Welcome to the WeChat subscription number of “Sina Technology”: techsina
Text / Wen Yehao
Source: Photon Planet (ID: TMTweb)
“Since I left a message and wanted to rent a house, a bunch of inexplicable people came to me privately, some asked me to share a house together, some asked me to add WeChat to see the property, and even just told a person that they wanted to rent a loft, Someone came to ask with a bunch of loft listings, it’s really pervasive.” Xiao A complained.
The object of the spit is precisely Xiaohongshu, a grass-growing platform with a monthly life of 200 million. Before this, Xiaohongshu was repeatedly named or even removed from the shelves due to the problems of “false grass” and “filters”, but after many rectifications, it seems that Xiaohongshu is still difficult to cut off the relationship with chaos.
In the end, Xiao A, who was afraid of being deceived, was too troubled and chose to pay hundreds of yuan more to sign with Ziroom. Like all traffic pools, Xiaohongshu seems to have been occupied by intermediaries, and once again fell into a crisis of trust.
The intermediary surrounds the little red book
Unlike Anjuke, Shell and other vertical platforms that all stare at professional photo avatars, there is no obvious difference between the intermediaries who gather in Xiaohongshu for private chats and amateur users, and some even post a few rental notes about their personal experiences, called People can’t tell the difference.
Most of these notes revolve around renting and living. The content is mainly about petty bourgeoisie and literary and artistic youth enjoying life and realizing their ideals. The pictures are generally more delicate, which is a dimensionality reduction compared to the house listing pictures taken by other platforms. However, there is a commonality in these types of notes, that is, the details and specific prices of the listings will never be mentioned, and interested users can only leave messages and chat privately.
In the private chat, if the user is not imported into the private domain, these people also refuse to negotiate the price, and they will not admit that they are an intermediary if they are killed, but once they successfully add WeChat, they will take off their sheepskin and rely on a variety of housing listings Information bombardment. At this point, the house that users liked on Xiaohongshu is no longer there, and it is replaced by a house with a poor selling price, or a house of the same type that far exceeds the price range disclosed by the notebook.
“The company requires that customers must be invited to show it. Sometimes, if the task cannot be completed, we can only compile some cheap, luxuriously decorated houses to keep the customers, but the actual price is much higher than the target price. When a customer asks, they say the house Just rent it out, and then take it to see something else,” an agent said.
In fact, this is a common phenomenon in the industry, and some verticals have also strengthened the identification of false housing listings, but on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Zhihu, users occupy both ends of content production, allowing false information to be hidden in one place. Among the normal notes, users are quietly harvested.
In addition to renting houses, study abroad and education and training are also the hardest hit areas for the flood of intermediaries. Compared with real estate agents who use fake listings to divert traffic to KPIs, the lower limit of agents in the study abroad circle is lower, and the technology of whitewashing itself is also more superb.
“Because of the epidemic, the environment for studying abroad is much different from before. Many information and policies from the past are no longer applicable today, and the online information is very fragmented, so I wanted to find a reliable intermediary. At first, I went to Baidu search, but I only found overwhelming advertisements, and there was very little useful information, so I thought of Xiaohongshu.” Xiao D said.
At that time, Xiao D felt that the information on studying abroad on Xiaohongshu was very rich, and there were many sisters who shared their own study abroad cases. Coupled with his urgent desire to go abroad, he quickly contacted the institution recommended by the “study abroad blogger”, who claimed that All packages are rejected, and guaranteed records are supported. A bright future is at hand, and Xiao D soon signs a contract with the agency. However, troubles follow.
“After I signed the contract, my study abroad consultant suggested that I had a poor academic background and that my GRE score might not be enough. They advised me to lower my standards, or to say that I could get a refund if I didn’t apply, but it was a waste of time. It’s better to go to a poor school. , anyway, the difference is not big.” In the end, Xiao D, who felt that he was cheating, killed the non-guaranteed school and refused to leave. He still refunded the money, but at the same time, he also missed the study abroad season.
