If you want to enter the Chinese platform, they have a censorship mechanism. You can even find some on the Internet. If you post an article, it will tell you whether you have hit certain keywords. This is a metaphysics. So if The first thing you need to do when doing Xiaohongshu is to find out that they censor this matter and the censorship is very strict . I even had dinner with officials from their united front unit. This was what my former classmates told my friends. You young people don’t care about money. I told him that China is very powerful and they didn’t seem to buy it. Later I told him what do you want to do now? He said that idol stars seemed to have some head start. Hello everyone, I am Zhiqi welcome back to our mysterious career reveal. Today we are honored to invite Nick. He is an algorithm engineer. He joined Xiaohongshu 10 years ago during the Chinese startup chaos and became an initial employee. Following Xiaohongshu all the way to become China's social giant, we will talk a lot in this episode , perhaps such as why Xiaohongshu dominates the female market, is it really regarded as a tool of united front? In addition, we will also talk about everyone's calculations. For some curiosity about the method, we ask Nick to briefly introduce himself to our audience. Hello everyone, I am Nick. I am an algorithm engineer who has worked at Xiaohongshu for more than 4 years. I am very happy to be invited by Zhiqi today. Well, before we start. Let's start with some business service time. First of all, I want to ask Nick why he wanted to develop in China. Because I was doing software and algorithm-related work. When I graduated, I saw all my classmates and seniors. They all went to TSMC and they were all doing hardware-related things . At that time, I had no choice . You could either stay in Taiwan and live a comfortable life, or you could go to the United States and live a very comfortable life. But at that time, China’s Internet When I got up, I thought, let’s take a gamble and try it. Let’s see how old or how many years you were at that time. You were 23 years old now, and you are probably 34 years old now. 12 years ago , because I came into contact with the Internet very early at that time, so I I would read some articles and find that Silicon Valley seems to be a place where young people can go out and start companies , and it seems that young people can also get a lot of money. I was very envious of this at that time, so I went to China because of this. At that time, Taiwan was basically Everyone worked very hard, but at that time, when you set your sights on China, you will find that getting money is called normal and not being able to get money means that you have a problem, but Taiwan is the other way around. At that time, how crazy was it? There were many venture capitals. Maybe you can’t understand it or something. In short, at that time, everyone couldn’t understand it. Even China didn’t know what the Internet would be like in the future. So I invested 2 million yuan in each project. If I invested one in 100, I would (earn) ) is back, yes
, as long as it is 101 times, it is back , and to be honest, if they invest very early, 100 times is very simple. Just like Xiaohongshu, when it got the first venture capital at the earliest stage The fund was only 1 million U.S. dollars , but later its valuation has now reached tens of billions of U.S. dollars. Yes , it basically jumped hundreds of times. At that time, how fierce was the competition in China's new innovation community ? Basically, everyone was wondering What I have to do if I want to survive is to recruit as many engineers as possible today. These engineers will stay up late and work overtime desperately. So at that time, most engineers did not have the concept of taking a vacation . And once the young people at that time entered this Starting a start-up company is like being on a stimulant because he will know that a company has successfully gone public before or even raised the next round of financing. He may be able to cross the entire social class and can buy a house that he couldn't afford in an instant. They are building a house , so they are all working desperately to do it. Basically, they get off work at 10 o'clock very early. Everyone will work until the early morning. Everyone is working desperately to do it. At that time, China may have many, many rockets , and each one is preparing to take off . Then you are Why did I choose to say that I wanted Xiaohongshu? I actually talked to several companies at that time, but at that time, for example, when I interviewed Xiaohongshu , for example, the CTO or CEO, I would interview them and they would feel that they were actually quite sincere because I At that time, when I asked the CEO, I said that if the company I worked for before was either acquired or collapsed, what would happen to this company ? He said, "I don't know." What he meant was that everything has risks. What can we do? What we do is to minimize the risk. You will feel that this person is very sincere and he has not bluffed you. So you just think it’s okay. Because I think it should be very confusing in the early stage of a new venture. But at any moment, I feel It seemed like it would be great . I seemed to have made the right bet. I think that moment was when you went to take the subway one day and found all the little girls skating , and then you thought what was wrong with the world . Also, in the beginning, I remember that every day There were only 600,000-700,000 people using the app. Many of them in Taiwan were not even among the top 100 in China at that time. At that time, it really gradually increased from 600,000-700,000 to 7-8 million to 10 million to 20 million. At that time, the feeling was very different. At the beginning, when I watched it keep growing, it was actually quite refreshing, quite refreshing, and it would grow. Morphine kept going crazy, which was a very manic state for almost everyone. Because of that It's growing too fast. It's not like in Taiwan. It can double in one year. It
