Text | Wu Yiyi
Open AI wants to be social media, Kimi wants to be a community, and the WeChat official account is finally going to be like Zhang Xiaolong's original vision, directly opening up everyone to be able to post short content...... While AI is soaring, the classical Internet is once again exuding its damn charm.
Let's start with the circle of friends.
I found that our generation first regarded QQ Space as a circle of friends, and later Renren and Weibo were circle of friends.Later, I had a real circle of friends, but now I have completely lost my circle of friends.It doesn't seem accurate to say this generation, there may not be anything worse in age, maybe ten years old, or two or three years old.
Some people still find their friend circle after losing their friend zone, for example, there are still people who have been on Douban, there are more people on Xiaohongshu, and there are people immediately. But among us, there is a generation that has lost the circle of friends.
However, this does not prevent WeChat from remaining a digital operating system, and WeChat is also changing.
WeChat is testing a major update in grayscale: allowing every ordinary WeChat user to register their own official account and publish content directly on their mobile phone. In the past, registering and operating an Official Account usually required a computer operation or the help of the "Subscription Account Assistant" App, which had a certain threshold. After this revision, users only need to enter the "My Official Account" page in WeChat, register with one click, and publish official account articles or short content as if they were on Moments.
It seems like a simple change, but it is perceivedIt subverts the content production process of the official account, which greatly lowers the threshold for creation, making "publishing an official account" as easy as posting a circle of friends dynamics.
For a WeChat public account platform with a history of 13 years, this move is not unusual. In fact, Zhang Xiaolong has been thinking for many years that "everyone can create"vision. He once admitted that the development of the WeChat public account has gone through some detours: the original positioning of the official account is a mass sending tool that connects brands and users, not a pure media content carrier, but it has evolved into a pattern where a few people write long articles and most people can only read them.
This has led to a long-term gap in the form of "short content" on WeChat, lacking a platform for ordinary people to easily express their opinions. Zhang Xiaolong said: "You can't ask everyone to write long articles every day", WeChat needs a carrier to carry text, pictures, videos and other formsShort content.
As early as 2020 years, he envisioned adding a "non-circle of friends" public platform under the entrance of the circle of friends, allowing users to post short articles or pictures and videos, and separate them from the circle of acquaintances. Although it was shelved for a while due to the complexity of the project, the WeChat team subsequently made efforts in the field of short videos and launched a video account in 0, which partially met the needs of users for lightweight creation. However, the video account focuses on audio-visual content, and WeChat still does not fully meet the expression demands of pure text or graphic texts.
The new grayscale function of the official account is obviously a re-embrace of the original intention of "everyone can write". When the mobile terminal is available at any time, more long-tail users will become content producers. This is expected to inject a huge amount of fresh content into WeChat's huge ecosystem.
If the original idea of short content was closer to Weibo, then now, the short content of the official account is closer to the form of Xiaohongshu, that is, Little Green Book.
If all goes well, WeChat may reinvent itself as oneA content platform for everyone to createto make the leap from "connecting everything" to "inspiring everyone to express themselves".
Of course, the challenges should not be overlooked. Let a large number of ordinary users participate in the creation, the quality of content is uneven, how to ensure the exposure of valuable content through algorithms and operations?
Will the influx of a large number of UGC affect the existing content ecology and balance? WeChat needs to find a balance between encouraging creation and maintaining the user experience.
In the longer term, however, a successful move would strengthen WeChat's viability as a content platform and further cement its unassailable dominance in the social space.
What's more, corpora have become especially important in the age of AI. The content produced by people, and AIGC, is almost a chicken-and-egg relationship.Because the human knowledge base and the classical Internet have precipitated too much content, AI can learn. And if people stop producing, will the wisdom of AI continue to grow?
Of course, the AI circle is also targeting the classical Internet community.
OpenAI is developing platform-based social media similar to X (formerly Twitter). An internal prototype has been built that focuses on combining ChatGPT's image-generating capabilities and social feeds. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly privately solicited feedback on the product from some outsiders. It's unclear whether the social network will be launched as a standalone app or integrated into ChatGPT.
