When I met Huang Jixin, the co-founder of Zhihu who last made headlines as a male guest if You are the One, I noticed the ring on his left ring finger.
There was a question on Zhihu about Huang jixin’s performance on If You are the One, and one of the most liked answers was: “No matter how good Zhihu is, you can’t find a date.” But now it seems that the answer is not so true: after the elimination of If You are the One, a woman contacted him, and like any romance novel at first sight, they fell in love quickly, and last month, they officially received a certificate, which was rumored within Zhihu.
In transplantation in the history of silicon valley innovation, knowledge sharing is a relatively special review object – both business journey far away, also common extrusion by search engines and social networks, so in addition to the pawn line risk the risk of investors for its high expectations, China adhering to the pragmatic entrepreneurial teams sickliest mostly, little incentive to copy.
As Quora’s protege in China, Zhihu’s growth seems palpable: as of July 2015, the Zhihu community had 29 million registered users, 110 million monthly UVS, and 300 million cumulative page views per month. Zhihu has generated 6.2 million questions and nearly 20 million answers. In total, users answered 4,129,244,445 words, nearly 100 times as many as the Encyclopedia Britannica and 2,580 times as many as the Deer and Cauldron.
After a large number of high-quality answers were collected, how to spread and share the contents of the website became the research problem of Zhihu team. Therefore, Zhihu Daily, “Money Has The Art” and dozens of electronic publications were established. Bertrand Russell once wrote in Marriage and Morality that “ignorance is a pity” and the desire for knowledge is a simple emotion throughout human history. If you translate desire into traffic and clicks, it’s about how to better mine content and how to define the future of content.
Yesterday (September 24) afternoon, Zhihu officially launched a new mobile terminal content consumption product — “Read Daily”. Apart from inheriting the product concept of Zhihu Daily, Read Daily has also made a further extension on the basis of “taking human recommendation as the core”. Including that everyone can create their own daily newspaper and invite others to join the editor-in-chief. This seems to confirm what Zhou Yuan, CEO of Zhihu, has argued in his oft-cited book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: Once a city has solved its security problem, prosperity is the next step.
So what kind of prosperity will the new reading daily bring to Zhihu?
Evolution history of Zhihu Daily
Zhihu Daily was founded two years ago, during the period when Zhihu officially opened its registration to the public. The idea is to share good content, which is also a complementary product concept with Zhihu: Zhihu community is responsible for content production, while Zhihu Daily is responsible for dissemination and consumption. The original Zhihu daily was run by two editors, who recommended popular content in the Zhihu community every day. This is the original form of Zhihu Daily, that is, the 1.0 era of Zhihu Daily.
Subsequently, Zhihu upgraded the daily by inviting some 40 professionals from 11 areas of Zhihu community to be the chief editors, recommending what they consider to be good articles in their respective fields, and expanding the scope of content selection from Zhihu community to the entire Internet. The result: in version 2.0, each of the 11 thematic dailies became a great source of content recognized and appreciated by professionals in their respective fields.
The third step of verification by Zhihu Daily is to expand the scope of recommencers to 5000 Zhihu users in Zhihu 2.5, giving the right to recommend good content to ordinary users. As a result, everything you see on Zhihu daily today comes from user recommendations.
At present, reading daily newspapers, namely Zhihu Daily 3.0 stage, the right of content recommendation is fully handed over to users. Everyone can make a daily newspaper of his or her own, and everyone can become the chief editor.
Reading a daily newspaper can set up all topics, and there is no restriction on the source and form of content. It is no longer limited to zhihu community, nor is it limited to articles. Everything with links can be recommended. Articles on websites or wechat, songs on Xiami or NetEase Music, videos on A or B, and even restaurants on Dianping… Of course, everything recommended must comply with local laws and regulations.
“We encourage personal things. Why is that? Because that’s the beauty of the human recommendation core. So in addition to choosing their own taste of content and being able to write featured recommendations, we also have a number of places where editors can highlight themselves. The founder of a daily paper may choose a special nickname for his daily readers, and often these nicknames reflect the self-perception of the founder and editor.” Huang Jixin said.
Huang jixin’s special nickname refers to the right of each daily newspaper to define the term “reader.” For example, readers of Comrade’s Daily are called “minority,” and readers of Neurotic Playlist are called “Ma Da.” Perhaps the most entertaining is The Late Night Scare, which simply calls its readers “frightened eggs.”
Look from the model, the main content of daily from forwarding, content source can be zhihu, the client can be news, also can be youku, dried shrimp, editor in chief of the main competitiveness lies in the taste and taste, it is shown on the forwarding content editor, and that everything forward and witticisms, for not to encourage original read daily, taste and personality is more important.
You can set up a special research in the above bottle of daily, every day or on a regular basis and send some pictures of the bottles with comments, can also get a circle of friends brainwashed collection, you see in the circle of friends is the content of the XX post pictures of appreciation, including food, go to a fancy restaurant for dinner and then review – in fact now has a similar account.
Standing on the opposite side of today’s headlines
Ten years ago, huang Jixin, then a journalist, wrote an article titled “The World Still Needs Editing”, which discussed the information overload of content: the new problem is not insufficient information, but information fatigue and information overload. Ten years later, the problem seems even worse.
The solution to information overload is filtering, and different companies have different values about how to filter.
For example, Toutiao mainly relies on algorithms to make recommendations based on the classification of the content you pay attention to, and then makes calculations based on a series of data such as the mode of articles you read, including the length of time you stay in reading. Finally, the system wants to know more about your taste and recommend all the content you like. Toutiao relies on strong technical capabilities. Zhang Yiming, CEO of Toutiao, stressed on various occasions that “Toutiao is not a media company, but a technology company.”
