In the 20 years of social media boom, the emergence of phenomenal products like Facebook has revolutionized the way people live. However, with the loneliness of stranger socialization and the rise of short videos, the landscape of social products is undergoing profound changes. This article will explore whether there will be a super phenomenal social product in 20 years, and whether traditional social products are destined to be lonely.
In 2004, three sophomores entered Silicon Valley with their fledgling college social networking sites.
This website only works on a few college campuses. It doesn’t occupy a leading position in the market and isn’t even the first college social networking site to appear; Other companies have already launched this service, and it is more functional.
The website had only 150,000 registered users at the time and had almost no revenue. But that summer, they raised their first $500,000 in startup funding.
Less than a year later, they raised another $12.7 million.
Facebook Stories are now known all over the world.
Today, 20 years later, will there be another super phenomenal social product? Or will traditional social products be lonely?
Seeing him build a tall building, seeing him collapse?
Two days ago, I read an article called “Times have changed, the Internet no longer needs strangers to socialize”. The author is full of emotion, agreeing that stranger socialization has indeed reached a crossroads, and what I do not agree with is that the author of this article does not have an in-depth understanding of “stranger socialization”.
In fact, from the popularity at the beginning of the epidemic to the loneliness after the epidemic, the stranger social market has indeed begun to gradually disappear from the top list of non-travel apps?
Source: SensorTower
According to SensorTower’s latest list data, in April 2025, only the “rookie” SUGO and the veteran products Poppo Live and Chamet are still on the list and are still at the bottom of the list in the overseas non-travel application revenue rankings in April 2025. Instead, the rise of short video products.
Source: App Annie (data.ai, later acquired by SeneorTower)
The author will post another list of non-game app revenue list of App Annie (data.ai, later acquired by SeneorTower) in November 2021. Even if the list is different every month, the share of social products is clear at a glance.
In 2021, the author has a good friend in Alibaba Entertainment who is very sensitive to traffic, and found that the leading short video platforms in China are giving a lot of traffic subsidies to short dramas. So I invested in a few short dramas, and the return rate was basically 50%, which is still quite a considerable profit.
In 2022, the author chatted with companies and capital that make upstream short dramas, and also found the rise of short drama business. In addition, capital prefers products with large cash flow, in addition to social products, short dramas have become the best choice. At that time, the short drama market was not very mature, so the early entry of capital into the market would inevitably set off the rise of the entire industry.
Today, in 3-4 years, short dramas have become a depression in traffic and revenue.
Leap of faith
Lean Startup mentions a word called “Leap of Faith”.
This concept runs through its development logic as follows: in the absence of sufficient verification, based on deep insight into user needs and social trends, adhere to a long-term vision and invest resources, and ultimately create new value.
This philosophy is in line with the common “Leap of Faith” philosophy in Silicon Valley, which emphasizes belief-driven innovation rather than being bound by short-term data or market reactions.
There are two things that impressed investors the most about Facebook’s early growth.
One is the amount of time active users spend on the site: more than half of users visit Facebook every day.
This is an example of a business validating its value assumption – the customer discovers the value of the product.
The second impressive thing about Facebook’s early power was the speed it took over the first few college campuses.
Facebook’s growth rate is staggering: it was founded on February 4, 2004, and by the end of that month, nearly three-quarters of Harvard students were using it, and it hadn’t spent a penny on marketing and advertising.
Facebook also validated its growth hypothesis.
These two assumptions represent two of the most important “belief flyover” problems that all startups face.
However, in the past 10 years, there have been very few social products that can come close to Facebook’s size.
The author reminds me of Renren during my school days, and it didn’t take long for WeChat to completely replace the early social media era in China. The fundamental problem of Renren’s failure is not the chaotic layout of the company’s business, but the needs and experience of users.
The author has personally experienced that Renren has not been able to keep up with the needs and experience of users in product design and optimization, and what is even more outrageous is that free membership has become a fee.
The current idea is: What value can you provide by opening a membership fee model for a social media platform? In particular, the first batch of mobile Internet users have not yet settled down and have not yet gone out of campus to work. Are you borrowing from QQ in the early 2000s?
In the early days, many criticized Renren for necessarily reminiscent of Facebook, claiming that there was “no business model” and that the website could only reach the average income level based on the appraisal value of its investors.
The Facebook incident saw a resurgence of the Internet explosion era, when companies with low revenues raised large amounts of cash to pursue “eye-catching” and “rapid expansion” strategies.