can't increase by more than 10 times in that year. OK , there should be some failures in this process . If you think you will lose it, there will be no success. We had a lot of people and we had more and more users at that time. We found that if we were to be an e-commerce company, would it be better for us to open offline stores ? Then it would fail - and then it would be - this is completely different logic. Then we want to say that we have so many Traffic , it seems that we can make more money by doing our own brand. If we do it to death, what do you think is the most blind thing here? The most blind thing is that for a while, our boss said that we had a lot of female users at that time , probably close to 90%. He said no. In this market, we must do something about men. Because half of the world is men, he worked very hard to suppress everyone and said that we are going to be men today. In the end, we worked for half a year and gathered many people in the team to do it. The final conclusion was that it was done. It’s not very good. Indeed, there will be more men, but in the end, they are all gay . We were too early to be men at that time. It’s stupid to think about it now . For example, let’s find some basketball players to settle in. Otherwise, we want to do some 3C. Evaluation type and then select men in advertising As a result, we later discovered that if you don’t have enough of these things, people will still not want to see them when they come in. So in the end, men will only do two things when they come in. One is if you say you are gay or you like dressing up very much, he will go. After looking at skin care products , others come in to see girls in bikinis, yes
, but those who like to see girls in bikinis have a low degree of adhesion. He may only visit her once a week. In this way, Xiaohongshu is increasing users or overall. Is there any strategy for user stickiness ? Because we all divide users into many groups. For example, we have tens of millions of users. They come in every day to show you different things. Ultimately, we hope that users will come again the next day. So this indicator is called retention in the Internet circle. If you come today, will you come tomorrow ? Or will the people who come today come next week? We will look at this indicator in all experiments , so all engineers are involved in product design. We will do A/B testing on people, divide them into two groups and see if their future retention has become better. Then we will do a lot of things here. If a new user comes in today, we will know that as long as you If you like more than 3 times, the probability that you will come tomorrow is very, very high, so you will set the mechanism so that you have to reach at least 3 pairs , and then you will find that if you are a new user, we will encourage you to click If you like it, we will push you some content that you like more. Even when you are a new user and come in, we will first select some very popular content and push it to you . Cats, dogs, bikinis, beauties , that ’s right. Things are very safe , but if you click on our site, we can roughly know whether you are a male or a female , or if you filled it in randomly , we can know your user preferences and then make more accurate recommendations . Things are actually very hidden, and the system will record them, but the average audience doesn’t know. In fact, many of them , you may think that likes or comments are very important interactions, which means you really have to move your fingers . Have you ever thought about it? It means you click on this article, how long have you browsed it, how many times have you swiped your finger in it , and then there will be pictures that can be swiped, right? IG also has you swiped a few pictures. All these things are monitoring you every minute and every second. We can also monitor preferences. That is to say , when you were browsing IG today, how long did you stay on this post and this article ? Those things are very important signals. How to capture the line of sight is actually very simple , because it is not One card at a time? When