An industry insider pointed out: “There are only two logics in securing a record with a large amount of money. One is that students can apply for it in the first place, and the intermediary applies normally and collects money while lying down. The school has made money, and it can’t be refunded because it has already made enough money from the students who left.”
Of course, some study abroad intermediaries have established cooperation with foreign colleges and universities. They have poor information on college admission requirements and document preferences. They can indeed help in study abroad planning. Where there is information asymmetry, there must be intermediaries.
However, like real estate agencies, many study abroad agencies also turned into amateurs and mingled in Xiaohongshu as sisters. After importing users into private domains, the real face was revealed, which made it a little more fraudulent. Not to mention those black intermediaries who are hidden in the shadows and are firmly bound to the gray-black industry.
Xiaohongshu, the next 58 city?
In recent years, the discussion of HPV virus in the Internet context has detonated the public’s “nine-price anxiety”, and the current situation of “one seedling is hard to find” has attracted a lot of gray and black players to hear the news.
Nine-price robbing is the most common “playing method”. Among them, there are “real scalpers” who use technical means to ask seedlings to earn the difference, and there are also real liars who are anxious about the group and wear scalpers’ coats.
As we all know, the nine-valent HPV vaccine is suitable for women aged 16 to 26, which is highly matched with the Xiaohongshu user pool. Aurora data shows that the average monthly DAU of Xiaohongshu is 83.187 million, young groups with strong spending power account for as high as 72%, and female users account for nearly 70%.
Xiao G is a senior at a university in Chengdu. During college, she missed the nine-valent HPV vaccine in the school hospital many times. She was very anxious and determined to take advantage of the gap before graduation to solve the “life event”. To this end, Xiao G kept a close eye on the news of the local seedling release, and tried many times on various seedling appointment platforms, but found nothing, but spent a lot of time and energy. In the end, deeply fatigued, she still compromised with the “scalpers” she once despised, adding an intermediary who claimed to be able to achieve technical assistance under the recommendation of the “sisters” of Xiaohongshu.
At first, Xiao G was “heavily guarded” against the so-called intermediary, but the latter provided him with a number of chat records and appointment records, and the intermediary’s circle of friends was filled with information about appointments from various places, which made Xiao G gradually relax his vigilance. After some inquiries, the intermediary guided Xiao G to add a local appointment group in Chengdu, and told Xiao G to pay a deposit of 600 yuan first. If he fails to get it, he will only get half of the deposit, and then pay the final payment of 4,000 yuan.
Just when Xiao G, who was eager for Miao, was about to pay, she found that the so-called Miao Miao group was in a state of silence, which made her vigilant again and suspended the transfer. Later, after adding and asking friends in the same group, Xiao G learned that not only did he fail to get the vaccine after paying the deposit, but even half of the deposit promised in advance needed to be praised by Xiaohongshu for the agency or a new one. will back. And now, there are newcomers from time to time in the local cohort where Xiao G is located.
Little G who is not deceived is undoubtedly lucky, but more users who are not vigilant have fallen into the scam. According to media reports, some black intermediaries about Miao Miao will even artificially fabricate successful SMS messages to defraud the final payment, and even forge the Miao Miao website, defrauding money ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan, and the deceived people are from Weibo, small Red Book and other social platforms.
In order to compete for traffic, some black intermediaries not only impersonate bloggers, but even solicit customers through “delivery on behalf of others”. It is reported that most of the proxy distribution is for experts or amateurs, and black intermediaries usually do not choose to cooperate with experts. The threshold for proxy distribution for amateurs is extremely low, there is no requirement for the number of fans and the number of existing notes, and the relative remuneration is not high.
Generally speaking, the price of each order for graphic and text distribution is in the range of 5 to 8 yuan. In principle, the agent needs to have original graphics and text, but according to industry insiders: “For text, just go to some relevant Weibo to select a few paragraphs and put them together. , but the picture cannot be copied directly, but the MD5 value of the picture can be changed in the form of a screenshot to avoid being recognized by the system as a duplicate.”