Some leaks describe OpenAI's vision as "an AI version of Xiaohongshu" – that is, to create a new type of community experience through the integration of AI-generated content and social sharing.
OpenAI's move could be intended to challenge Musk's X platform and social giants like Meta to compete head-on in the social media space. The deeper motivation is to obtain a steady stream of real-time user data to feed back their AI model training.
Musk's integration of the X platform with the xAI models he created (such as having the Grok model crawl X content) is attracting the attention of the industry, and OpenAI clearly wants to miss this data gold mine.
If you have your own social network, OpenAI will not only allow AI to help users create better content, but also accumulate rich conversation and interaction data for model optimization.
Of course, entering the social space is also a big challenge for OpenAI: how to cultivate a large user community from scratch, how to balance the quality of AI-generated content with real user content, and how to avoid flooding with bots and misinformation are all problems that need to be solved urgently. In addition, the already tense relationship with Musk may be further exacerbated by this - it is reported that when Musk was considering taking control of OpenAI, Altman hit back on X: "Why don't we buy Twitter for $974 billion".
Foreseeably,If OpenAI launches social media, it will face a double test of technology and public opinion.
An AI assistant that has always been ahead of the curve in features and productsSomeIt is also quietly taking the step of community.
Despite being hit hard by deepseek, Kimi's version updates are rapid.
Kimi has betaped a new "Discover" community feature, positioned to build realAI NativeA platform for AI entrepreneurs, practitioners, content creators, and tech enthusiasts.
As early as last year, the industry pointed out that in order to improve user retention, various AI tools must build interactive communities based on AI-generated content, and Kimi is now putting this idea into practice.
The Kimi community's "24h Hot Broadcaster" channel automatically aggregates AI-generated summaries of scientific and technological information. In terms of actual experience, Kimi's community is currently more similar to oneReal-time information aggregation platform。 At the top of the app, the "Discover" column brings together the latest hot events, and the content is mainly based on AI grabbing news from the whole network and generating summaries, focusing on AI, Internet, finance, science and other fields.
Kimi is also inviting someChannel numberSettle in, focusing on the output of vertical content such as science and technology, finance and economics. The average user is currently limited in what they can post – mostlyRetweet a transcript of your conversation with KimiTo the community, uploading original graphics or videos is not supported for the time being.
In-feed content is fully personalized by Kimi AI, and users can't actively search for specific users or topic channels. Despite its proximity to an information platform, one of the highlights of the Kimi community is its deep integrationAI interactive features。
Kimi is trying to put itThe AI assistant is integrated with the community forum: It not only uses AI to produce and filter content in real time, but also allows AI to act as an interactive participant, lowering the barrier to entry for users to obtain information and discussions. This model has been similarly explored abroad.
For example, Perplexity, an AI search engine in the United States, launched the "Discover" page last year, providing users with hot content aggregation in fields of interest such as technology and finance, and embedded AI Q&A interaction.
According to reports, Perplexity has even experimented with adding links to purchase products under some content and offering e-commerce delivery offers to paid members to explore monetization paths for the content community. In contrast, Kimi is not currently involved in e-commerce, but does not rule out learning from such business models in the future.
Previously, most of the products that focused on the AI content community were companion entertainment attributes, such as Character.AI or the "Hoshino" of MiniMax in China.The latter allows users to share interesting storylines with the community after talking to virtual characters, and share them with others; Its founder, Yan Junjie, bluntly said that Hoshino's "underlying design is not to chat with users, but to be a content community", in which users can create stories and worldviews, and interact, similar to an immersive interactive novel experience.
In contrast, Kimi is positioned as a chatbot with a serious Q&A type, with more emphasis on answering questions and providing instrumental help to users, and users have limited participation in content creation. As a result, the current shape of the Kimi community is closer toAI-powered knowledge communities(similar to what Perplexity does), rather than purely social networks or two-dimensional content sharing circles.
