As Quora continues to open up and grow its user base, the questions it will face are how to keep the quality of its questions and answers from dropping and how to expand into more established circles outside of the IT field. the same problems Quora faces will be faced by Zhihu. From the public beta of Zhihu, like Quora in its early days, Zhihu has attracted the attention of some "big names" and "opinion leaders" in the IT industry, and Tencent's boss, Pony, is also said to have heard of it. These two types of registered users make up the vast majority. The community atmosphere is very Geek.
Traditional Q&A sites, which started with the Web 2.0 wave, relied on users to create content, but also generated a lot of low-quality and even fake spam, making it burdensome for users to sift through and discern information. After social networks popularized the new generation of News Feed communities, it became a new way of thinking 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 "read and leave" and increase the stickiness.
Of course, Quora and Zhihu can't rely on the self-correction of content by a huge number of users like Wikipedia. Because a question is not a phrase, it will theoretically have countless inferior variants. Quora and Zhihu also did not take the extreme method of strict real-name system such as ID number authentication to limit the user's maliciousness, and can not solve the root of the problem mentioned above.
So it's going to be a long fight, and until the machines are smart enough, it's going to be up to the operators to maintain the community atmosphere and the quality of the content. Zhihu has a long way to go, and I hope it succeeds in finding answers for itself.
Overall, there are four main problems facing Zhihu:
Smaller proportion of valuable questions
Many people who have signed up for Zhihu refuse to explore on their own, but instead just ask questions.
The purpose of the Q&A community is to solve some of the more difficult problems. If you can already find the answers yourself, but because of laziness, you keep asking almost childish questions, then the quality of the questions in such a Q&A community will undoubtedly decline slowly.
Early on, Zhihu was a place where a bunch of elites answered questions and asked questions. Now that there are nearly 10,000 registered users, the size of the questions has gotten bigger, and meaningful answers have become increasingly scarce. A big reason for this is that the elites don't answer questions anymore. This may be a tacit approval of Zhihu's preliminary work, which was answered by these people in the early days, and a lot of classic questions and answers appeared, which were then spread over the network to attract more people to ask for invitations. Zhihu's marketing strategy is indeed successful.
As Zhihu has become a rising star in the Chinese Q&A community, with an aura of investment from Innoventions, pre-publicity has become unnecessary. Those who once created countless classic questions and answers have gone into hiding. So the questions and answers are no longer as impressive as they were at the beginning.
If we can't solve this problem, we're just going to be another Baidu or Tianya.
The proliferation of similar questions
One of the more classic similar questions has been asked quite a few times: how to see what number of registrants you are on Zhihu.
This question was answered four months ago and archived without adding new answers. However the author can still see a repeated flood of this question from time to time.
As mentioned, the quality of Zhihu's registered users is declining, and there are more and more lazy people - they don't even want to search to see if the question has been solved.
Zhihu should be able to solve this kind of problem. The key to social Q&A is not the quantity of questions, but the quality.
Service stability
This phrase has been popping up a lot on Zhihu in recent days: "The server posed a question, and we're working furiously on the answer..."
This is a very user-friendly error message, but it's uncomfortable to see it so often. Stability is a requirement for all websites. Frequent service errors can easily reduce the user experience.
Another frequent occurrence is that the first time you enter the home page of Zhihu, it will appear that the entire page is only the search box and buttons, and underneath are white screens. You need to click somewhere else, or refresh a bit to get better. This problem is often seen in chrome and firefox. This issue has also been raised on Knowledge. But the author hasn't seen a solution yet.
After Zhihu's registered users reach 100,000,000,000 in the future, the stability of the service will undoubtedly become more demanding. I hope that Zhihu will be able to solve this problem properly.
Incentive system
Answering questions on Zhihu is basically based on the human instinct to help others and to show off our rich knowledge base. But we can't ask everyone to be in that mood every day.
The incentive system needs to be improved, as some people ask questions that go unanswered, which discourages users even more.
This kind of mental activity must be shared by many Zhihu registrants. We see the original Internet celebrities put forward the question immediately get a group of people to answer, in favor of, vote; and their own an obscure small curiosity put forward the question, even if full of answers to the significance of the question, but a day or two days countless days no one asked, and even invite others to answer the opportunity to not ......
A good incentive system can constantly arouse users' desire to answer questions, and then their own questions are well answered. This is the real virtuous cycle. Otherwise, Zhihu will only become a community where noble celebrities ask and answer questions.
On the incentive system
In China, too many various websites, too many various incentive systems, feel not much of a practical effect, the final effect may just be the original equality of people, divided into three, six, nine, etc., but the more to the back of the more difficult to stimulate the motivation of the newcomers, there are grades, with all kinds of rules, can reflect the superiority of the pride of psychology, but not to the benefit of users enthusiastically and actively. On the contrary, it is not conducive to the users to speak enthusiastically and actively. And rely on personal influence, personal reputation, personal charisma, in their own circle, to win part of the respect, it has been enough to make people more active to answer more other questions, to expand their charisma, which does not need the surface of the number + V or account level to motivate.