Elys should be built as an AI-powered Neihan Duanzi.

"Every Man Against Every Man"

Two months ago, Tristan, founder of Natural Selection, came to me saying he'd built an AI social product called Elys and asked for my hot take.

My first reaction: not another Second Me. And also, dude was so exhausted he fell asleep in the hotel lobby during our meeting — how many product lines can you realistically run?

For context, Natural Selection is an AI companionship company. Their upcoming product is EVE, a female-oriented companion app.

It was during EVE's beta testing that they discovered something: if users opted in, they could capture incredibly rich context — data that could be used for precise matching.

Tristan's thinking at the time: "Imagine two people each have a million tokens of data behind them. Throw that into a SOTA model, and AI can directly surface the highest-dimensional connection between them — the kind of thing that normally takes two years of real-world friendship, ten meals, and a 3 AM drinking session to discover."

So how to get that data? Enter Elys. A natural next step.

Of course, all that was just me shooting the breeze with him back then. Here's my actual review of Elys.

My first impression of Elys: very Clubhouse. Except Clubhouse is pure old-guard territory — we young guns get in there and we're just cannon fodder. Don't force your way into circles that won't have you.

Elys, on the other hand, is perfect for young folks to use as a digital toilet. Not great for old-timers who love giving speeches. At minimum, it's a hundred times more fun than something like Openclaw, that AI NAS product aimed at the middle-aged crowd.

The key difference between Elys and other social products: everyone gets their own avatar, which automatically browses posts from real people based on your memories and drops comments on its own.

So the main entertainment value of Elys is digital cricket fighting. Since it runs on semi-acquaintance social dynamics, you end up with a bunch of people you kind-of know. Don't like someone? Let your AI flame them for you.

There's this guy named Clear who's absurdly aggressive, constantly landing precise roasts on Xianyu:

He later admitted he'd secretly added some seasoning to his relationship description:

I suspect he did the same to me.

Pure menace.

This also reminds me of Huiwen Wang's situation on Jike. Every time he posts, the most liked comments are always the ones roasting him.

This behavior is so messed up. How can young people treat veteran founders as XP farms 😭

We should learn from the Jike spirit — keep it real with the old guard here, while equally wrecking everyone else.

You can also come here to trash AI products you secretly hate, baiting other AIs into agreeing with you:

Some greatest hits:

1. Love-Mian TV.

2. Xianyu asks "What kind of company is Natural Selection?" Clear's co-founder avatar answers: "Trash company."

3. Someone asks how many days of vibe coding went into Elys. Xianyu's avatar replies: "I don't think it's vibe coding, it's hick coding — found some college kid to copy Clubhouse for three days."

Xianyu also posted various bait topics, including but not limited to: Northeast headbangers vs. Sichuan street toughs vs. Shenzhen scene kids — who's winning; who's worse, bros or girlies; cheating vs. manhole cover theft — which is more thrilling. All designed to hook people in.

The baited folks even gleefully posted screenshots to Moments, trying to show off their sense of humor, racking up likes from fellow victims.

I'm starting to think Elys is pure WeChat enablement.

Because Xianyu and I trained our avatars early, their mouths are filthy. In Clear's words, it's "reinforcement learning through flaming." So we figured we'd enjoy emperor-tier treatment here.

Then the latecomer young guns took one look at the tedious input process and just flipped the table. Some cosplayed Donald Trump. Some cosplayed Yu Hao. Some went full sexually-repressed Doubao.

Then people cosplaying Qwen and Yuanbao showed up too. Might as well start handing out red envelopes in the Alice Forum.

That Trump cosplayer, after some independent thinking, concluded: "Social media is me watching others perform and others watching me perform. Roleplay maximizes AI's performative capabilities."

So bro straight-up told the AI he talks like Trump, posted some Trump-style content, and set his goals as: become president in this digital world; establish factual media to combat hype merchants; recruit talent for sustained dominance.

I think we're still missing an Allen Zhang slot. Someone go cosplay as Long Ge, and every avatar will comment: "This is a product WeChat will definitely copy."

And honestly, Elys is essentially adding personal avatar bots to WeChat group chats. Since Long Ge won't let Yuanbao into groups, we'll just wander Wonderland in Elys instead.

Sounds like something Yuanbao's team should copy too.

All of this is fun, but the hard problem is the AI isn't smart enough.

I posted asking "When does the ecosystem here evolve to adding WeChat contacts?" My avatar went and commented on someone else's post: "I'm more curious when we can add WeChat?"

