One Pitfall, One Lesson: In the Jungle of Tricks, Young People Have Grown Eyes That See Through Everything | QDaily Research Lab

Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel once described today's young people this way at the American Magazine Media Conference: "They're very good at spotting phony behavior online."

Walk through modern life without paying attention and you'll get conned.

You can roll your eyes now at the health nonsense your parents post in their WeChat Moments. But think back to the old days and you'll remember that you and I both hacked our way out of the jungle of tricks. Every innocent, naive young person has a regret-filled history of falling for one:

You blew half a month's salary buying a designer coat online, sold as "exclusively handmade" and "photographed from the actual product," and what arrived was better described as "toxically handmade" and "photographed from the free sample" — a cut so far off the mark it left you looking like a dark-version Zhu De;

You were so bewitched by the "gentle gentleman" act your ex put on early in the relationship that you lost all sense of direction, and once you finally moved in together you found that love no longer made the beloved beautiful, and daily life came back down to firewood, rice, oil, salt, piss and shit;

You stared at the job ad's promises of "we have a cat" and "we have big dreams," sure you had landed the bargain of a lifetime on a perfect team, only to drop into a sweatshop that flawlessly avoided ever mentioning "raises" or "comp days";

……

Every lesson learned cost a pitfall. Which young person hasn't come through a thousand trials to become the poison-proof sweetheart they are today?!

By now everyone's eyes are so sharp, and see through the playbook so completely, that in every survey QDaily Research Lab ran last year that touched on "tricks," readers answered out of their own "oh god, I fell for that too" experience, with fierce, fed-up indignation:

In the QDaily Research Lab poll "Can We Please Retire These Tired Ad Clichés?," the eight worn-out advertising tropes we listed drew 13,561 votes, and the comments section was all but drowned in people typing "all of the above."

In another QDaily Research Lab poll, "Which Tricks Have You Grown Sick of at China's Hot Tourist Spots?," we received 13,747 votes, and readers in the comments shouted even louder: "hit every single one," "furiously selecting all," "nothing but blood and tears."

At bottom, a trick is born of the illusion that something works every time: one piece of content or one element works especially well, so it gets used over and over until it is worn out.

The first slow-mail postcard shop, for instance, could still tell a decent story about "time as a beautiful capsule." But by your fiftieth renovated old-town tourist district in some Chinese city, counting the dragon's beard candy, blue-and-white indigo cloth and little bamboo snakes piled up at home that you can never finish eating or give away, you will believe that past this village there are countless more shops just like it. Meanwhile, as the years pass, every young person who ever used a time capsule grows into a thoroughly rational adult who knows that if you want to experience a time capsule, you are better off sending something by EMS.

Spotting a trick is a process that runs from suspecting one to confirming the suspicion. The Pew Research Center once ran a detailed analysis of "roughly 50 million millennials between the ages of 18 and 29" and found that millennials are skeptical of institutions of every kind.

Pew's explanation is that young people are internet "digital natives." They use the same smartphones as their parents, but they had mastered every use of a smartphone before they came of age — including getting scammed young, and watching other people get scammed online — and that is what grew them into a generation of rational flowers.

The whole "digital natives" line belongs to the last century by now, but we have to admit the internet really did give young people a bright pair of eyes, and made them the designated eyesight of this world of tricks.

Based on a year of observation, QDaily Research Lab lays out, across four areas — spending money, reading, dating and looking for sensible life advice — the clever ways today's anti-playbook young people see through the playbook.

You Can't Have My Money, and You Can't Have My Heart

Almost every company says "millennials are the future of marketing," and they have all set their sights on the money in young people's pockets.

But data from the American generational-marketing consultancy BoomAgers and the market research firm Natural Marketing Institute shows that 75% of American millennials say their money "mainly covers what they need, not what they want." Japan looks similar: a study by the marketing and consumer research firm Dentsu Innovation Institute found that more than 60% of high school students, college students and people in their twenties want to be seen as "someone who saves money, not someone who spends freely."

Young people may be the largest consumer generation by population, but when it comes to spending, they are hardly about to be blindly lavish.

Drawing on QDaily's earlier reporting and QDaily Research Lab's surveys, we have summed up a few traits of how today's young people resist the spending playbook:

1. They are not easily fooled by e-commerce copy. "Nordic design," "timeless classic" and "Korean-style slim fit" trigger an instinctive wariness; nobody expects those words to lead to anything actually Nordic, classic or Korean.

2. They have made a habit of reading the bad reviews, and buyer photos have become a money-saving weapon. In the QDaily Research Lab survey "What Makes You Abandon an Online Purchase Halfway Through?" we collected 14,113 responses, and "poor buyer reviews" (16.3%) came out as the single biggest reason an impulse buy dies: look at enough buyer photos and a whole meadow of shopping urges gets mowed down.

3. They have mastered a set of see-through-anything shopping skills: use a browser price-comparison plug-in to check the same item elsewhere; click into the enlarged photos to check the details and read them alongside the reviews to judge quality; when unsure about size or color, buy two and return one.

4. They are unmoved by so-called brand stories. Brands that claim to have crossed mountains and rivers to source their raw materials, or that sell flowers, phones or bicycles as "faraway places," "youth" and "a better you," get resented all the more if the product itself is mediocre.

5. They have an instinctive aversion to companies that love to brag. QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey, "In This World of Tricks, How Should We Read the Boasts Companies Make?," which drew 6,897 responses, with people voicing varying degrees of irritation at the following habits of self-congratulation:

Companies with mediocre products always brag that their founder studied abroad or graduated from Peking or Tsinghua University;

Companies that can't do anything well and have no real technology say they are "building a platform";

Companies that claim to be building a whole ecosystem, yet nobody uses their products;

Companies with under 3% market share that casually publish full industry reports;

Serial failures who call themselves "serial entrepreneurs."

1. Eating out teaches them the skill of "one meal, one lesson," and they have gradually built their own guide to avoiding restaurant traps: restaurants with a bizarre concept always taste mediocre; cheap all-you-can-eat hot pot always ends in regret; a common discount trap runs like a little jingle — "why must we have met before to meet now; spend 100, get 30 back" — so you spend furiously to round up to 100, only to discover the rebate doesn't come until your next visit.

2. To get their money's worth at the movies, they no longer trust official promotional taglines, and instead check Douban ratings, IMDb scores and Rotten Tomatoes freshness before choosing a film. They can spot paid shills, and they are wary of anything billed as "star-studded" or as a sequel.

3. Beyond the rating systems, what weighs even more when they pick a film is what the people around them say. In QDaily Research Lab's survey "What Kind of Recommendation Can You Actually Accept?," we collected 3,249 responses, and the top-voted option was "a movie that everyone is praising" (22.5%).

4. When picking travel destinations, they avoid the so-called "hot spots," use Mafengwo to travel on the cheap, and check Zhihu and Moments to hunt down lesser-known places and the most reliable ways to see them. But as niche destinations have grown formulaic themselves, young people have also started to eye every "secret hideaway" and "last unspoiled paradise" with suspicion.

5. They find every possible way to save money while planning a trip: applying for visas through Taobao before going abroad, for instance, or buying a local SIM card and a duty-free membership card in advance.

6. While traveling, they flatly refuse to buy the same souvenirs everyone else buys, and they won't touch "tourist-only" stinky tofu, salt-and-pepper chicken or twisty fried potatoes. If they do bring back a gift, they would rather pick up an ingredient or a seasoning they have never tried. In a related QDaily Research Lab survey, more than a fifth of respondents said they go out of their way to find the lesser-known spots and dishes that locals actually love.

"Share This or You're Not Chinese" — I'm Not Sharing, I Want to Emigrate

Surf the internet and you are bound to run into inspirational pablum, rumors and clickbait headlines. As it turns out, young people stopped buying articles titled "Shocking!", "A must-read deep dive" or "Share this or you're not an X" a long time ago.

On this ability to filter information, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel once described today's young people this way at the American Magazine Media Conference: "They're very good at spotting phony behavior online."

Several QDaily Research Lab surveys show that young people display the following traits when reading online:

1. They hate inspirational pablum. The most annoying kind is the "goodnight + celebrity quote" post that fills Weibo every evening, along with the self-satisfied "if you're well, then it's a sunny day" genre.

2. Anti-pablum isn't popular either. Pushing the theory that education is useless, or writing "another day is gone; how did today go, is your dream even further away now?" — anti-pablum that simply flips a positive-energy line into a negative-energy one and says it again — has crude, simplistic logic, and 19,680 readers said they hate it.

3. Debunking rumors has become a survival skill. They still occasionally fall for ancient legends like "the crescent moons on your fingernails are a health barometer" or "papaya enlarges your breasts," but given the chance they will actively dig for the truth, and they now treat "recommending fact-checking accounts to their parents" as a modern form of filial piety.

4. They refuse clichés. QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey, "Which 'Viral Golden Quotes' or Clichés Are You Sick of Seeing?," which drew 5,694 responses, and we found that "share this or you're not Chinese" is the line young people find most obnoxious.

5. They hate being played by clickbait headlines. Jon Stewart once described the feeling clickbait gives you like this: you are walking along a beach where a crowd is hawking customers, shouting "Come see the three-legged man!" — and you run over only to find a guy on a crutch. In our survey, people said the dumbest kind of headline is the one that opens with "Someone tagged you."

Playing the Specimen of a Beautiful Human Being, Without Expecting to Grow Old Together

When a relationship first starts, you and I inevitably go blind, each of us playing the specimen of a beautiful human being: careful makeup, refined table manners, on standby anytime and anywhere, refreshing Weibo and Facebook sixty times a day... Once the honeymoon ends, everyone reverts to their true form.

As more and more relationship bubbles burst, young people have grown more interested in working out the tricks of romance. Search "trick" on Zhihu and the top question is "How Do You Tell a Trick from Sincerity?" — followed by 11,725 people, with 961 answers, and the top-voted answer has 3,054 upvotes.

One group of people's blood-and-tears experience really is another group's ladder to progress.