Many start-ups in the Internet era design a way to make money by reselling the purchased eyeball effect to other advertisers.
In fact, those failed Internet companies are similar to middlemen, actually spending money to buy customer attention and then sell it to others.
However, Facebook uses a different growth engine, so it’s not the same as it was in the past.
The website does not burn money to attract customers, and its high usage means that it accumulates a lot of user attention every day.
It’s never a question of whether customer attention is valuable for advertisers, it’s just how much they’re willing to pay for it.
Many entrepreneurs aspire to create the next Facebook, but when they try to learn from Facebook, or the success stories of other well-known startups, they quickly get confused.
What does Facebook’s experience tell startups? Don’t charge customers early on? Or don’t spend money on marketing?
These questions cannot be answered in an abstract way; Because there are countless counterexamples to any strategy technique.
However, as I mentioned in my previous article, testing what techniques work in their unique environment by testing innovation on a small scale, and the strategic task of startups is to figure out exactly what questions to ask.
During the author’s entrepreneurial period, I made a social product specially for “rich brothers”.
The boss most wants to solve the user’s problem is the circle and resource problem, but the author randomly has questions. For the “rich brother”, circles and resources are not a problem. The biggest problem is how to solve the “feeling of emptiness”.
The author will give an example. The author has met some bosses who have had a confused “window period”, which can be understood as the period before they cannot find something they are really interested in after having a certain amount of wealth.
During this time, they can spend a lot of money on trial and error or experience, and the desire to pay is stronger than ever. For example, buying sports cars, high-end restaurants, more luxurious consumption places, etc., this social product is specially designed for this “window period”.
Although the team knew what users needed, it turned out that during the cold start, the piles of material messed up the atmosphere of the platform. For example, it is to bring in anchors who have no knowledge of “rich brothers” at all, resulting in extremely poor user experience.
During the Facebook period, it solved a wide range of problems. Looking at the present, the problem needed to be very specific and tricky. Therefore, the “leap of faith” may not necessarily be used for specific projects, but it can definitely avoid the minefield of “taking it for granted”.
Appearances do not mean that demand has decreased
“Times have changed, the Internet no longer needs strangers to socialize” also mentions a phenomenon of “light socialization” “partner culture”. Social Product Notes is an article from three years ago”Mainstream Cultures and Subcultures: What Are the Core Competitiveness of Social Products?” 》This phenomenon is explained in detail, many niche subcultures have existed for a long time, but with more and more exposure, they have entered the public eye, and finally a phenomenon that seems to be “mainstream culture” has been implemented.
Social product notes are still more inclined to believe that the core competitiveness of social products is to shape subcultures.
In addition to the logic of cultural use, technology (new gameplay) is also used.
Perhaps you have used this trick yourself: the X technology (gameplay) used before, because of its Y characteristics, won the Z market. Now our new X2 technology (gameplay), because it also has the Y feature, also allows us to win the Z2 market.
The problem with this analogy is that it obscures the truth of the “leap of faith”.
The purpose of such an analogy is to try to make the business appear less risky, mainly to persuade investors or partners.
Back to the social track. Even if the data on the market shows signs of contraction in the industry, it does not mean that demand has decreased.
“Boredom, loneliness, hormones” exist with human nature, not because of fluctuations in social product data that can verify the fluctuation of demand, but because of the deconstruction of demand and the failure to make corresponding products.
Just like the metaverse concept that was relatively popular in the past three years, in addition to the hype factor, the core problem is that there is no perfect “hardware + software” product that can meet the needs of users.
After all, the concept is a bit too grandiose, and the gap between real life and fantasy is a bit out of reach.
Including the currently popular “AI social”, this is only part of the macro fantasy.
Of course, the data of old products such as Momo and Tantan is getting worse and worse, which must be related to the general environment, followed by iterative products that do not meet the corresponding crowd.
For example, the social form of the post-00s generation has undergone earth-shaking changes, which is different from that of the post-80s and post-90s. Similarly, What about the post-10s? They grew up in a completely different environment from their parents, which is why “little genius watches” can be so popular among the post-10s, while the electronic watches bought by the post-80s and 90s are in the iWatch category, focusing on the pursuit of health and life.
When the post-10s grow up, will they still buy an iWatch watch? Will the core functions provided by iWatch change significantly at this time?
This era gives us a lot of room to think, but it also blinds us to some extent.
