Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 142 Viral Spread

Throughout the morning, the line outside the school's printing shop grew longer and longer.

Because group photos of ten or more people are free and not counted in the number of photos, many people bring their group photos to be scanned.

These include not only graduation photos, but also many photos of classmates going on trips, outings, and picnics together. Basically, as long as there are at least ten people in the photos, they will be scanned for free.

The four roommates were so busy they were practically smoking from scanning.

Chen Cheng didn't treat everyone badly; he went and bought a bunch of McDonald's for everyone, and also provided plenty of Zhonghua cigarettes and iced Coke.

When it was lunchtime, the line was still long, so the five of them took turns eating while continuing to scan photos for students and upload them to the backend.

By noon, nearly 300 users on campus had activated their accounts, with an activation rate of about 70%.

Although the remaining 30% haven't been activated yet, Chen Cheng guessed that they were just not available at the moment because their photos had been uploaded to the website. Therefore, Chen Cheng believed that once they had time to go to the internet cafe, they would definitely activate it as soon as possible.

Besides the nearly three hundred activated users, what Chen Cheng found incredible was that the number of registered users had exceeded the number of activated users, surpassing one thousand!

Registered users are more than three times the number of active users.

To put it another way, each activated user contributed an average of three registered users during that morning.

This is mainly thanks to scanning photos, especially group photos.

These days, sharing photos online is difficult, but Renren.com has provided an excellent opportunity.

Moreover, Chen Cheng monitored the backend data and found that users who uploaded graduation photos attracted significantly more new registered users. The user with the most photos even attracted sixteen new registered users.

In the past, graduation photos were printed out one for each person, and most people would keep the photos at home, with very few people bringing them to school.

However, there are exceptions. For example, if the photo contains a boy or girl you like, it might be the only photo of the two of you together, and the only photo of the other person that you have, so you bring it to university.

This class has dozens of students scattered all over the country. Their main way of contacting each other is QQ, but QQ can only be used for text chat. If they really want to look at old photos and reminisce, they can only wait until they go home for vacation.

But things are different now.

A classmate happened to bring photos to university and had them scanned into digital format for free. Naturally, the classmate shared the album address with the other students.

Some witty individuals have even started their own "social media status updates," where they continuously post pretentious and frivolous remarks on their personal pages, hoping to attract the attention of both new and old classmates.

For example, phrases like "Your appearance is like a ray of light, illuminating my wounds before the world," "Don't be obsessed with me, I'm just a legend," and "I love you, but I don't love you back."

This is different from QQ's personal signature. Personal signatures can only show the present and have no past records, but text-based Renren posts can be posted at will. Even if you post a hundred posts a day, they will all be recorded on your personal homepage.

Even more bizarrely, in order to save server bandwidth and capacity, Chen Cheng added a one-click transfer function to the photo album.

If you see a photo of a friend, such as a class photo, and you really like it and want to save a copy to your album, you can simply click "one-click save," and the photo will appear in your album.

However, from a data perspective, the data being accessed is the same image data, requiring no additional storage or uploading.

In just one morning, users of Renren.com all fell in love with this social platform specifically developed for college students.

This unprecedented product, combining personal homepages and photo albums, immediately addressed the social pain points of college students.

Subsequently, the speed of this spread accelerated.

Chen Cheng was surprised by the rapid increase in bandwidth and, fearing it would affect the user experience, immediately contacted the server hosting provider and temporarily added two more independent servers and increased the bandwidth.

It remains to be seen how long the two newly added dedicated servers will last.

Today happens to be the last day of the holiday, and many students have already returned to school, making it very convenient to access the internet. As a result, the number of registered users on the school's intranet has been steadily increasing, and by 2 p.m., the total number of users had exceeded 4,000.

Moreover, these 4,000 people did more than just register and browse; 90% of them completed their profiles and even posted their first status update.

The most outrageous user posted more than a dozen status updates in one morning.

The app itself is highly interactive, allowing users to like, comment, and send small gifts.

However, Chen Cheng's gift design is very simple: a rose. Users don't need to spend money to send roses, but they can only send three roses a day, and only one rose per post. They cannot send the same rose repeatedly.

If a post receives ten roses, it will be displayed in red text, and a red rose icon will appear before the title, somewhat like a Weibo VIP crown, making it very eye-catching.

As a result, many users ask their friends to send them roses on their status updates in order to get this badge.

This inadvertently increased user interaction. Some users even went so far as to create new friends to receive roses, either by inviting new users to register or by creating fake accounts to send roses to themselves.

Chen Cheng could have implemented IP restrictions in the backend, but upon closer examination, he realized that the user numbers on any platform are often inflated, and he didn't need to discourage users' enthusiasm for developing the platform. The fact that they were willing to register new users just to get roses proved that the strategy itself was very attractive to them.

