Path, a product that looks like it is from the future, was born for a real "circle of friends". But even if it pursues such an extreme user experience, it ends up "dead" silently.

Path, a product that looks like it is from the future, it was born for a real "circle of friends". But even if it pursues such an extreme user experience, it ends up "dead" silently. The question of title

is directly borrowed from a friend's monologue in the group. This sentence was posted in the morning when no one spoke, without any preface or afterword. No one replied to it, just like no one saw it, and soon others opened up new topics with other links.

Everyone’s love and hate for WeChat Moments has been going on for a long time. Some people here show off regardless of occasion or treat it as a work window, while others carefully maintain multiple personalities through grouping. I am the type that basically doesn’t look at my circle of friends, but I don’t have the courage to turn off this function directly.

WeChat "friends" are not real friends, and "Friends" are not real friends.

Is there a choice outside of WeChat that can help us continue to contact our selected “real” friends online without being disturbed by more complex interpersonal relationships?

The answer is: has .

, a social networking product Path that was once regarded as a powerful challenger for Facebook and has been persisted for 8 years, announced that it will be completely suspended by the end of this year. Looking at Path’s life will be enlightening for many of us.

It was born for a real "circle of friends"

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford in the UK proposed the famous " Dunbar Number " law in the 1990s:

This law is inferred based on the intelligence and social activities of apes: the upper limit of the stable number of friends allowed by human intelligence is 148, and rounding is about 150.

On Facebook you can add a large number of users as friends, and Path deliberately limits your number of friends.

When Path was first launched, it limited you to add only 50 friends, and later this limit followed the "Dunbar number" and increased to 150.

At the 2012 Southwest (SXSW) conference, Dave Morin, Path CEO, said:

"We want you to stay in touch with the right 150 people. After you sign up for Path, it uses information from your existing social graph to try to highlight those friends you are most likely to share your profile. This also means you can't add friends as you like. Once the number of friends reaches the limit, you have to delete some people to add others... The 150 people you choose to share information won't remain the same. It's very similar to real life, some friends may break off contact, and new friends will enter your social circle."

Path has many reasons to attract attention, and its founder itself is one of the highlights.

Path was founded by former Facebook product manager Dave Morin and former Napster duo Dustin Mierau, Shawn Fanning.

As one of the people who know Facebook's strengths and weaknesses, Morin wants to take Path to the opposite direction of Facebook , which also makes people expect it to become Facebook's strongest opponent and repeat an industry showdown that has created two giants like Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

According to previous media reports, after Morin initially set a maximum of 50 friends, he has been exploring a suitable number of friends. When he saw Dunbar's paper on Dunbar's numbers, he also called Dunbar himself to confirm the research details.

Path The default concept of "friend" is much more private and narrower than the concept of "friend" Dunbar mentioned. Its product design allows users to share whether they are "sleeping" or "wake up". In the early 2010s, in the early stages of the mobile Internet, it took the lead in cooperating with sports manufacturers such as Nike to obtain and share users' body rhythms and exercise records.

At that time, the meaning of these states was not to stop at the simple narrative itself, but to declare a naked honesty, so sharing yourself with your "friends" would take risks.

At the same time, a key point that has to be said is: Path's user experience is also far ahead and ahead of its era, and it has even led many latecomers, even affecting operating system-level design specifications.

It creates custom styles including pull-down refresh, scroll bar, dialog box, card and other controls. It has delicate and touchable transition animations, and has a design language that is different from the operating system but is also all-inclusive.

All this makes Path look like a product from the future. Its ultimate pursuit of user experience is also the ultimate goal of social networks - because there are always risks and resistance to sharing your own private heart, so must dress this sharing environment like a real home, and the little heart that lives in it will not panic.

It is so popular that it is jealous and dies silently

Path has maintained a very high financing record in the first few years of its establishment, and many giants including Google are interested in its acquisitions. At its peak, the service had about 15 million users and once raised funds at a valuation of $500 million. It took only a few months to investigate and open a $100 million attempt to buy it.