you enter the card, it will be placed in the middle of the screen for as long as it stays there. Or it will be on that screen for as long as it appears. If you don’t like it, you can just swipe it out. Right . On the video, we will also check to see if you have finished watching it, whether you have liked it , or whether you have watched a few seconds of it, or whether you have seen that crucial frame or clip. Everything is under our control. Are any of them so fierce and true ? You think it is impossible for ordinary people to think of this. Of course, we are actually Tracking, and it is very, very important. In fact, it is quite powerful. Your mobile phone model and your IP address are actually these. Everything will leak your every move. For example, Zhiqi, you are here in the office. You just need to connect to WiFi . Are the IPs you use when going out the same ? In the system, like, like, like , you may all see the same thing . If you push something that Zhiqi has clicked to your other assistants, they may win, and he will think that this thing is easy to appear in your discussion space, right? He may think that Zhiqi has mentioned this matter, why should I immediately Open Xiaohongshu or IG and you will see it is actually like this. You will think that IP is nothing, but it actually reveals that you are a group of people. This is very scary . And if we went to a restaurant today , Even its WiFi actually reveals a lot about your consumption possibilities, your consumption level, etc. In addition, which WiFi you have connected to and your IP can be used to estimate your approximate geographical location, and I can take you all there. By stringing together the past places, you can draw a picture of what kind of person you are and where you will appear . In this way, we already know a lot about how to understand a user from an algorithmic perspective. If he has a creator today, he wants to To start living on Xiaohongshu, does he have any special thinking or concepts that can help him operate on it? From an algorithmic point of view, many people will ask me, and I will say that Xiaohongshu has created something before you started. In fact, there is YouTube and IG as well. In fact, there are many things in it. The first thing is that you understand everything in it first. But for experienced creators, there is no need to read those things. It will teach you what the title should be, how to write a good cover, and not draw some things that are or are not. These things are very basic , but once you want to enter the Chinese platform, they will have a censorship mechanism. OK, are they all manual? I remember semi -manual. It’s part machine and part manual , so you can even find some articles on the Internet or clips from videos you’ve recorded, and it will tell you whether you hit certain keywords . Many times if you hit the keyword, you can still pass the review, but you will have no traffic. This is a metaphysics. For example, Xiaohongshu, for a while , the Cyberspace Administration of China (Internet Information Office) felt that the Internet The platform should not have anything that is too naked. Bikini will become a banned word that will reduce traffic, because we need to protect ourselves from platform personnel. Maybe bikinis and underwear cannot be released for you . We all hope that there will be less content in this category, so if we do The first thing about Xiaohongshu is that you have to find out that they have censorship and the censorship is very strict. It’s a bit like if you want to move to that country, you have to first find out what the laws of that country are, right ? The first thing and the second thing are actually that all creators will face a problem, that is, if you are a Taiwanese creator today, when you enter, you must choose topics that are not regional. For example, well, I still have Taiwanese creators doing Taiwan tourism. If you do Taiwan tourism and the Chinese people can't come to Taiwan, will they feel sad if you do it? That is, you directly limit your own audience. You want to Open it up. If we go back to the algorithm, many people will want to Hack the algorithm . Or if I can know something about the algorithm, then I can live a better life. In fact, it won’t. The reason is because the algorithm also goes It reflects the user's preference , so you have to turn it around , which means that what you want to obtain is the user's preference. So I have seen many excellent creators make several versions of the cover for a video . I first uploaded the content of this version to find out . If the data is not good, it will be taken off the shelves in half an hour. We will do the same to you now . I have even watched their interview-based programs or text-based programs . They post pictures , pictures and text, and they may write Try all 6 versions and try to find a state that I like best. So I often say whether you can do well and whether the traffic is good or not is the process of trial and error . It is to keep trying. Do you think you are like this? So what will be the core value of Xiaohongshu? If we talk about the core value of the community, basically we share it sincerely. From the core, as far as the community is concerned, we all want to create a sincere and peaceful community. So you It’s hard to see something that people are arguing about on Xiaohongshu. In fact, those who are arguing have been processed by us in the algorithm, and they will be removed simply because they read the text. Yes, just pull it down. It 's very similar. We don't encourage you to make unkind comments. It's partly machine processing and partly manual processing. So overall, we are very strict in controlling the community atmosphere. You will find that in There is no discussion of current social affairs on Xiaohongshu because it is too easy to cause controversy. We often say that Xiaohongshu is about buying things, being happy, being happy, and the time being quiet, everyone is happy, but there are also many things on it. People will share their emotional stories and you will find that the following (messages) are all very