Seeing everyone's high enthusiasm, Chen Cheng made the first push notification to all users in the background.

The push notification stated: Limited-time event: From now until October 10th, users who have more than 10 followers will have their photo album space upgraded from five to ten free, the number of roses they can send per day upgraded from three to six, and they can also send two roses to a single post.

Expanding photo album space is beneficial to oneself, while the overall increase in the number of flowers is beneficial to social interaction.

Like Weibo, Renren has followers, users you follow, and mutual friends.

Anyone who follows you, regardless of whether you follow back or not, will be counted as a follower.

In the afternoon, people started posting discussions about Renren.com in the casual chat section of the Galo Forum.

Several of them had used Renren.com before and were very addicted to it. So, with the motivation of sharing and gaining followers, they started posting in the chat section. Some asked if anyone had started using Renren.com, while others simply sent out mutual follow invitations, hoping to increase their number of followers and break through one hundred as soon as possible.

So, everyone started exchanging Renren IDs in the chat section of the Galo Forum, and then followed each other on Renren.

Yang Siqi was taking a nap in her dormitory at that moment.

He lives a very comfortable life every day. More than half of his monthly advertising fees go into his own pocket, allowing him to easily achieve the threshold of earning over 10,000 yuan a month.

Moreover, relying on his position as the president of the Computer Science Department's student union, he received a lot of subsidies and support from the department. The server and bandwidth for the Galo Forum were provided by the school; the office space for the students in charge of technology was also a classroom provided by the school; and even the computers were provided by the school.

Now, Yang Siqi doesn't even need to develop or maintain it himself; he can leave everything to his classmates and juniors to keep the Galo Forum running smoothly. All he has to do is promote the forum and earn advertising revenue.

While he was sound asleep, the technical staff of the Galo Forum suddenly discovered that the number of information posts had surged even though the website's traffic had not increased.

Data shows that the chat area was unusually lively today, with the number of posts and replies at 2 PM exceeding the previous record for the entire day.

So, the technicians went to the front desk and took a look at the chat area, and found that the first page of the chat area was full of posts asking for mutual following within the school.

This puzzled the technicians. They usually only focused on the backend and backend, and rarely looked at the frontend content. It was like the engine and transmission of a car, running steadily inside the vehicle, but not paying attention to the scenery around them.

Seeing that the comment section was flooded with posts from "Xiaonei" (a Chinese online community), the technical staff did not click to read the content of the posts, but instead called the moderator to inform him of the situation.

In essence, moderators are the administrators of this forum. Their work is mostly done manually. They check posts for inappropriate content and delete them if found. If a user's behavior is excessive, they will ban or suspend their account. If a topic attracts a lot of attention and discussion, it will be marked as a featured post.

However, the moderator was not at his computer at the time, so he was unaware that the forum had been flooded with messages.

When he received the notification and turned on his computer to check the forum, there were already more than 100 posts about Renren.com and more than 5,000 replies.

These people are going crazy talking about the topic of "Xiaonei.com"!

The other party noticed something was wrong and quickly found the address of Renren.com from one of the posts. After entering, he found that he had to register, so he registered one. After registering, he was surprised to find that the website even had a free electronic photo album. He then completed his personal profile.

This completion process was quite significant. After he filled in his name, the university he was attending, and the year of his enrollment, a bunch of avatars and names immediately popped up, along with a description: "People you may know."

He was surprised to find that he knew at least half of the people recommended here.

Because they were all Jiangnan University students in the same year as him, only in different colleges, and the system prioritized sending him users who entered the same university in the same year, he received a lot of information from his fellow alumni.

He was already a junior in college and a moderator of the online forum, so he had a wide social circle at school and knew a lot of people. He immediately recognized many of them.

Just as he was shocked and confused, the system started popping up notifications again, "So-and-so has followed you, so-and-so has followed you, so-and-so has followed you..."

He found it unbelievable, because he knew all of these people. How did they know he had just logged onto the school's intranet?
It turns out that the "people you may know" algorithm is bidirectional.

It will not only match new users with old users they may know, but also push new users they may know to old users.

When long-time users see the notification that "So-and-so has joined Renren.com," and realize it's someone they know, they easily click to follow.

Therefore, within just a few minutes of the moderator in the "flooding" section updating his profile on Renren.com, seven or eight Renren users who knew him received a notification about him.

He wasn't a founding member of the Galo Forum; he was just active on the forum, so Yang Siqi recruited him as a free laborer for the moderators. When he got to Renren.com, he had no idea that Renren.com was stealing users from the Galo Forum.

When he realized that he would be more popular on Renren.com after reaching one hundred followers, his first thought was to post a thread in the chat section of the Galo Forum as a moderator:
Hey guys, I've registered on Renren! Follow me! Follow me back!

In order to quickly attract 100 followers, he also conveniently marked his post as a featured post...

(End of this chapter)