In short, Path raised a total of $55 million from investors such as Silicon Valley top venture capital Index, Kelpen Huaying and Redpoint.

has many reasons: including the co-founder’s luxury background, clear product goals and strict quality control, targeting Facebook’s competitive positioning, etc.

But the more this happens, the less anxious the founders are. Path released the 2.0 version for more than a year to polish it, and during this period, it only released a few image filters symbolically. Products like

will either become immortal one day, become popular, or will go down all the way and become like everyone else. There are not many previous examples in the technology industry, but the latter one cannot be counted, including a bunch of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs acquired by Yahoo, Yahoo itself, Digg, StumbleUpon and others.

has been countless unicorns and quasi-unicorns who have challenged Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other positions. When they finally die, if the "Internet Aboriginals" who were ignorant of them had heard of their financing and valuation figures at their heyday, they would probably jump in surprise.

is a pity that Path has also become the latter, and it has never returned to the peak it has created since then. Morin, the soul of Path, who created Path, left the position of Facebook product manager. He used Facebook more than his contemporaries and experienced the information overload and social fatigue that plagued everyone earlier.

His feelings about the problem are so urgent that his old boss cannot help him solve his troubles. Perhaps only people with this primitive impulse are truly suitable for entrepreneurship.

But in the first few years of the 2010s, social networking was still in the "just right" or even "not big enough" stage for most users, and Path needs to solve an unimpressive and serious problem.

At that time, Facebook just had an advantage on the computer network, and it had not yet rampant on mobile phones, along with Instagram and WhatsApp. Think about it, people were still excited about games like "Happy Farm"; as for the big problems that triggered Zuckerberg to testify to Congress, it did not exist.

So Morin's pain doesn't make most social network users feel empathy until several years later, when Path was already angry.

Now, Facebook is full of "Happy Birthday" blessings automatically generated and synchronized by various third-party applications. Game invitation links and messages generated by not interacting on the platform. Even if you leave a message in Facebook status, I may not be able to see it. This is not the case with "fake news" criticized by governments. Path's original design also allowed users to synchronize selected part of the Path status to Facebook to meet their occasional needs for "broadcasting" to friends and outsiders at the same time.

Even though Facebook is full of "zombies", robots and the accelerated aging of users' average age, people still hope that Facebook will solve the problem itself; and even if these problems will never be solved, everyone will endure it. Not many people in will really #deletefacebook, which is so high that it is unimaginable.

intends to challenge and solve the problem Path until it finally dies, not many people who are dissatisfied with Facebook know about its existence.

It dies from the temptation and betrayal of users

People are too lazy. They complain, but they are always unwilling to make sacrifices and changes sincerely; people are too greedy and capricious, they don’t want to stay at the needs they once said, don’t want to be limited by the needs they used to, and they still want to ask for more.

Many people remember the "user survey" done by Henry Ford before inventing the car: he asked people what kind of transportation they needed, and many people said they wanted a faster horse. So, what if you really build a faster horse? Users will probably be further framed in the concept of "horse", constantly complaining to you that it is not running fast enough, it is too troublesome to get on and off, and it also creates more horse manure.

Even if users have shown a promise, it is best not to completely obey them. If you set the rules they want in the product truthfully, they will feel very uncomfortable and impatient, and may even take their anger on your failure to do the product well.

In " Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ", the old principal Dumbledore must drink poison in order to obtain props. Before taking the medicine, he reminded Harry, who was accompanying him to help, saying that he might become extremely painful and even repent, so he could not continue to drink the medicine, but Harry's only responsibility was to urge him to drink the medicine. At this time, Harry was also similar to the "-inferior " responsibilities when a Japanese samurai committed suicide by separatism.

