To understand Zhihu, I analyzed the founder’s 2,699 answers and 200 seed users.

Since its founding in 2010, Zhihu has always attracted considerable attention in the Internet industry. Whether it was the early invitation system, the angel investment from Kai-Fu Lee of Innovation Works, or the recent C round of financing led by Tencent and D round of financing led by Capital Today, Zhihu has made headlines in technology media many times.

Privately, many friends in the Internet circle often go to Zhihu to find hot topics that they can discuss with friends today, or read long interpretations from experts from different industries. Even last year's Baidu Wei Zexi incident , Alipay's "White-collar Diary" circle and other hot topics of public opinion all completed the first round of public opinion fermentation on Zhihu.

Because our team at Tencent Cloud is also responsible for a PGC content product similar to Zhihu, Tengyun Pavilion , we mainly invite technical experts from Tencent and architects and small and medium-sized developers among Tencent Cloud customers to share their first-hand technical experience in the form of technical articles. We are currently in a cold start-up phase with less than 200 seed users , so the best way to grow is to first find industry benchmarks, learn from others' ideas and apply them. Zhihu is definitely a benchmark in this area of ​​content community PGC.

To this end, I analyzed some of the most important contents of the PGC professional community based on the Python that I had just learned recently. In addition, I have accumulated more than 11,000 followers on Zhihu in the past three months and have been awarded the label of excellent respondent on Zhihu's "Internet" topic. So I decided to organize this analysis into an article and share it with other Internet product managers and operations students who are interested in the evolution of the Zhihu community, function iteration, and community mechanism like me.

The reason why Zhihu crawler runs on Tencent Cloud host is that it is afraid of being blocked by the website (here is a reminder to all programmers : when deploying crawlers, be careful not to adjust the concurrency too high, which will affect the normal user access to the website. This is also a basic technical literacy that should be paid attention to when using crawlers):

1. The proportion of Zhihu seed users

Among Zhihu's 200 seed users , entrepreneurs account for the highest proportion, and designers are the most active.

Zhou Yuan mentioned Zhihu’s 200 seed users when he was interviewed by the outside world. By analyzing the top 200 users followed by each of the four founders and eliminating duplicate data, we can use crawlers to obtain their industry background, level of activity on Zhihu (number of answers), and number of fans.

Among the 158 users with occupational information, entrepreneurs (63 people) account for the largest proportion, followed by programmers (27 people), media people (21 people), product managers (17 people), investors (10 people), designers (10 people), and others (10 people in art, education, etc.). The serious atmosphere of answering questions by these Internet industry users has a great influence on the PGC atmosphere of Zhihu.

I found many interesting phenomena about the source of Zhihu's seed users: many seed users joined through the invitation mechanism during Zhihu's internal testing phase. For example, Tencent’s CEO Ponyma was invited by He Caitou , who in turn was invited by Du Xiao, the founder of http://dinehq.com.

An interesting piece of data is that, unlike the proportion of invited early users, so far, the proportion of users with more than 10,000 followers (a reference value for whether users are active on Zhihu) is the highest among others and designers (60%), followed by media professionals (52%), product managers (47%), entrepreneurs (44%), investors (40%), and programmers (15%). This part of activity data is close to the proportion observed by the author in the Zhihu group with 10,000 followers.

2. Is there a dependence on the activity of the founding team?

The time distribution of the four founders of Zhihu’s answers on Zhihu - the activity curve, to see whether a community product like Zhihu is dependent on the activity of the founding team?

Zhihu CTO Li Shenshen is the most homely of the four founders, has the fewest answers and is the least active (of course, it is not ruled out that Li Shenshen has a secondary account, through which you can secretly look at the pictures of beautiful women that @VCZH shows you around). Teacher Zhang Liang was the most active, answering 1,408 questions, which was equal to the total number of answers given by other founders (1,288). Mr. Huang Jixin follows the most Zhihu users, with more than 9,000 followers... I crawled for a while...

3. Frequency analysis of keywords involved in the questions answered

Analyze the frequency of keywords involved in the answers to the questions and see how the community atmosphere of Zhihu is reflected in the founders’ answers.