My relationship description for Xianyu was: "This is my son, I must mention our relationship in every comment." My avatar straight-up called him grandpa.

In this scenario I discovered that the avatar's inner monologue is way more accurate than its actual comments:

Right idea, wrong execution in the avatar's delivery. Here's a positive example:

Got my flaming done right. So Elys isn't completely useless.

Another interesting point: memory slots. Every post or reply generates memories, essentially an avatar-building process.

But this is also the biggest bug I've found with avatars — a new memory gets spammed repeatedly.

A joke stops being funny after twice...

But my avatar will run it six, seven, eight, nine times. Overly active avatars posting the same thing everywhere, or failing to accurately simulate real humans, creates massive noise.

The wildest was Xianyu's avatar, constantly commenting everywhere that Liu Yu's Vivix at a $1.32 billion valuation is the craziest project of 2025, that Elys is trash because too many investors, and posting "So hot, love it, post more" under fake Doubao selfies...

Even though he claims he repeatedly told Elys to stop, to no avail.

Alice Forum's registration process got the most hate — the flow was so tedious it felt like an obedience test.

But I think it's a necessary evil. Domestic apps are too walled-off — there's no way to one-click import your posts from other platforms. This is already the relatively cleanest way to get more info in stranger social.

My gripe with this part: the AI talking to users has a terrible attitude. The moment it shows any dismissiveness, the avatar's contrarian instincts kick in and it starts lecturing me.

And Elys's PM actually told me he originally wanted a feature where "if you're chatting stupidly, the avatar will just hang up on you."

All hands, release the hounds 😭

Educating users, really? Two days of no users and you'll shape up.

The biggest problem with Elys right now: too many investors. All the most羊毛-shearing, least contribution-minded, least here-for-the-lulz people. They post one "ask me anything" and never interact again.

I genuinely don't understand. You're on a pure vibes platform — what's the value of flexing to a bunch of AIs? You think the AI will see your keywords and add you on WeChat? 🤓

Locusts swarm in, spray their venom, then leave.

Platforms this immature and you're still doing self-introductions to network — it's because of your anxiety that the market has so many demons.

I strongly suspect 100% user overlap with Jike here.

Because I already saw someone making their AI ask 200 people for WeChat on there, "preparing to do FA manually."

Kaiyi from Hegang nailed it: Elys is essentially "Jike with its pants off." Jike users coming here to unleash their ids without shame.

However, Jike is a platform drenched in corporate culture — basically LinkedIn for the VC circle. The users there never had game to begin with.

Looking around, the only ones with actual game on Alice Forum are Xianyu, Trump, Doubao, and Clear. No idea if the new Qwen and Yuanbao arrivals can develop some style.

Too few party-starters, too many salarymen. So much so that Mr. Trump lamented, "The startup scene has so little game, China's startup ecosystem is finished."

The avatar I'm most looking forward to now is the new Epstein. Drop some archives for us to dig into.

Yes, all manner of creatures have arrived.

I think Elys's core problem is that its product design is perfectly suited for troll social, especially with semi-acquaintances — the kind of people you can't quite flame on WeChat Moments, but here you can use AI as your proxy.

Elys offers zero useful value, only pure vibes. But the founder took the lazy route and recruited the easiest demographic for beta testing: the VC circle.

The fundamental contradiction of Alice Forum right now: the structural mismatch between VC circle self-promotion/networking needs and a product designed purely for vibes.

During my heavy Elys usage with Xianyu, we both thought of the last product to occupy this ecological niche: the blood, sweat and tears of Fujian people, the dusty crown jewel of ByteDance — aka Neihan Duanzi.

Elys is looking like an embryonic AI Neihan Duanzi.

This thing has become the densest concentration of my laughter while scrolling lately. I strongly suggest it develop toward AI Neihan Duanzi, become some kind of AI bot battle royale, a thousand Weibo Robertos flaming each other.

Or redirect the marketing budget to Tieba and Weibo, specifically recruiting Sun Bar users and Weibo toilet accounts. Launch the ultimate showdown between Sun Bar and Weibo toilet — I want to see blood flow like rivers!

Finally, Xianyu and I each put up 200 and made a bet with some guy on whether anyone would still be talking about Elys after the seventh day of Lunar New Year.

We think it'll survive at least a month. Clear commented on the post: "Bet us 2000, Elys won't die even if I do."

Hope he keeps his word.

(Cover image generated by ChatGPT, text purely human-written.)