With the influx of these chaotic, batch-replicated generational distributions into the platform, users are inevitably deceived by the bombardment of information. On the Black Cat Complaint Platform, a total of 1,257 complaints were searched with keywords of “Xiaohongshu” and “cheating”, and 2,194 complaints were searched with keywords of “58.com” and “cheating”. It can be seen that Xiaohongshu is equivalent to more than half of “China’s largest distribution center for scammers”.
But even so, Xiaohongshu is fundamentally different from 58.com, which is an intermediary platform. The reason why intermediaries poured into Xiaohongshu is not only because of the high-quality traffic of Xiaohongshu, but also because of Xiaohongshu’s “grass-growing” gene.
With “planting grass” as its basic appearance, Xiaohongshu’s UGC content community focuses on sharing “products” and “experiences”, and precise content distribution aggregates UGC content into smaller interest circles, thereby stimulating users’ sense of belonging and enhance discussion. Driven by the cycle of “content output – interest circle layer – content re-production”, Xiaohongshu has gradually accumulated batches of high-quality and accurate notes, covering all aspects, while the decentralized traffic distribution model is more efficient for intermediaries, etc. Long-tail accounts are more friendly.
Compared with Zhihu and short video platforms, which are also content communities, Xiaohongshu’s “Notes” focuses on the mixed output of graphics and text, and the creation tools cover multiple sections such as stickers, filters, templates, labels, and texts, which makes it more popular in products. It is better than Zhihu in terms of presentation and beautification. The intuitive graphic and text form also enables it to have a much shorter information dissemination chain than Douyin and Kuaishou, which endows it with tool attributes and is increasingly used by users as a second search engine.
Therefore, although it cannot be compared with the traffic pool of short video platforms such as Douyin, the tool attributes of Xiaohongshu make users often come from XXX. In contrast, Doukuai has a higher DAU, but the user usage scenarios Most of the time is spent hanging out, lacking a sense of purpose.
Based on different scenarios and uses, relatively cheap white-label products are easy to sell in the Douyin live broadcast room, but the consumption of strong-purpose services such as intermediaries is difficult to achieve on short video platforms; on the contrary, in the logic of “planting grass” Under the influence, it is difficult for the white-label products with no characteristics to arouse discussion in Xiaohongshu, while the consumption of services such as medical beauty and studying abroad can cultivate a fixed interest community. In a deteriorating marketing environment, this naturally attracts hungry wolves.
However, 58.com, as an intermediary platform, can benefit from artificially relaxing audits, but Xiaohongshu is not. Although 80% of Xiaohongshu’s revenue in 2020 comes from advertising business, the aforementioned black intermediaries are also good, and the agency can send soft advertising. In any case, it will not create profits for it, but will lower the quality of the platform’s content, thereby damaging community activity and commercial interests.
Therefore, Xiaohongshu is unwilling to become 58 in the same city. To this end, in recent years, it has been strengthening the suppression of false marketing and soft advertising. However, the initial platform only formulated the “Xiaohongshu Community Convention”, requiring note-sharers to “declare their interests”, and now it has gradually increased to block some brands. In February of this year, Xiaohongshu launched a “special governance for medical and aesthetic categories” in response to the frequent chaos in the medical and aesthetics sector. The rectification targets ranged from accounts to companies, and eventually fell to the industry, reflecting Xiaohongshu’s panic over content governance.
But as the saying goes, one foot is high and the devil is one foot high. On the one hand, it is to maintain the quality of the platform content, on the other hand, Xiaohongshu maintains the quality of the platform content, and on the other hand, it is for the intermediaries to make money and survive. The latter is obviously more willing than the former. It also makes Xiaohongshu, which has been governed many times, still full of chaos, and even evolved to take the initiative to attack.
The private chat bombing encountered by the aforementioned small A is to a certain extent the product of the evolution of the organization to fight against the platform. It’s more savage and more insane. As the number of users continues to expand, UGC content will be diversified, and the accumulation of content will increase by orders of magnitude. The problems that Xiaohongshu will face will only become more complicated.
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