A product that wants to use rules to restrict user behavior and ensure that they comply with the original design goals is like a "wrong person" like Harry. They force users to be the agreements that the user originally promised to abide by, like forcing him to drink poison. However, software products, especially social networks, are not as powerful as novels and Bushido.

Most of the time, the original purpose of users voluntarily using a "non-mainstream" social software is to gain physical and mental pleasure and relaxation. However, adheres to the "restrained" rules and "kneeling" of changing the principles at any time seems to be neither suitable for , and the balance is quite difficult to grasp. If you want to acquire users who can adhere to principles and create value and revenue, you may only encourage students to check in like pilgrimage like today's "knowledge payment", but Path certainly doesn't want to gain such users.

In Path's practice, they screened away most of the users who were originally dissatisfied with Facebook and fled, leaving only a very small number of users who were strictly self-disciplined, had a clean foul for friends, and were willing to bear the negative impact of deleting their friends' relationships at any time. As a result, Path was unable to achieve the original set number of users and profit targets, which also caused the company's own uncertainty about its development path.

has not improved for many years and has no hope of profitability. Path launched Path Talk, allowing merchants to run "public accounts" to promote business information, and then tried functions such as "drift bottles". In the end, it completely canceled the most iconic feature of the 150-person friend limit. Path's betrayal of the past principles marks the overall confusion and lack of direction of the company , but this does not help it to reverse the decline, but also goes against its original intention of existence. While driving away old users, it cannot attract new users.

In 2015, Morin, the most important founder, left Path, and the company was acquired by the parent company of Kakao Talk, the largest social network in South Korea. Kakao's acquisition of it mainly focused on its remaining advantages in Indonesia , which still has 4 million users there; but Path cannot continue to develop no matter how hard it struggles, it can only be abandoned.

is like some other products that have been abandoned one after another or cannot be saved - QQ pets, Renren.com, etc. Path has also brought good memories to those who use it fully, carrying the true feelings. Considering that the original intention of its product design is to share the most private part of the mood in a small range. Its loyal users will also be hit harder after hearing the news of the outage.

but that didn't help much. A small circle of everyone equals like utopia may bring short-term and beautiful fantasies to those in it, but when the fantasy bubble burst, the "most loyal users" of should have turned the tide and quickly went in and supported a little activity or used other methods (donated to developers?), but this demanded too high on them. they are more happy to see what they are doing and do not intend to help them. If they leave, they will no longer have any concerns.

Path Use your own life to tell all developers: Don’t take the needs that users say seriously.

What do you want?

Speaking of this, do you think our Facebook - that is, WeChat Moments, is still saved? Where is the next "Friends" with fireworks and friends?

It seems that what you need is a software that limits the number of friends to Dunbar's number so that your circle of friends will not look so crowded; or it seems that you want a locked diary, just like a WeChat account or group visible.

is right, why don’t you really use WeChat account or group visible to achieve it? These are all functions that come with the software.

So looks different. What you need is actually much more than just reducing the number of friends . It also includes adding some friends in a timely manner in the occasions when you need it temporarily, but blocking it when you don’t need it, but you still have to maintain the right to unblock it at any time. Almost every move you do is eager to regret and withdraw. After you experience simple grouping rules or life without grouping for a few days, you will immediately invent another complex grouping system.

You must have seen the so-called "6 people in a girl's dormitory have 5 WeChat groups", which perfectly explains why there may be a world of difference between the originally expected functions of the software and the end user's learning and application.

No one can really satisfy you, the erratic and backfire of this end user, this devilish "product manager". What WeChat, QQ Space, Facebook can do is to make as diverse as possible into one product and give you free choices.

When the user cannot even give an accurate definition of what is considered "good", whether to build a better" circle of friends is probably the user who can only solve it himself.

Author: Hangtong News Agency, WeChat public account: Hangtong News Agency (ID: lifeissohappy), Weibo: @lishuhang

This article was originally published by @ Hangtong News Agency and is a product manager. Reproduction of