Why were websites like Quora and Zhihu not born until 2009?

As it continues to open up and the number of users grows, the problem Quora will face is how to ensure that the quality of Q&A does not decline, and how to expand beyond the IT field into an organized circle. The problems faced by Quora will also be the problems faced by Zhihu. Judging from the public beta of Zhihu, like Quora in its early days, Zhihu has also attracted the attention of some "big names" and "opinion leaders" in the IT industry. It is said that Tencent's boss Pony also came after hearing the news. These two types of registered users account for the vast majority. The community atmosphere is very geeky.

With the wave of Web 2.0, traditional Q&A websites rely on users to create content, but at the same time they also generate a large amount of low-quality and even false spam information, making it a burden for users to filter and identify information. After social networks popularized a new generation of News Feed communities, it became a new idea to introduce relationships between users to help discover and filter questions and answers. To a certain extent, it can also solve the pragmatic tendency of users to "leave after reading" and increase stickiness.

Of course, Quora and Zhihu cannot rely on the self-correction of content by massive users like Wikipedia. Because the problem is not the entry, which in theory would have countless inferior variations. Quora and Zhihu have not adopted extreme methods such as strict real-name system such as ID number authentication to limit users' malicious intent, and cannot fundamentally solve the above-mentioned problems.

Therefore, this will be a long-term struggle. Before the machine is smart enough, maintaining community atmosphere and content quality will need to be solved by operators. Zhihu still has a long way to go, and I hope it can successfully find answers for itself.

In general, the problems Zhihu faces mainly include the following four aspects:

The proportion of valuable questions has become smaller

Many people have registered to Zhihu People who refuse to explore on their own but blindly ask questions.

The purpose of the Q&A community is to solve some difficult problems. If you can already find the answers, but keep asking almost naive questions because of laziness, then the quality of the questions in such a Q&A community will undoubtedly slowly deteriorate. decline.

In the early days of Zhihu, a group of elites answered and raised questions. There are now nearly 10,000 registered users, the scale of questions has become larger, and meaningful answers have become increasingly scarce. A big reason is that the elites don't answer questions anymore. This may be a tacit approval of the early work of Zhihu. In the early days, these people answered, and many classic questions and answers appeared, and then spread on the Internet, attracting more people to ask for invitations. Zhihu’s marketing strategy is indeed successful.

Zhihu has become a rising star in the Chinese Q&A community, with the aura of investment in innovative factories, so early publicity is no longer necessary. Those who had created countless classic questions and answers then retired into seclusion. So the questions and answers you can see are no longer as impressive as they were at the beginning.

If Zhihu cannot solve this problem, it will just become another Baidu Zhizhi and Tianya Q&A.

The proliferation of similar questions

There is a classic similar question that has been asked quite a few times: How to check which registrant you are on Zhihu.

This question was answered four months ago and no new answers are added to the archive. However, I still see this problem recurring from time to time.

As mentioned, the quality of Zhihu's registered users is constantly declining, and there are more and more lazy people - they don't even want to search to see if this problem has been solved.

Zhihu should be able to solve this problem. The key to social Q&A is not the quantity of questions, but the quality.

Service stability

This sentence has often appeared on Zhihu in recent days: "The server has asked a question, and we are nervously writing the answer..."

This error message is very user-friendly, but it makes people feel uncomfortable when seeing it often. Stability is a requirement for all websites. Frequent service errors can easily degrade the user experience.

Another common problem is that when entering the Zhihu homepage for the first time, there will be only a search box and buttons on the entire page, with a white screen at the bottom. You need to click elsewhere or refresh to get better. This problem is often seen in Chrome and Firefox. Someone also asked this question on Zhihu. But I haven't seen a solution yet.

When the number of registered users on Zhihu reaches 100,000,000 in the future, the stability requirements of the service will undoubtedly become higher. I hope Zhihu can solve this problem well.

Incentive system

Answering questions on Zhihu basically relies on human instinct to like to help others, and to show off one’s abundant knowledge reserve. But we cannot ask everyone to have this mood every day.

Zhihu’s incentive system needs to be improved. Some people’s questions are not answered, which further dampens the enthusiasm of users.

Such psychological activities must be experienced by many Zhihu registrants. We saw that the questions raised by the original Internet celebrities were immediately answered, approved, and voted by a group of people; and the questions raised by an unknown celebrity, even though they were full of meaning, were ignored for countless days. , there is not even a chance to invite others to answer...

A good incentive system can continuously arouse users' desire to answer questions, and then their own questions can be answered well. This is a truly virtuous cycle. Otherwise, Zhihu will just become a community where aristocrats and celebrities ask questions and answer questions.

Opinions on the incentive system

In China, there are too many various websites and too many various incentive systems. It is difficult to feel how much actual effect they have. The final effect may be It just divides people who are originally equal into three, six or nine levels, but the further you go, the harder it is to motivate new people. With levels and various rules, superiority can be reflected, which will lead to pride, which is not conducive to users. Speak enthusiastically and proactively. And relying on personal influence, personal reputation, and personal charisma to win some respect in one's own circle is enough to make people more active in answering more other questions and expanding one's own charisma. No superficial number V or account level is needed to motivate.