Why did Renren die? What did you do wrong?

The first sin: the quality of the product team is too poor.

What is the most criticized feature on Renren.com?

There is no doubt that it must be "today in the past". This function will give you a place in the lower right corner of each user to view the photos sent by friends in the past and today. The original logic of this function was very good, helping users find friends they have not contacted for a long time, and at the same time, it is possible to recall the stormy or tense past. But as a logical person, what would you do if you saw your friend in embarrassment a few years ago? To laugh at?

Don’t be ridiculous, the first thing you should do is delete the photos in your album. After removing this feature, I deleted all the photos related to me in the Renren photo album and never uploaded them again. In fact, after the launch of this function, it has become apparent that fewer and fewer people are uploading photos, and the photos you see every day are the content of zombie users who have stopped uploading for a long time.

The most powerful case I have ever seen about this function is when a girl accidentally saw her boyfriend’s “Today in the Past” on Renren showing ambiguous photos of his ex-girlfriend and him... after that Things are about to be graded on a large scale.

The reason why I think the product team is poor is not actually because they made this feature. After all, Internet products in this era are advancing through trial and error, but what is outrageous is that this feature that has been eliminated has always been It has been on the website for a long, long time... similar products that were criticized to the point of collapse include Renren's Little Secretary, which has been sending all kinds of junk messages to users. What forced me to give up using Renren was the reminder that Little Secretary went crazy every day. I said, "Come and use the beep." And in fact, from 2012 to 2014, the entire Renren network made almost no positive changes. As a user, the biggest feeling is that the entire technical team of Renren has been in a state of paralysis in the past two years. In my memory, the employees of Renren who I came into contact with were in a state of "autopilot" in this Internet company that was not actually too big. However, in our impression, this was something that only a company like PetroChina could do. .

In 2012 and 2013, I contacted several teams from Renren because of work issues. I won’t talk about the fact that the managers clearly wanted kickbacks. I just said that I occasionally asked about their products at that time. Manager, ask him if it’s okay if your product hasn’t been iterated yet? I still remember his answer to me, "I'll just use it anyway if the boss doesn't tell me."

The biggest joke I've seen this year is that a once platform-level social network company turned its app into a beautiful one. Taken and shared photos.

The second sin: the quality of the operation team is too poor.

The operation of Renren is almost the most appalling that I have ever seen in the entire Internet circle.

Some netizens summarized the eight common customs of Renren, which are:

Common sense of life, makeup skills, little secrets of the twelve zodiac signs;

Don’t regret success if you don’t watch it Record, a complete collection of essays and IELTS questions.

Portal of love quotes, a story about men silently crying and women crying;

Which sentence did you feel heartbroken after reading? But I am not Chinese.

It is possible that the operation team of Renren has a far-sighted vision, because most domestic social networking sites will eventually be filled with these contents. However, any website filled with these contents will definitely not survive. It’s been too long, or it’s been far away from the highlight moment. Because first, the audience of this information is too wide, and its value to individuals is very low, which can easily cause users’ Timline signal-to-noise ratio to be too low. Second, these contents are too repetitive on various websites and lack attraction. Let’s see what the editors of Renren.com have done?

These eight customs are recommended crazily in popular websites, and they have been recommended with enthusiasm for several years. No matter how good the content is, it will be diluted by these things, and in the end it will make you lose your temper and really don’t want to engage in it.

Users like to watch these, but it does not mean that watching these all the time will satisfy the needs of users. Just like many products in supermarkets that no one buys at all, they still need to be displayed on the shelves.

The third sin: Failure in transformation and positioning.

In July 2009, Chen Yizhou was not satisfied with being just a social networking site for students. He changed the school network to Renren, and the user group began to target more public groups. Anyone who knows the history of Renren should know that this is a rebirth of Renren. The words "Renren" should be Chen Yizhou's pain for many years.

The transition from intramural to everyone was doomed from the start.

The idea of ??transformation is as clear as the transformation of Facebook. After some people graduate and go out of school, because of the leadership of these people, everyone can become a large and comprehensive social network product, but everyone has ignored three problems. :

1. China, which was more professional at that time, already had Kaixin.com, and it was definitely not easy for people to jump over from Kaixin.com. (Of course, the final winner is Weibo, which has stronger execution capabilities.)

2. On the one hand, it is considering making products with a wider audience, while on the other hand, it is constantly promoting younger content and products that are clearly targeted at student groups. game.

3. The lack of functional improvements for campus groups indirectly hurts old users who are student groups. The result is that it neither attracts a wider range of users in society, but also loses the student group on which it relies for survival.

The fourth sin: the complete failure of mobility.

1. The mobile strategy of Renren was not too early, and it encountered two very big problems at the beginning: The school started plagiarizing Facebook, but as users used the entire website The logic and user habits are obviously different from Facebook. In this case, Renren’s App directly copied Facebook, and the result was an almost horribly poor user experience.

2. In the later period, several major updates saved a little face, but unfortunately it still lacked mobile pedigree, and the idea was still to swarm Web functions into the App (in fact, for a long time, Facebook It's the same situation, so I think this period is actually just drawing on Facebook's ideas, but Facebook is the winner in terms of product completion, at least there are not as many bugs as Renren).

To sum up, a series of illogical decisions coupled with extremely low execution capabilities have caused Renren’s current predicament, as if it has been walking through a maze with no exit.