Problems faced by Zhihu

With the continuous opening up and the increasing number of users, Quora will face the problem of how to ensure that the quality of questions and answers will not decline, and how to expand to a more organized circle outside the IT field. The problems faced by Quora will also be the problems faced by Zhihu. Judging from the public beta in Zhihu, like Quora's early days, Zhihu also attracted the attention of some "big names" and "opinion leaders" in the IT industry. It is said that Pony, the boss of Tencent, also heard the news. These two types of registered users account for the vast majority. The community atmosphere is very Geek.

With the rise of Web 2., traditional question-and-answer websites rely on users to create content, but at the same time, they also produce a lot of low-quality and even false junk information, which makes it a burden for users to screen and identify information. After the popularization of a new generation of News Feed community in social networks, it has become a new idea to introduce the relationship between users to help find 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 can't rely on massive users to correct their content like Wikipedia. Because the problem is not the entry, in theory, it will have countless inferior variants. Quora and Zhihu didn't adopt strict real-name registration system, such as ID number authentication, to limit users' malice, so they couldn't fundamentally solve the above-mentioned problems.

Therefore, it will be a long struggle. Before the machine is smart enough, maintaining the community atmosphere and content quality needs operators to solve these things. Zhihu still has a long way to go. I hope it can successfully find the answer for itself.

Generally speaking, the problems faced by Zhihu are mainly in the following four aspects:

The proportion of valuable problems has decreased

Many people who have registered in Zhihu refuse to explore by themselves but ask questions blindly.

The purpose of Q&A community is to solve some difficult problems. If you can already find the answers, but you are lazy and keep asking almost naive questions, then the quality of questions in this Q&A community will undoubtedly decline slowly.

In early Zhihu, a group of elites answered questions and raised questions. Now there are nearly 1, registered users, and the scale of questions has become larger, but meaningful answers have become increasingly scarce. The big reason is that elites no longer answer questions. This may be a tacit approval of Zhihu's early work. In the early days, these people answered questions, and many classic questions and answers appeared, and then spread the network to attract more people to ask for invitations. Zhihu's marketing strategy is really successful.

Zhihu has become a rising star in the Chinese Q&A community, with the aura of innovative factory investment, so the early publicity is no longer necessary. Those who have made countless classic questions and answers have retired. So the questions and answers you can see are not as impressive as they were at the beginning.

If Zhihu can't solve this problem, it will only be reduced to another Baidu know-it-all.

The proliferation of similar questions

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

This question was answered four months ago, and no new answers are added to the archive. However, the author can still see the repeated flooding of this problem from time to time.

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

Zhihu should be able to solve this problem. The key to social question and answer is not the quantity of questions, but the quality.

Service stability

In recent days, this sentence often appears in Zhihu: "The server asked a question, and we are writing the answer nervously ..."

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

Another common occurrence is the first time you enter Zhihu's homepage, and there will be only a search box and buttons on the whole page, with a white screen at the bottom. You need to click somewhere else or refresh it to get better. This problem is often seen in chrome and Firefox. This question has also been raised in Zhihu. But I haven't seen the solution yet.

after the number of registered users in Zhihu reaches 1, million in the future, the requirement for service stability will undoubtedly become higher. I hope Zhihu can solve this problem.

Incentive system

Answering questions on Zhihu is basically based on human instinct to help others and to show off how rich their knowledge is. But we can't ask everyone to feel this way every day.

Zhihu's incentive system needs to be improved, and some people's questions are not answered, which will further dampen users' enthusiasm.

There must be many registered people in Zhihu who have such psychological activities. We saw that the questions raised by the original internet celebrities were immediately answered, approved and voted by a group of people; And the question put forward by an unknown coffee girl, even though it is full of meaning, has been ignored for countless days, and there is no chance to invite others to answer it ... < P > A good incentive system can constantly arouse users' desire to answer questions, and then their own questions can be well answered. This is the real virtuous circle. Otherwise, Zhihu will only become a community where aristocrats and celebrities ask questions and answer questions.

Views on incentive system

In China, there are too many websites and incentive systems, and there are not many practical effects. The final effect may only be to divide people who were originally equal into three or six grades, but it is more and more difficult to stimulate the enthusiasm of new people. With grades and rules, they can reflect their superiority, which will produce pride, which is not conducive to users' active speech. Relying on personal influence, personal reputation and personal charm to win some respect in your own circle is enough for people to answer more other questions more actively and expand their personal charm, which does not need the superficial number +V or the level of the account to motivate.