Zhang Chaoyang, who refuses to lie flat, is ready to fight another battle in the social networking sector.

Speaking of Sohu, the veteran internet player, what comes to people's mind? Veteran netizens may mention "Sohu.com", American drama fans will answer "Sohu Video", while new netizens may even ask in reply "What is Sohu?" After portal websites were eliminated by the times, Sohu successively launched Weibo-like services, developed video platforms, and even incubated Sogou to engage in the search business, but it has never found a new viable growth path.

Even after repeated setbacks and persistent efforts, Sohu still does not intend to lie flat. At the recently held Sohu Video Follow Feed Halloween American Drama Cosplay Party, Sohu founder Charles Zhang Chaoyang said in a media interview that Sohu is not lying flat, neither is he himself, the team has been working hard, and claimed that "there is a major battle to fight for a social platform".

The "battle for social platforms" mentioned by Zhang Chaoyang actually refers to Follow Feed, the strategic-level product of Sohu's layout in the social track, which focuses on real-person social interaction and relational content distribution without relying on algorithmic recommendation. In his view, the Internet has always evolved along two main lines: information acquisition and social connection, among which the connection between people is the more essential value. From portal websites and search engines to social products, Sohu's exploration of the social track has hardly ever stopped, and now Follow Feed carries its core strategy of transformation to social business.

Previously, after missing the booming decade of the mobile Internet, Sohu started its "second venture" and launched the social product "Huyou" in 2019. At that time, Zhang Chaoyang placed high hopes on it, once saying that "news and videos are the main track, while Huyou is the surprise soldier", Sohu even launched the "National School Flower Selection Contest" to pave the way for Huyou.

However, after the hustle and bustle faded, Huyou's differentiated selling points such as equality among users and privacy protection failed to impress netizens. So can Follow Feed cross the river that Huyou failed to get through?

This time, Sohu still chooses to focus on differentiated positioning. Zhang Chaoyang summed up the core gameplay of this product with the phrase "casually browse for fun, forward and interact on Follow Feed". It distributes content completely based on relationships that users actively follow, and the "Browse" section extends content based on the likes and comments of followed users, neither of which relies on algorithmic recommendation.

Zhang Chaoyang said that the user profile formed by the algorithm based on users' click history is easy to create information cocoons, while Follow Feed is filtered by the people users follow. "You follow a wide variety of accounts covering all kinds of interests, which is divergent, so there is no problem of information cocoons." Follow Feed takes "making friends through content" as its core, where users establish interpersonal connections through content, so as to achieve in-depth interaction and precipitation of social relationships.

Although "anti-algorithm addiction" is indeed a trend of thought in the current Internet, the number of people who hold this idea may be far less than Sohu's expectation. In the mobile Internet era, the 1:9:90 rule is very popular among product managers. This rule points out that on online platforms, users are usually divided into 1% core content creators, 9% mild interactors and 90% passive browsers. In the past ten years, almost all content-related platforms, from Douyin to Zhihu and then to Xiaohongshu, have designed their products around this rule.

In a sense, Zhang Chaoyang's perception of the Internet seems to still stay in the era when Sohu's portal website was at the center of the Internet. In the first decade after China's full-function access to the Internet, netizens had an extremely strong desire to express themselves, and products like chat rooms that were purely for casual chatting were the footnote of that era. At that time, Internet companies did not even need incentive policies, and netizens were all willing to create content on their own initiative.

From CNNIC to QuestMobile and iResearch, reports from various statistical agencies today all point to the same reality: 5% of people in China's current Internet environment generate 95% of all public opinions, while the vast majority of netizens have always been onlookers. People order takeout, scroll through Weibo, watch Douyin and play games, but hardly actively produce content. Even in the comment section of hit works on Douyin, a large number of users are too lazy to type "666", and just tag their friends to watch together.

This means that the vast majority of netizens have long been accustomed to algorithmic recommendation, and are willing to become "lonely content consumers". The current reality is that WeChat Moments have become more and more deserted. When you open Moments, you either see nothing but a blank line, or forwarded work links, the atmosphere of daily life is getting thinner, let alone Follow Feed, a semi-open type of Moments.

Not only ordinary netizens who act as onlookers are accustomed to algorithmic recommendation, but creators also prefer algorithms. From the creators' point of view, the fact that Follow Feed completely relies on user follow relationships and real-person forwarding equals "instability", while algorithmic recommendation is more predictable. After all, the essence of algorithmic recommendation is that the system abstracts users, content and interaction behaviors into mathematical symbols, and predicts content that users may be interested in through calculation and reasoning.

Since mathematics follows inherent rules, creators can follow the trend to create content, while Follow Feed, which is completely based on real people, is uncontrollable in the eyes of creators. Therefore, the "anti-algorithm" design will probably become the biggest stumbling block for Follow Feed.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Three E Life" (ID: IT-3eLife), the author is San Yijun, and it is authorized to be released by 36Kr.