Yes, that’s right. Alipay has started socializing again. This time, it has added a social function called Interest Communities to the Alipay message page. It looks like Douban groups. Users can join some groups and post in them, including text and pictures. I have not seen any video content yet.
As a financial tool, Alipay always wants to do social networking. Now Alipay is extremely bloated, but after repeated failures, Alipay still wants to continue to do social networking.
The interest community being launched this time should be currently only in internal testing in Hangzhou. Among the selected cities, only Hangzhou is available, and more cities are being accessed. The interaction volume of various recommended posts is relatively small, and there is no reading function, so you can only see stars, comments and likes.
After a quick scan on Bluepoint.com, I found that most posts have no interaction at all, and these are recommended posts. If you join a specific group, you can see that the interaction in the group is also very deserted.
By the way, I saw this internal beta test on Blue Dot about ten days ago. The large banner at the top of the news page cannot be closed, but Blue Dot has never clicked on it. I only remembered to click on it after seeing Tech Planet’s report today. There is nothing new.
Some recommended groups include Coffee Study Club, Get Tipsy Today, Let’s Go Camping Together, Passionate Baseball Players, Fishing Friends Please Get in the Car, etc. We have not yet found that users can actively create new groups.