positive, maybe encouraging each other or something. But if you say there are any abusers, in fact, the abusers have been dealt with by us. I’ll give it a shot. For example , the most typical one in Taiwan is PTT. PTT was fine when I was studying in my early years. Now if you post a selfie as a woman, everyone will definitely call you ugly . Then you may go to the career board to share with everyone how my salary is recently. It will feel like you are poor, which is not friendly to creators. So to be honest, we share this matter sincerely. A large part of it is to control comments, be friendly to creators, and be friendly to the entire community. IG also recently launched a new feature. It will automatically block impolite remarks for you. I think this is a very important thing because everyone is quarreling down there and then I feel so tired. I don’t seem to want to spend so much time dealing with emotions in my life, right ? Ah , and do you really think they are discussing social issues? There are no people below who are quarreling and swearing and attacking people personally . They are not discussing. They are just expressing their emotions . Then in fact, you will definitely encounter it here, that is, the values of the community and business. When there is a conflict of interest, basically the most powerful thing about Xiaohongshu is that everyone chooses values. For example, we know that the things that cause conflicts actually have traffic , or we are talking about the so-called low-IQ content Xiaohongshu . There was a time when the book was really boring. Girls all like to be white, thin and beautiful , and they have a lot of pursuits for thinness. Then there was an article. For example, we have two fingers pinched together and tied with a rubber band . Then you If you sleep like this for 5 days, you will lose weight . This kind of article has great traffic. Everyone loves to read it and everyone may laugh at it or complain about it. This kind of thing has traffic in the short term, but in the long term, it is harmful. Oh, I think being able to choose the long term at every moment is a really powerful thing. But when you choose the long term, it will cause pain. Do you think these are, for example, focusing on core values and focusing on the long term? The thing is that one of the key reasons why Xiaohongshu is difficult to be replaced by other competitors is that I think it is a key reason . It is a community and a content ecosystem. It is the car. As long as you drive it, it will always be there. The kinetic energy keeps going down , but if you make one wrong decision for all your things, the whole car may be overturned. There are many companies who want to copy. Xiaohongshu even came to chat with me and I said if you can endure it, In one year, the entire community may grow very slowly, so you can do it. If you all want it, it will be what you want. In three months, many creators will die if they want to pass fast . If your long-term value is not maintained, in fact, that The company cannot go far, which is why I think one of the most valuable aspects of Xiaohongshu at that time was that even we were very slow in commercialization because if there were too many advertisements in a community, people would not like to read them. Yes,
but it has been very, very restrained in this matter. So far, we have just talked about a lot of the success of Xiaohongshu. But of course it will have a lot of controversy , for example, because the users of Xiaohongshu are teenagers or young people . As a girl, some people are worried that your area is full of makeup tutorials from beauty influencers , which are creating some anxiety about appearance. What do you think of this idea? I have worked on a platform, so I think the platform’s tools themselves are neutral. OK , but in fact, the algorithm will have a tendency, that is, whatever you want to push, I will keep pushing it to you , and it will turn into a snowball, and it will go that way. Then you ask, will these children have anxiety ? I think it will all happen , but if you put it into a larger framework, I think algorithms are the epitome of society, so when we make Xiaohongshu In the end, when we looked at the data, it was actually a God’s perspective , looking at everyone doing things . In fact , there is appearance anxiety in this society , and the algorithm and Xiaohongshu just amplified it . OK But you asked me if I like it or not. Personally, I don’t like it very much. When you just talked about God’s perspective, it reminded me of something very interesting. Did you see anything during the process of just taking a bird’s eye view of the data? I think this is also very counter-intuitive data. It is different from my understanding, but the data shows something like this. The very counter-intuitive data should actually say that the probability of boys liking beauty is much higher than what most people think. This is what we started with. It is often said that men are not likely to search for cosmetics for anti-aging and medical beauty treatments. But in fact, many men are too embarrassed to tell the outside world that they are searching for cosmetics. Then they may be too embarrassed to step into a clinic in China , but the people searching for them are It’s really quite a lot. When I looked at the data, I was really surprised. I told Taiwan about the Phoenix radio wave in China. It’s called Thermage. Many boys