In June 2018, most wechat users saw their new subscription number. In the revision of the subscription number, the article becomes a card content display. All public numbers no longer share a screen of mobile phone, but get larger card display areas according to users' reading habits. Official account is often read and collected. Since then, the subscription number has been revised many times. It is worth mentioning that the content of the article is no longer displayed in chronological order, but in algorithmic order. Many content creators are not used to product revision at the beginning. After a period of trial, they have found their own solutions and began to guide users to interact, like, open and collect more. In this process, wechat has also tried many new functions of recommended articles, making recommendations at the bottom of the subscription number, collecting recommendations on the same topic, and recommending more articles after likes It can be said that in the recent minor revision of wechat subscription number, recommendation has become the most important function. Now, recommendation is no longer a revision of small functions. In the internal test of many users, a large proportion of recommended content appeared in the information flow interface. ▲ the subscription number is revised again Recommended as the protagonist, this large traffic allows you to find new content Before the internal survey, the official account gave many recommended places. The official account of a small part of the information flow, the commentable collection of love and the relevant recommendation after the collection, and the recommendation at the bottom of the article. However, these recommendations are not conspicuous. They are either located at the end of the text or integrated into the original products and are not prominent. ▲ click the like interaction at the bottom of the article to see some recommended articles In the beta version, the recommendation function has gained more exposure, and it can even be said that it has become the protagonist of the subscription number. In the beta version, the content published by the subscription number has been greatly folded, and almost only the articles of one account are displayed, and other articles of interest have been included in "show earlier messages". The original screen content is the frequently read subscription number and the information flow content of the subscription number. Now open the subscription number of the internal test version, and you can only see the frequently read subscription number, the information flow content of an account, display earlier messages and recommendations in one screen. The recommendation is successful and gets more traffic support. It is likely to open the subscription number column and only see one frequently read content. After that, all the recommended content will be brushed down. Tang toughen, who has been tested by grey, said: "the actual experience shows that the content of the official account is much more folded, and the content of the official account will be displayed directly. In addition, the location of the folded area is also not fixed, and there will be algorithms." ▲ subscription number content in grey test. Picture from: Tang Ren The content of the recommendation will be displayed on labels, and the label is located on the left side of the official account name. There is also a "change batch" button at the top right of the section on the right side of the recommendation. Click to see the new recommendation content; In the lower right corner of each recommendation, you can also choose to delete the recommendation and give feedback on why you don't like the recommendation. However, it is different from the algorithm recommendation that has been tried in the previous few small updates. The video has also become an important recommendation in this internal test update. In the recommendation information stream, the proportion of video content is not low, and these contents are subscription number videos, not video number content. Considering that there are still a few subscription creators who are used to pushing videos, we can also think that the change of subscription number internal test recommendation is the greatest gospel for video creators. Only when there are many overlaps between subscription number video and video number video bearing functions, this revision may also confuse many brands and users. But in general, the change of the internal test version is that the recommended content successfully occupies more space, and more video recommendations are added at the same time. ▲ it can be seen that the video content has greatly increased in the recommendation. Picture from: Micro jam Make the new number promising and the subscription number attractive When wechat tries new functions, many users will ask - can you turn it off? Most of the answer is no, and so is this time. Knowing that the user @ 789456123 had become an internal test user of the subscription number in July, he also thought of many ways to try to turn off the recommendation, and even complained about this disliked function to the Ministry of industry and information technology. Two days after the complaint, this function did disappear briefly, but it was put on the shelves again two days later. ▲ the product cannot slide to the bottom, close or block tweets, which are all violations complained by users Netizens who were tested by the internal version early also tried their best to close the recommendation, but even if they closed the privacy policy advertisement and switched back to the old version, there was no way to make this function disappear. The only effective way is to open the wechat youth mode, but this mode has many restrictions on users. It is not necessarily worth opening the youth mode just for recommendation. Most users don't like change. It's conceivable that there will be a lot of disapproval voices about the change of subscription number, but wechat has made a change. In 2017, the data released by WeChat in the first quarter showed that the average opening rate of official account was about 4%. The data in that year can be said to have dropped considerably compared with the previous years, which made many creators feel anxious. Now, this number may be lower than that year. The headlines of millions of fans' accounts can be read, but 1W has become a possible thing. If users want to go back to the subscription number to read articles, the subscription number platform needs to provide more attractive content, and its whole ecology also needs to give creators more confidence and hope. ▲ wechat mailbox This is the existence of recommendation algorithm. The new number can be quickly measured in a short time through the recommendation algorithm. Users don't have to think about what they need to see, they just need to see the content they are interested in. This is far from the initial form of the official account, but from the current beta version, it does change to the more immersive form of the user. Recommendations and the increase of video content have become the focus of this internal test version. It's hard to say whether it will succeed, but this time, the wechat subscription number is really more like today's headlines. (Xinhua News Agency)