31: Chapter 31 Micro-view Officially Defeated

Tencent Group Headquarters.

Sun Qiang pushed open the office door and slammed the data report in his hand onto the desk.

"Nineteen minutes?"

"It was clearly twenty-one minutes yesterday. Why is the average daily duration only nineteen minutes today?"

There were far fewer people in the conference room than last time.

Zhang Li sat in the middle, his expression looking rather grim.

In the corner, the head of the Algorithm Task Force kept his head down, his fingers unconsciously rubbing his knees.

"General Manager Sun, there was indeed a minor issue with the recommendation module of one server group during the early morning maintenance yesterday. It caused increased push delays for some users, which pulled down the average duration slightly. It’s been fixed today."

"It's just a technical adjustment!"

...

Another day passed.

"Down to seventeen minutes, and you call this a technical adjustment?"

...

"Fifteen minutes. Still a technical adjustment?"

...

Weikan's average daily online duration began to slide.

In the following days, it stalled completely at the fifteen-minute mark and never rose again.

At this moment.

Tencent Group Headquarters.

Sun Qiang tossed the report onto the table, turned to the projection screen, and pointed at the duration curve that had been declining for several consecutive days.

"Fifteen minutes on the first day, twenty on the second, twenty-one on the third, and then? Then it never went up again. You call this a technical adjustment?"

Zhang Li opened his mouth but couldn't find the words.

The Weikan backend was open on the laptop before him. The figure in the average usage duration column clearly read: fifteen minutes.

This number hadn't budged for days.

Sun Qiang turned his gaze to the head of algorithms in the corner.

"Stand up. Tell me exactly what is going on."

The head of algorithms slowly stood up.

His lips trembled, and his voice squeezed out of a dry throat.

"General Manager Sun."

"The eighty percent we mentioned before... we actually couldn't reach it at all."

"The reality is likely only thirty percent."

Everyone in the conference room turned to look at him at once.

At this point, there was no longer any meaning in keeping up the deception.

"The architecture of Douyin's Recommendation Algorithm is too advanced."

"Our team started from scratch, but the further we went, the more we realized we simply couldn't understand many of the core logics."

"It wasn't a lack of time; it was a lack of understanding."

His voice grew lower, but every word fell clearly into the ears of everyone present.

"The algorithm we've built can, at best, only mimic Douyin's surface behavioral patterns. We haven't even scratched the surface of the underlying logic."

"The first wave of duration increase was because users were so used to being mistreated by the version without any algorithm that they felt anything was better than nothing."

"But after a few days of use, all the flaws in the algorithm were exposed."

"Recommendation Drift, Tag Mismatching, and insufficient exposure for Long-tail Content—our framework cannot fundamentally solve these issues."

"Enough."

Sun Qiang didn't lose his temper.

He just slowly closed the report in his hand, placed it on the table, and spoke with a terrifying calmness.

"An algorithm with only thirty percent effectiveness, and you told me eighty."

The conference room was so quiet that everyone's breathing could be heard.

Zhang Li stared down at his laptop screen, not daring to look up.

The head of algorithms stood there, his lips moving, but no sound came out.

He knew that anything he said would be useless now.

Sun Qiang was silent for a long time before he spoke. His voice held no anger, only exhaustion.

After a long sigh, he slumped into the sofa behind him, as if all his spirit had been deflated.

"What is Weikan's current DAU?"

"Ten million."

"Since the check-in activities and cash red envelope events from the new version are still ongoing, the DAU is still holding up."

"Cancel the activities. Every extra day they run is just another day of burning money."

Zhang Li looked up sharply.

"General Manager Sun, but if we cancel the activities, then Weikan will really..."

"I know, but we've lost."

Sun Qiang pushed the report to the center of the table, as if pushing away something that no longer had anything to do with him.

"In the field of Short Videos, we have lost."

"We didn't lose on traffic, promotion, or capital."

"We lost on a big data algorithm."

"Qin Mo created something we couldn't. Douyin won, and Weikan lost. It's as simple as that."

He stood up and straightened the hem of his suit jacket.

"Fortunately, Douyin is just a small company with only one product."

"The scale of Short Videos is only so big. At most, it's worth a few billion. Compared to Tencent's trillion-dollar valuation, it's not even pocket change. Winning or losing in this track won't hurt Tencent's core."

He turned around to face everyone in the conference room.

"As of today, Weikan is removed from the core project sequence."

"All traffic resources previously allocated to Weikan will be withdrawn starting tomorrow. The operations team will retain basic maintenance staff, and the algorithm team is disbanded effective immediately."

No one protested.

No one dared to.

Zhang Li looked down at the data report in front of him, wiped his face with his hand, and remained silent.

Just then, the conference room door was pushed open from the outside.

The head of operations for Douyu walked in quickly, holding a freshly printed data report, his expression even worse than Zhang Li's.

"General Manager Sun, something has happened at Douyu."

Sun Qiang, who had just sat down, straightened up again.

"Speak."

"Over the last ten days or so, the DAU for both Douyu and Huya has been dropping. Together, they've lost nearly ten percentage points."

"We conducted a user churn analysis and found that a significant portion of the lost users migrated to Douyin."

"We suspect that Douyin's live streaming feature has started poaching our users."

Sun Qiang froze for a moment, then waved his hand and leaned back into his chair.

"Douyin's live streaming? You're overthinking it."

"We did an analysis before. Their live streaming data is mediocre for everyone except Jiang Youyou. The average concurrent viewers don't even reach three digits."

"What kind of waves could that kind of live streaming possibly make?"

"Just keep an eye on your people and make sure those top streamers don't get poached."

An executive nearby, who had previously been responsible for live streaming industry analysis, chimed in.

"General Manager Sun is right."

"I've also spoken with the operations over at Huya. Douyin's live streaming has been online for nearly a month, and only Jiang Youyou's numbers are decent."

"The viewer counts for the other rooms aren't even a fraction of a Mid-tier Streamer's on Douyu. They pose no threat to our two leading platforms."

The head of Douyu was still a bit uneasy.

"But the data is definitely dropping..."

"Data fluctuations are normal. Just go back and run a few events to pull them back up."

Sun Qiang waved his hand, signaling the end of the topic.

The head of Douyu couldn't say anything more. He nodded and turned to leave the conference room.

People in the conference room began to leave one by one, chairs scraping unevenly against the floor.

After Weikan was officially abandoned.

Over a month passed quickly in tranquility.