were searching for that kind of thing. It was very interesting . And many people thought it was about women . Children don’t seem to be very interested in cars . In fact, this is very counterintuitive. Girls just don’t like the kind of cars that boys like. MINI Cooper also comes to advertise with us. In fact, girls also like these things. In fact, they are not well treated . It has been made public and taken out to see that in fact our impression of gender is actually quite stereotyped. Yes, this opportunity is rare. You can have such a large data and see a lot of information outside the niche , and it is very real. It's very naked, right? At night, go and see what they search for . Does it change over time? It's different at noon. It 's different when you look at it at night . Did you know that Xiaohongshu still sold sex toys in the early years ? At that time, female users were searching for sex toys. Sex toys are indeed a market dominated by girls. But you don’t know that the most interesting thing is that there will be a peak after 10 o’clock in the evening. Then at that time, it will start to Our e-commerce side promoted the sex toys, but within a few days, you were warned not to do this. We just finished talking about the first controversy, which is appearance anxiety. Then we extended the conversation a lot about the second controversy, I think. It’s related to cultural united front because there are a lot of people using it in Taiwan. So what do you think of this statement? I’ve been asked a lot about this question. The first thing I asked is that we don’t have any advertising budget in Taiwan and we don’t put in ads. Then I said I asked our boss if we should set up a Taipei office and send me back. I thought Shanghai was so boring, so I discussed the population with him. He said that your population is smaller than a district in Shanghai. Why is it reasonable to do this? Indeed, from a user perspective, From a quantitative point of view, not much . As for how it grew, it is because we have unintentionally planted willows and we will have cultural spillover. This phenomenon is very similar to the fact that sometimes when traveling to Southeast Asia, the local Chinese will have watched "The Coming of Kangxi". But "Kangxi Is Coming" had no intention of entering the Southeast Asian market at that time . This is how it was created. As for the United Front, will it be suspected of being a United Front? What is the reason? Basically , all APPs in China They are all regulated by the Chinese government. For example , the Chinese government did not want Didi Taxi to be listed in the United States . If you listed it, I would directly remove your APP from the shelves and directly send police to your company to say that you may be suspected of leaking secrets. espionage and other things , and then make your company like this. The stock price is extremely low, so no one dares to do this. You will be obedient in the end, but I think our focus is wrong. If you are really a user group. Speaking of which, the most used ones in Taiwan are actually Facebook, IG or LINE . I think what we should be concerned about is this matter. I often make an analogy with others. When we look at these things , whether it is TikTok, Douyin or When it came to Xiaohongshu, you all clearly knew that it was Chinese capital , and behind it were Chinese companies , so everyone would be wary of it. What we were not wary of, in fact , were things like IG and Facebook , and their penetration rate was higher. Gao, when you post content, the leverage it can create is greater. And you said that today it is really people with serious intentions or China. It wants to put something into Taiwan. If I am a Chinese official, I will definitely choose Facebook. Because you will think it is the most cost-effective. If I vote for Xiaohongshu, I can only influence some younger people. But if I vote for Facebook today, I can control almost all the audience groups. I even had dinner with an official from their united front unit. He was a former classmate and an acquaintance. Later, they said that it is really hard for young people to do things. He said that your young people don’t care about money and told him that China is very powerful. They didn't seem to buy it. Then I asked him, what do you want to do now? He said that idol stars seem to have some ideas, but I think idol stars are of no use. What everyone is watching is just a cultural performance, and it won't be like this. It became a recognition that if I were a United Front official, it might be a huge challenge to deal with young people . This reminds me of what Joeman said before about elders being the holy grail of creators because elders will not scold you and will share your videos with There are more elders in the LINE group , and he also has several groups that are a bit similar to this. Yes, basically an elder has penetrated it. It is equivalent to infiltrating 100 elders , and they will spread vertically and chat everywhere , and then they can also influence their children, so we still have to care more about our parents and not the children, so you know I usually talk about united front. I said the conclusion of this issue is to go home first and care about your elders, right? You haven’t even gone home yet and you are still talking about other people’s children using Xiaohongshu, right ? Is there any difference between Xiaohongshu now and before ? You said you left. Did I tell you that it was the earliest time inside the company? Yes, yes, the company was very fucked later. I think it should be said that when I went to China in the early years, the penetration rate of mobile phones was still very low . Even at that time, I still had a mobile phone . The penetration rate is getting higher and higher. What does the penetration rate getting higher and higher mean? As long as you are in the APP market, as long as you can survive until next year, it will definitely increase by 20% . As it becomes more and more saturated, the number of people in the company will increase. When the things we do become smaller and smaller , and competition becomes more and more intense, the company is no longer fun. Of course, I think this is a normal thing, because when I left, it had more than 3,000 people and almost 4,000 people. It is not what it used to be. That kind of CEO, you see him every day and he will bring his dog in. Professional managers will join the meeting and he will establish various systems. You will never be as relaxed and comfortable as you were in a startup company. The atmosphere was like this . Later, in the end, it was written in the employee code that no drinking was allowed at work. Was it a major blow? It was a big blow. I only joined because you could drink. Then
you know how exaggerated it was at the beginning. There is a wine cabinet next to my office seat. I bought the small refrigerator and the wine in it was bought with the team building funds. Then I asked the company if I could reimburse him for it. He said it’s okay. The whole company is drinking. It’s not bad for you. Then there are many behind it. For example, It also uses face recognition to punch in and then calculate how long your working hours are at the company. I think this is really crazy. Oh my god, this is what it feels like to be monitored , and then your working hours are calculated. If it's not enough, you will be warned . Then you know that everyone's working hours are 10 hours. It's so painful. I think this is a very frustrating thing. You will know that the company has reached a certain level , and this is also a problem. It's a normal thing , but when you look at it, you will feel that the good times are gone. So, suppose there is a person today who wants to go to China's new start-up zone. What advice would you give him ? Now that China's economic situation is not good, you Do you really want to choose China? Don’t be like this, okay ? Don’t be like this. Everyone is running away. Why are you going? Right
, because I am one of the people who escaped when Shanghai was closed. My cousin used to teach at Shanghai Jiaotong University and he was originally a 150 -year-old. Kilogram Man , this is really funny. He was banned from the city, so he was banned for a long time. During this process, I had plastic surgery and some surgeries , so when the two of us met, we watched it together. The other person wants to say who are you? Because he lost weight from 150 kilograms to 50 kilograms . Then I changed his face and the two of them were like wow. This thing is quite magical. How long did you escape from being banned ? It was about 30 days. When you escape, if you block other cities, such as Inner Mongolia or that small city, forget it, you block even Shanghai. I have a few friends in China who have escaped , and then they will say that they seem to have seen a lot during that process. People's evil , and this evil is a very small evil. You didn't want to witness these things, right? At that time, even because you couldn't move freely, the security guards who might have greeted you every day before the city was closed were very kind to you. But once they have power, they will become another person and it will be very scary. They will restrict you and say that you can't go out now or something. But what should you do if you want to go out and give him money? These people will have a little power when they have a little power. These things are like this , so if I go back to your question, if you really want to see the big market or something, you can take a look. But in fact, it has already developed in China's Internet or startup companies. It's the middle to late stage , so when you enter, you can basically only work as a handyman. If you work as a handyman , you might as well work as a handyman in Taiwan . In fact, it's probably about the same , and go find a rocket . If you are a young person, right. If young people are looking for rockets, I think they can go to the United States and many other countries . And I even think that the entrepreneurial environment in Taiwan is much better than before, and there will be some rockets running. Thank you very much Nick for sharing today. Nick, you still have it. I do n’t have anything to say to you. I just think that modern people use their mobile phones too much. Can you use them less? You know I am a person who specially designs algorithms and makes poisons. My friends will ask me one thing. Many people will say, do you still have Xiaohongshu on your phone? No, I don’t have Xiaohongshu on my phone. I don’t have Douyin. I use IG for sending messages. Later, they concluded that the people who deal with drugs don’t take drugs. Am I right? Wrong or not, it’s just like this. Zhiqi, everyone doesn’t watch YouTube very much. The videos are not correct. OK, then this episode will be here first.