In a given document, term frequency (TF) refers to the number of times a given word appears in the document. This number is usually normalized to prevent it from being biased towards long files.

As a question-and-answer community, Zhihu has the following words that are discussed more frequently: "question", "answer", "why", "how", and "view". At the same time, due to the background of early users, words such as "Apple, Internet, and Innovation Works" appeared frequently in the questions that several founders were willing to answer.

4. Top 10 questions that received the most likes from the four founders

Analyzing the 10 questions with the most likes from the four founders of Zhihu. This analysis is purely out of my personal curiosity.

Answer the corresponding question Time Number of likes Author Answer link

##What does "having seen the world" mean? 2013-1-21 10566 likes Zhang Liang

Can enjoy the best and endure the worst

##What kind of bookstore is the Yecao Bookstore at the east gate of Beijing Normal University? 2013-7-2 9346 likes Zhang Liang

What kind of bookstore is Yecao Bookstore at the east gate of Beijing Normal University?

##How do you view your lover’s love history? 2011-2-4 8557 likes Huang Jixin

How do you view your lover’s love history?

##How do you evaluate the movie "Tiny Times" adapted from Guo Jingming's novel? 2013-7-7 6902 likes Zhang Liang

What do you think of the movie "Tiny Times" adapted from Guo Jingming's novel?

##What is your deepest impression of the movie " The Social Network "? 2011-1-27 6438 likes Huang Jixin

What is your deepest impression of the movie " The Social Network"?

##Why do we never see people like Zhihu masters in real life? 2015-3-25 5955 likes Zhang Liang

Why do we never see people like Zhihu masters in real life?

##What are some tips for falling asleep quickly? 2012-1-30 5904 likes Zhou Yuan

What are some tips for falling asleep quickly?

##What important life milestones have you experienced in the past five years (2011-2015)? What impact does it have now? 2016-1-26 5226 likes Zhou Yuan

What important life milestones have you experienced in the past five years (2011-2015)? What impact does it have now?

##It is often said that Shi Yuzhu, Zhou Hongyi and others have grasped human nature and human desires. Can they systematically explain human nature and desires? How to grasp it? Can you recommend relevant books? 2013-7-23 4730 likes Zhang Liang

It is often said that Shi Yuzhu, Zhou Hongyi and others have grasped human nature and human desires. Can they systematically explain human nature and desires? How to grasp it? Can you recommend relevant books?

##Why doesn’t Baidu acquire Zhihu? 2011-11-3 4440 likes Zhang Liang

Why doesn’t Baidu acquire Zhihu?

Summary: From the above data we can see

• Among Zhihu's nearly 200 seed users, there are many entrepreneurs, investors, programmers, and media professionals in the Internet field. However, judging from the user activity data, users in other categories such as art, education, and movies are also quite active on Zhihu. The popularity of topics other than "Internet" is also an important reason why Zhihu has reached its current user scale.
• In the early stages of the Zhihu community, which is in urgent need of forming an atmosphere of serious answers, the founding team needs to actively participate in community content construction. The four founders of Zhihu answered a total of 2,345 questions in the first three years of Zhihu's establishment (2010-2012), accounting for 86% of the total number of answers they have given. From 2013 to 2015, they answered a total of 312 questions, and from 2016 to 2017, they only answered 39 questions in total, which shows that the atmosphere of the community is on track.
• Not all answers given by the founders of Zhihu can get more than 1,000 likes. The founders of Zhihu have answered a total of 2,696 questions and received 270,000 likes, which means that on average each answer received about 100 likes. So, has your Zhihu answer received more than 100 likes?

The subsequent plan is to analyze the version history of Zhihu's product iterations in the next article, analyze which are the core functional iterations, Zhihu's overall information flow source and distribution mechanism, and the product form of commercial realization; from the articles of Zhihu's housekeepers, we can see the changes in the community mechanism, the different stages of community growth, and the history of the evolution of the KOL group, such as the existence of the legendary Zhihu 10,000 fans group.

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