Q&A Social Network Website-case study on zhihu.com

• Motivation behind this presentation

• Introduction

• Theory the Q&A community based on (mainly focus)

• The development processing (mainly focus)

• Technology in Q&A Social Network(mainly focus)

• Future Challenges & Choices

Motivation Behind this Presentation-an idea from my friends

community with effective interpersonal network

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How do you think of your social network in Facebook, Twitter or Wechat?

What factors could lead to an effective interpersonal net work?

useful content

People!

core value.

Introduction

"Zhihu" ,is a Chinese question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by the community of its users. It has a similar product model as Quora originally. But during the development, it become different from Quora in essence.

The company was founded on January 26, 2011. By the end of 2014, the number of registered users of Zhihu had exceeded 11,000,000 ， has more than 80,000,000 active users each month and 2500 updates or comments each second.

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Introduction-funding sources

Zhihu is a Chinese Q&A website launched in Jan 2011. Zhihu reportedly received fundings from Kaifu Lee's Innovation Works, Sequoia Capital (VC firm), and Qiming Ventures. It's located in Beijing, not far away from the campus of Tsinghua University and Peking University.

No specific profits model

initially focus on building an academic, elite and cohesive environment

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Introduction-team member & corporate culture

Young people, not experienced

support culture

direct communication between engineer and users

encourage individual creativity, not much rule

respect people

flexible working hours

adventure spirits

reference: answer about the team from Jixin Huang, founder of Zhihu. http://www.zhihu.com/question/19712388/answer/12764266

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SO, WHAT’S THE SPECIALITY OF ZHIHU?

Theory the Q&A community based on

Cognitive surplus: Shirky argues that since the 1940s, people are learning how to use free time more constructively for creative acts rather than consumptive ones, particularly with the advent of online tools that allow new forms of collaboration. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world?language=en

What we learnt from it?7

Theory the Q&A community based on

Feel to be constructive

high quality content

cohesion

BUT the interactive system that make contributors feel to be constructive is important

BUT relax, seeking interesting things can also be motivation for people to write answers/articles

The advent online tools

voting system

invitation system

classify method8

The Development Processing

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High Quality Q&A Platform — initial stage

SNS (social network service) community of intelligence sharing ——the current stage

Private Think Tank —- still quite far away

Reference: Yongjiao, Wei. "Analysis of Modes of Knowledge Dissemination Online Q&A——a case study of Zhihu Q&A website." (2014): 009.

The Development process—Stage1: High quality Q&A platform

Join method: invitation

Number: limited

Target customer:

Professional elite, expert—-People who has cognitive surplus

People who has real question

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A.high quality content useful content

B.assemble the human resource people!

C.establish a reputation — academic, elitism, successful

D.establish an environment — respect to knowledge and a objective, scientific/academic discussion spirit

core value

——But these are just foundation, the next problem is how to maintain, enlarge and utilize these fundamental resources

The Development Process—current stage: SNS Community

Open Register

Focus on establishing weak interpersonal relationship

Focus on establishing Personal Brand

connect info with personal background

invite people to answer

follow topic/ follow people

Personal Column (on testing)

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The development process—current stage: SSN community

2011 >>> 2012 April >>> 2012 July >>>2013 April,2014,2015…..expansionmore inclusive topicreference:http://web.archive.org/web/20130601000000*/http://zhihu.com

Better Community BUT more potential problems!!!!!

The Development Process—Current Stage: SNS Community

Assessment and Community Feature

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reference: CHEN, Xiaoyu, and Shengli DENG. "Influencing factors of answer adoption in social Q&A communities from users’ perspective: Taking Zhihu as an example." Chinese Journal of Library and Information Science Vol 7.3 (2014).

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Answer Interactive

“Zhihu has strong social ties, and communication or interaction between Zhihu users is an important factor which can be summarized as peripheral cues to keep users active in communities[19]. For users in Zhihu, “the identity of who you are” sometimes far outweighs “whether you can answer the question”[19]. Therefore, if users in Zhihu think that an answer makes them willing to discuss, evaluate and cite, etc., they will have greater intention of adopting the answer. “

“For users in Zhihu, “the identity of who you are” sometimes far outweighs “whether you can answer the question”. Therefore, if users in Zhihu think that an answer makes them willing to discuss, evaluate and cite, etc., they will have greater intention of adopting the answer. “

Answer Entertainment“In this study, we adopted the definitions of answer entertainment by Soojumg & Sanghee and Utpal as follows: An answer that can bring users entertainment value in an SQA site. According to Soojung & Sanghee, there are various social and emotional values that users take into consideration while selecting the best answers in an SQA site. Users tended to adopt those answers with emotional support, positive attitudes, or personal experiences, sometimes, even with

personal humors. Utpal et al. also found that the entertainment value is derived from fun and relaxation through interacting with others. For Zhihu users, they will intent to adopt an answer if they think the answer has entertainment values. Therefore, socio- emotion is an important criterion for assessing answer quality. “

More focus on the people, enhance the personal relationBUT less useful content?Remember! We say motivation can be cognitive surplus but can also be just for Relax!!! And Feedback make author to feel constructive is crucial!conflicts —> Redefine of Core Value?

The Development Process—current stage: SNS Community

An unpredicted trends?

—- More experience-related instead of solid knowledge related question?

（ What kind of experience it is to do sth? ）

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The Development Process—current stage: SNS Community

result:

Many expert who form the initial Zhihu community left

a timeline full of trivial question

unfriendly to a new user (because they will be immersed in a ocean of trivial information)

more like a story sharing website, deviate from a Think Tank Target

Possible Solution

First! Need to make a choice: an experience&story sharing website OR more academic and elite website

Better recommend system, better voting system (See the next slide )

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Technology in Zhihu—data analysis

Not know very well in this part actually… Just to give a general idea. Because we are engineer hahahahahahah

Remember! Advent online tools help cognitive surplus !!!

E.g.Study on subscript:

Users still prefer to use short queries on CQA portals, which is contribute large part of traffic

The information is particularly useful for navigational queries and transactional queries in web search. Related Algorithm:optimized algorithm, NMF

Wu, Yu, et al. "Mining Query Subtopics from Questions in Community Question Answering." Twenty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2015.

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Future Choice & Callenge

Profit OR Non-profit

Continue expand OR Focus more on small, cohesive group

Academic OR Experience/Story

To be a Think Tank OR To be a social website

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