QuanDiem asks Vietnamese users to vote and discuss their favorite topics

One of the hottest topics on QuanDiem was, of course, the life and death of Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s acclaimed war hero.

Vietnam’s online landscape is dominated by forums. It’s for this reason that QuanDiem, which means perspective, is interesting because it is charting new territory for social media online. Similar to Reddit, QuanDiem is basically a voting platform for people who are interested in a gamut of topics.

If you look below, the platform basically allows any user to post their thoughts and ask other users if they like/dislike/agree/disagree with their statement. QuanDiem’s simplicity gives it huge potential since the social media space is still largely dominated by Facebook and forums that are unable to serve a larger portion of the less nerdy but conversational population.

The site was launched earlier this September, so its beginnings are still humble. According to Anh Dung Bui, co-founder of QuanDiem:

Initial feedbacks have been pretty positive, we received a lot of encouragement from people in the startup community. We’ve gotten more than a thousand Facebook likes in the first two weeks, and some of the hottest topics received between five hundred and a thousand votes and comments.

That’s quite a strong launch for a new social media site in Vietnam. For contrast, take a look at the death of the Pinterest clones late last year and the steady decline of LinkHay’s userbase, Vietnam’s Digg clone. QuanDiem’s initial traction parallels UBox’s early success with its meme-oriented commenting system. It underlines something novel in Vietnam’s internet: a group of early adopters that are willing to try something new.

The new wave of social media in Vietnam

Vietnamese users haven’t been known to be receptive to these new models. Recently however, there has been a tidal shift on Vietnam’s internet. Not only is the country one of the world’s fastest growing Facebook countries in the world, but small sites like HaiVL, which only specializes in allowing users to upload and upvote funny pictures, have only recently gained massive traction (HaiVL has over 2 million unique visits per day). A quick look at the heated chat app battle in Vietnam hints that there are still no winners yet. That’s because users are willing to try new things like never before. These new models have paved the way for users to open up to sites like QuanDiem. Dung says:

By building QuanDiem.net, we aim to offer a place where Vietnamese could go to to share their opinions on all aspects of life. It has to be easy and fun to use, while at the same time promotes meaningful conversations and insightful content.

QuanDiem has arrived at the intersection of the new trends mentioned above: Vietnamese people have become receptive to new models of interacting with content, and they need a means to chat about new content. Instead of Quora, which starts with a question and eventually sources for the best answers, QuanDiem starts with voting and ends in discussion. This may also remind you of Reddit. Dung elaborates: