Recently, the topic of #Still 500 Million People Insist on Using QQ# has soared to the top of Weibo's trending list, dominating for hours on end. It's truly remarkable that despite being a 25-year-old veteran social app, QQ continues to exude youthful vibrancy and wield extensive user influence.
Many netizens are rallying behind QQ, citing reasons why they still favor it despite its 130 million reads and 13,000 discussions.
Some users see QQ as the ultimate "work companion," believing that features like file storage, large file transfer, and Q group notifications greatly enhance work efficiency.
Some internet users treat QQ as their "diary," leaving behind the most beautiful and everlasting fragments of life in QQ space, albums, and other features.
Some netizens argue that they can only find like-minded individuals on QQ, where they have their own exclusive space. They find joy in chatting and hanging out in groups with their list of friends.
Many users are getting hooked on the various interactive features within QQ, enthusiastically engaging in activities like nurturing virtual flowers and lighting up shared symbols with their list of friends.
The essence of why so many netizens genuinely love using QQ probably stems from the theme of "change and continuity" that has characterized QQ over its 25-year journey.
From the PC era's QQ groups, QQ Show, and QQ Space, to the mobile internet era's QZone, QQ KanDian, and Interest Tribes, and now to the current QQ Channels, Super QQ Show, and QQ Short Videos, the functions and products of QQ, which have been in existence for many years, have never ceased to evolve. As QQ's leader Zhang Hao puts it, "We always anticipate change because product creators always like to explore new things. Paying attention to new technologies and new models can create better user value."
In contrast, what has remained unchanged is the continuous contemplation by the QQ team on "what is the greatest value of QQ to its users."
In 2013, on the occasion of QQ's 15th anniversary, it put forward the brand proposition of "Enjoy Communication," designing many innovative features around the preferences of young people, such as Interest Tribes, Q Show, and KanDian, with the aim of making chatting a fun and expressive experience for users, making socializing and communication more interesting and vivid. Ten years later, in 2023, during a discussion on the business strategy for the new QQ 9.0 version, the management team pondered over what concept the new QQ should convey to its users. Everyone proposed their own ideas, with some suggesting "passion" while others believed it should be "zeal," but the final voting results showed that "relaxation" ranked first. With "relaxation" winning the vote, the team upgraded the proposition to "relax and be yourself," and began experimenting with bigger breakthroughs in the product.
Last year, QQ dropped more than 100 features from its product lineup and completed an epic project to rebuild the underlying architecture accumulated over its 25-year history. In the past, each version of QQ had to be accompanied by an independent team for iteration and optimization. Now, all versions of QQ have switched to the same set of code, allowing them to be adjusted and updated simultaneously. "There is no other product of similar scale in the industry that can achieve this capability," said QQ's technical lead, Wang Hui.
While reducing the burden on QQ, Zhang Hao and QQ Channel head Wu Nianwei discussed where the new value points of QQ lie, and came up with an idea: interest-based socializing might be the biggest value point.
"Think back to when we used QQ many years ago, most of the time it was to make friends online, interact in groups or spaces, and eventually develop social relationships," Zhang Hao said, highlighting the most obvious difference between QQ and WeChat. Today, on QQ, whether it's channels, groups, or Super QQ Show, they all serve as hubs for users to engage in virtual socializing. Users naturally engage in interest-based socializing and discussions here.
Over the past twenty-something years, QQ has accumulated a large number of semi-familiar relationships formed around shared interests. Most of them are based on QQ groups, with the basic path of establishing these groups being: users find like-minded people offline or on other content platforms, then they gather on QQ to further communicate and interact. Compared to most content communities, QQ's advantage lies in the backend, where it caters to the needs of users to create groups and interact. However, this does not mean that QQ cannot provide frontend services. But under the new plan, QQ should also be a place where users can discover like-minded people. Hence the birth of QQ Channels, which provide content and tools to serve communities organized around interests. When users enter the channel entrance, the first thing they see is a double-column information flow page, filled with text, images, or short video highlights of various channels' discussion content. In addition, there are tools such as voice rooms and live rooms to help users discover like-minded groups.
QQ Short Videos is another channel for users to discover like-minded people. "We often see a video with mediocre quality but exceptionally high interaction and comment counts, only to find out it's a niche meme in the anime community, which is particularly popular," said Ruan Chao, head of QQ Short Videos, realizing the value of user-generated content. This has been confirmed as one of the most important strategic directions for QQ Short Videos - encouraging ordinary users to publish content and, with their consent, distributing it to people with similar interests, with platform traffic support and cash incentives tilted towards this content, unlike most short video platforms that emphasize head content. In addition, "you cannot ignore the 'context' when making short videos on QQ," Ruan Chao said. The so-called "context" is precisely "making videos on QQ," which means that QQ Short Videos will relatively focus on satisfying the preferences of QQ users at present, and the content will also focus on categories such as anime, animation and film, and games.
"At each stage, QQ's goals are different. The youthification strategy in the past emphasized differentiation from WeChat, but now, focusing on interest-based socializing, we should not define ourselves by 'user age,'" Wu Nianwei said.
Yang Zaijing, head of Super QQ Show, said that when designing virtual avatars for Super QQ Show, the initially set height of 4.5 cm was adjusted to 5.5 cm, as the former was considered too childish. Later, the team deliberately incorporated many styles that adults like in the selection of facial features, hairstyles, and clothing. "We hope to achieve a state that is neither too adult nor too juvenile."
"QQ wants to break that stereotype. Does growing up mean you don't need QQ anymore? Definitely not," Zhang Hao said.
At the beginning of 2024, at the Tencent staff conference, Ma Huateng specifically mentioned QQ. He said that for the development of QQ, it is necessary to accurately position product services, reduce usage thresholds, open up more ideas, and put more effort into breaking through product limitations.
"What is growth? When a product has new creative value, there will naturally be growth," Zhang Hao said.