For experiments like Kimi, the focus of the industry is on whether the community contributes to product retention and commercialization. Of course, the premise is that the community ecosystem can grow healthily, and there must be enough real user interaction, and the quality of AI-generated content needs to be controlled, so that the community does not become a pure machine information stream. This remains to be tested by time and operations.
While the value of social community is obvious, it is an enduring problem from a business perspective. On the one hand, the operating community is facingUser growth and retentionChallenge: How to attract enough high-quality users to enter and continue to produce content during the cold start, and prevent user churn and community content decline when it matures. Many community-based products initially attract users with freshness, but quickly fall silent due to the lack of follow-up content or stickiness.
On the other handMonetization modelCommunity users are usually sensitive to commercial monetization, excessive advertising will erode the user experience, and relying solely on advertising revenue is difficult to support the long-term operation of the community. Patron memberships, value-added services, virtual props, and other changes to the scene also need to be built on a large and active user base to be effective, which is not easy for most communities.
At present, many community products are exploring a balance point. They realize that only whenUser value and business value are unified, so that the community can survive for a long time. For example, Xiaohongshu combines grass content with e-commerce transactions, so that users can share their lifestyles and promote product consumption, realizing a closed loop of content and commerce.
But Xiaohongshu, there is only one at present.
On the one hand, AI technology can reduce community operating costs and improve content matching efficiency. For example, the intelligent recommendation algorithm allows each user to find the posts they are interested in faster, improving retention; Natural language processing can assist in reviewing a large number of speeches, filtering illegal content, and maintaining the community atmosphere. Generative AI can also assist users in their creations and inspire more UGC output. On the other hand, AI is also creating new forms of community and business opportunities.
A symbiotic communityNew monetization models may emerge: As explored by Kimi and Perplexity above, AI can embed links to products or services based on the topics discussed by users to achieve content-to-consumption conversions. Virtual character communities such as Character.AI may also generate paid business by providing high-end customized AI image accompaniment, or creating virtual IP images for creators and selling related copyrights.
Looking at OpenAI, if its social platform is launched, it can theoretically form a linkage with ChatGPT's paid subscription - users are willing to pay a subscription fee in order to enjoy more powerful AI-assisted creation or personalization functions in the community, so as to generate income for the community in disguise.
Of course, even with the blessing of AI,The fundamentals of community commercialization are still inseparable from "people" themselves。 The real active and willing to invest time and money are still the real users in the community. Therefore, in order to make money from community products, we must first retain and retain people. This means not only innovating content and features that impress users, but also building a healthy and positive community culture that gives users a sense of belonging and participation.
Some potential breakthroughs include:Deeply cultivate vertical segmentsto provide high-value communities where professionals are willing to pay to communicate (such as paid communities in the fields of investment and healthcare);Nurturing power users and KOLs, through rewarding, sharing and other mechanisms to motivate head creators to stay on the platform to produce content, thereby attracting fan groups and bringing commercial cooperation; andCommunity IP-based and surrounding economyto extend the influence of a successful community to more diversified monetization channels such as offline events, brand co-branding, and derivative products.
Social communities aren't a quick and profitable business, but they're strategically significant——Especially in the era of AI, it is not only a carrier to meet the emotional and social needs of users, but also a soil for the combination of technology and humanity to give birth to new business models. Whether it's OpenAI's ambition to build "AI Social", or a rookie like Kimi hoping to improve user stickiness through the community, or a giant like WeChat to reshape the creative ecosystem, it's all right behind itCommunity valuesHigh level of recognition.
It is precisely because they see the irreplaceability of "people" that they invest resources to bring social back. This trend heralds that even with the ubiquity of AI,There is always a need for people to meet and interact online, and community-based products that can meet this demand are still promising.
As AI technology sweeps across industries, we are witnessing a dramatic change in the way information is produced and acquired. howeverThe undertone of social and community has always been human。 The forums, blogs, and moments of friends that were nurtured in the classical Internet era are not outdated today, but are becoming more and more precious because of the scarcity of real emotional connections.