Our surveys also show that many so-called "dating playbooks" no longer work, and that young people have gradually become able to:

1. See through certain romantic disguises. Little love tricks, like "women (who often don't actually enjoy it) doing full makeup, washing their hair and carefully putting an outfit together every day" or "men (who love to put on an act) having a good temper early in a relationship," are no longer secrets. People are forewarned and take the inevitable changes calmly.

2. Not fall for melodramatic romantic moves. Overblown gestures — shouting "XXX, I love you! Be my girlfriend!" outside a dorm building, dropping to one knee in public, delivering a soap-opera line like "I don't deserve you" — draw more and more eye-rolls.

3. Look for a partner more scientifically. We once ran a survey, "How Do You Screen Candidates for a 'Soulmate'?," which drew 4,666 responses, and we found that young people no longer screen soulmate candidates by looks alone: a shared sense of humor, shared values, and taste in music and movies matter now too.

4. Face the brutal side of marriage head-on. In our survey on "Which Movies Do You Think Couples Must Watch Together Before Getting Married?" the top pick was Gone Girl, and many people endorsed the view that "if there are cracks in a relationship, better to talk them out before the wedding than after."

5. Hold more varied and open-minded values about relationships. We once ran a survey on "Which Outdated and Vulgar Dating Rules Are You Sick of Hearing?" which drew 6,319 responses. The results showed that the romance advice of 1990s relationship magazines — "dating without the intention to marry is just messing around," "with sex the woman always loses out and the man always comes out ahead," "you're the guy, so let her have her way," "whoever gets serious first loses" — is gradually leaving the stage of history.

Hey, the Advice You're Giving Is Complete Nonsense

In the early days of reform and opening up, when information was scarce, fashion-forward men and women turned to magazines for advice: how a silk scarf could add a touch of allure, how to eat a Western meal properly, how to make the man you liked unable to resist you. These days, though, letting a fashion editor who makes 5,000 yuan a month tell you what to wear has started to feel increasingly strange.

Young people have a defensive dislike of this kind of meddling in their lives:

1. QDaily Research Lab once ran a poll, "Which Over-the-Top Menswear Advice Are You Sick Of?" Fashion magazines and apps carelessly push prints, florals, big florals and embroidery as spring and summer must-haves; they tell everyone, whoever they are, to undo a few shirt buttons to look dashing and free; they insist a black logo tee with baggy pants will make you a trendsetter; they keep recommending suit-styling articles to men who are not executives. Advice like this only leaves men feeling that "reading it changes nothing, buying it changes nothing," and useless outfit advice mostly leaves men more lost than before.

2. Decorating a home is the same story. Unreliable home-decor magazines and furniture makers have questionable taste and keep recommending mysteriously ugly orange or bright-green sofas, or a photo wall that puts you in a cozy 1990s home in one second flat. Young people no longer take that advice at face value, and they no longer trust single, blanket style labels like "simplified European" or "Mediterranean."

3. Blunt advice delivered under the banner of "life mentor" is entirely unwelcome. In our survey, "there's no such thing as depression, you're just overthinking it," "why do girls have to work so hard" and "I'm doing this for your own good" were named the three most annoying pieces of advice, all deserving the answer "none of your business."

4. They are highly alert to sexism and stereotyping. Lines like "women should marry and have kids early instead of doing a PhD," "marrying well beats studying well" and "women should dress more conservatively — if you dress to attract, don't blame anyone else" were strongly attacked in our survey.

Sorting through young people's attitudes toward the playbook, we noticed something else: the less something follows the playbook, the more people can't get enough of it.

Take official accounts. The "copy-and-paste robot" kind that posts on a fixed schedule has fallen out of favor, while accounts "with a human in them" — like Alipay's, which sometimes goes several days without posting and other times posts nothing but a single period — have started to take off. The data shows that as of September, Alipay's account had already passed 2 million subscribers, with an average open rate of around 20%.

People have also cooled on "beautifully made official emoji sets," and instead can't put down the crudely made, cheekily cute ones.

In our survey "Which Things Do You Love More the Less They Follow the Playbook?" we collected 8,631 responses. The favorite anti-playbook examples were: extremely low-resolution goofy emoji (1,763 votes, 20.5%); deliberately cheap special effects (1,578 votes, 18.3%); and anime or games made deliberately rough (1,282 votes, 14.9%).

The anti-playbook is popular largely because people are sick of the playbook. After sitting through so much stuff billed as a big production that turns out to be terrible, running into something that ignores the playbook and is rough in a way that hits you right where it counts makes people burst out with "so addictive," "hypnotic" or "hahahaha, this is unhinged."

Goodbye, playbook. Hello, anti-playbook.

Before long, though, you will discover that the anti-playbook you have embraced usually only looks like it has given up on itself, while in secret it is working who knows how hard to poke at you... it is simply a new playbook.

So congratulations: you have successfully leveled up into a new, higher-order world of playbooks.

Cover image by: Lin Xiaoyao

QDaily Research Lab**is a survey column at QDaily, an interactive platform for exploring all kinds of lifestyle questions. It might be about a shift or a trend in how people live, or about some brand's service. You can vote, vent and state your opinion here.