Zhihu is an original content platform for quality Q&A communities and Chinese Internet creators. It was officially launched on 2011,with the brand mission of "let people better share their knowledge, experience and opinions and find their own answers".
Zhihu is an online Q&A community software. Users can share their knowledge, experience and opinions with each other, have related discussions around a topic of interest, or pay attention to people with similar interests. The fusion of divergent thinking is a major feature of Zhihu. Zhihu encouraged discussion in the question-and-answer process to broaden the divergence of questions.
From "realization" to "good content"
An important discovery that Apple4.us once brought to Kelly Y Zhou is that the Internet community will produce high-quality content for free, that is, UGC (User-Originated Content). This is one of the important driving forces for his later entrepreneurship, and Zhihu's underlying logic is question and answer. The community relies on the question-and-answer mechanism to automatically generate high-quality content, which is further realized and then fed back to the community.
The process of producing high-quality content is from 0 to 1, while the realization of content and the formation of a virtuous circle are from 1 to everything. Zhihu did well in the process from 0 to 1, including the byte-based Wukong Q&A app, which was at a disadvantage in the competition with Zhihu or simply withdrew from this field. Today, Zhihu has become one of the most diverse and rich communities in China, but its core orientation is still "professional discussion". To sum up, Zhihu's success in professional discussion should be attributed to two characteristics of Zhihu's information mechanism: one question and many answers and weighted voting.
One person asks questions and countless people can answer them, which constitutes the pluralistic openness of the community and lays the foundation for equal discussion; Users make high-quality answers stand out and increase professional endorsements through their approval or opposition to the answers.
Zhihu is often regarded as an elite community. It may be true that Zhihu's invitation was hard to find at the beginning of the venture. But today's huge community in Zhihu is more like a match between a large number of curious users and excellent creators through the question-and-answer mechanism. At present, most of Zhihu's creators have professional backgrounds, and professionals-such as mathematician Zhang, world champion of women's fighting, and even myself-will share their knowledge, experience and opinions at the Zhihu.