where n is the number of people in the network.

But whether social applications allow such subgroups to form easily is a design problem. Integrated dynamic news often forces everyone to enter a larger subgroup, but this scale is not conducive to healthy interaction. Although each user will see different Twitter timeline or different Facebook dynamic messages, it will still give people the illusion that this is a large public place. Because anyone can see what you post, you should also act like everyone else.

In contrast, chat applications usually allow users to form their own most relevant subgroups. FacebookGroups are more flexible than dynamic messaging. People are grouped, so social applications should flexibly deal with their various communication privacy needs.

Not surprisingly, many technology companies suddenly found themselves dealing with all kinds of employee riots shortly after installing Slack. Once the communication topology of any group is reconnected, it is changing the dynamics among members. Slack's public channel, as a public square within the company, allows more employees to understand each other's ideas. This may lead employees to find ideas shared by others, such as having reservations about the company's specific policies. Originally, they thought that only they thought so, but now they have found like-minded people. In the past, we saw that many companies seemed to be calm, but in fact, it was largely because of the inherent privacy of e-mail, a communication technology, which covered up the turbulent undercurrent.

In many ways, compared with the early social media, map design is more important to many western social media now, which is inevitable. In the early days of the Internet, there were few or no public social maps. In most cases, our atlas is limited to the email address we know and the user name of someone in our favorite newsgroup. In the early days of the Internet, the discovery of every new online connection seems to reveal an extremely exciting secret, which is difficult to explain for the generation who grew up with the Internet. At that time, if you only knew each other's name, it was very difficult to track this person online.

Nowadays, we have enough ways to contact almost anyone in the world. When I can access anyone in a dozen ways with my smartphone and the Internet, it is almost unnecessary to add someone to my address book.

In this world, finding people online has become a commodity, and the better skill is to contact the right people in the right environment. I have more than a dozen chat applications installed in my mobile phone, and they all look similar. Although I discuss map design here mainly for defense-that is, thinking about how to avoid mistakes in map design-the positive view is to actively use map design. How can we construct a unique atlas so that its structure can absorb valuable and, more importantly, unique wisdom?

LinkedIn is probably the Silicon Valley social application that people like to complain about most. Although many complaints are justified, the company's huge market value proves the value of its atlas. It turns out that if you draw a career map, not only today, but also for a long time in the past and organizational dimensions, recruiters will spend a lot of money to turn it upside down.

As for all the arguments about whether our current social network is beneficial to society, I prefer to pay attention to the potential that we have not realized yet. Yes, we have the miracle of Wikipedia, yes, but aren't there more types of large-scale cooperation that can be achieved?

Every week or so, I will be recommended to a great person or an account I have never heard of, which surprises me. The social network itself did not promote these recommendations, which did not discourage me, but made me less sad. Ten years later, today's social map looks like a blunt object, and the configuration is too primitive.

Looking back on that decade, we will also see how many great people we met at the right time and under the right background, and realize that real wealth is the friends we made along the way.

Translator: Bossi.