Read Daily, on the other hand, relies on the tastes and interests of its editors to filter content. In other words, the Zhihu team believes that “people are more reliable” when it comes to reading. Even in terms of operation details, It chose natural growth instead of attracting more from zhihu community. Currently, the daily newspaper with the largest number of fans is only about 10,000, and most accounts have dozens to hundreds of subscribers. Of course, this is also related to the fact that it was in the beta stage before.
However, this does not mean that Zhihu does not have technical genes. On the contrary, two of the three co-founders of Zhihu are from technical backgrounds, and engineers account for the majority of the whole team of Zhihu.
Zhihu’s technology is mainly reflected in content operation and algorithm. For example, Zhihu previously developed an anti-spam system called wukong. At present, the system has accepted 320,000 reports, blocked 100 million SPAMs, deleted 3.2 million contents and processed 600,000 accounts. Another example is problem clustering, mainly through the complex word bag model (such as traditional PLSA, LDA, new word2VEc, etc.) to vectorize the problem text, so as to cluster related problems through semantics.
The main reason for choosing people as the screening standard rather than machines is that Zhihu started with UGC, and faced with millions of active online Zhihu users every day, they are more trusting in the relationship between people and content. Therefore, reading daily chooses people as the channel and carrier of communication. This is exactly the same as the idea of “media is information” put forward by the famous master of communication McLuhan several decades ago.
Anyone can be an editor?
One of the more interesting features of reading a daily paper is that you can invite other people to become the editor-in-chief of the daily paper.
The subtext of this feature is that you can bring in people with the same tastes and personalities as you, and share with them, regardless of the traditional factors.
What are the traditional elements? That is, in traditional media, a rigorous and complicated set of standardized processes and models for content production. Take the newspaper as an example, the reporter should first report to the leader before writing, determine the subject and main content of the manuscript, and then start to operate the manuscript – interview, data collection, writing. After the manuscript is produced, it needs to be submitted to the editor. In this process, the editor will constantly revise the manuscript production process, such as reminding the reporter to interview XX people, and what materials and data should be listed in the article. Once the manuscript is actually written, the editor needs to make further changes to the manuscript, such as verifying data, confirming interview information, deleting paragraphs, etc., then proofreading, signing and printing.
On the other hand, the whole process of content production is built on a controlled basis. No mass media will tolerate uncertainty, and reading a daily newspaper is breaking that law and certainty. Or to put it another way, how do I know that the new editor isn’t going to post stuff in my daily paper? It’s like when fans are worried that some highly charged Weibo user suddenly starts retweeting chicken soup ads.
Huang jixin’s response: “We want certainty and uncertainty. Certainty is what we will see when we read the daily paper. Uncertainty means don’t make me guess what I will see every day. Let’s say I have a daily Internet monitor. I want to see good articles written on the Internet every day, but I don’t want to guess what’s written on the Internet every day. That’s the feeling.”
In fact, editorial content (uncertainty) is not an invention or a first of its kind. On Zhihu, users can also improve and modify questions, which seemed like a first at the time, but also accompanied by controversy.
Zhou Yuan, CEO of Zhihu, explained that What Zhihu creates is a public space. There is no public space on Twitter, it’s all private space, so you can say anything.
For a problem, it should satisfy two conditions: first, it should be as deweighted as possible, and second, it should be precipitable. Then it must be a public space, owned by no one. The question page must make the information public and editable.
It’s reminiscent of another great Internet product on the other side of the ocean, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the best collaborative user products on the planet, but that has nothing to do with its product design: Wikipedia’s product design is definitely one of the worst in the world. Code editing, poor front page design, no guidance, and poor layout of discussion areas that are critical to collaboration. So what makes a site with 142 employees the sixth largest in the world?
Here’s an excerpt from a TED talk by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia: “With this firm policy of neutrality, unquestionable from the start, we’ve ensured that people can work together and that articles don’t simply become a battle, going back and forth between left and right. If you behave like that, you will be asked to leave the team. Every simple change to the site will be in the most recently changed page. The recently modified page also goes to the IRC channel, where people monitor various software tools. People can get RSS feeds to subscribe to, and they can receive email alerts about changes. Users can then set their own personal follow lists. My page is on a lot of volunteers’ watch lists because it gets broken all the time. So, what often happens is that someone can notice the change very quickly, and then they can simply restore that page.”
Whose life are you trying to kill?
It was a surprise that Zhang Wei, deputy editor of GQ magazine, also came to the scene and shared in yesterday’s communication meeting. His other identity is the founder and operator of the wechat public account Shixiang. Well, he has more than 420,000 followers, and each reading is close to 100,000 + that public account. Because the public account was shut down a few months ago for bogus reasons.
I was going to write it myself, but it seems like I’m just paraphrasing what he said, so why not just put it in the original? The following is an edited version of Zhang Wei’s speech in shorthand.
In the past decade, I’ve been through three major shifts in authorship, each of which has caused major upheaval in the industry.
The first was the rise of blogs; The second time, from blog to weibo; The third time is from Weibo to wechat. All of these three transfers were brought about by the Internet, and the Internet is becoming more and more influential. Therefore, you will notice that each transfer of power from the Internet platform is accompanied by another slow long-term transfer, that is, the transfer of power from traditional media and traditional publications to the Internet.
I remember that when I joined China Youth Daily, it had just come to the end of its golden age. At that time, a report could be popular all over the country and a reporter would be popular. I knew the name of a reporter in China Youth Daily when I was a youth in a high school in a county town. Southern Weekend, finance and economics and other media, have had such a good day. But after the rise of blogs, the first group of new power holders emerged, wang Xiaofeng and others are outstanding, Han Han’s real popularity explosion was realized on the blog. At that time, the traditional celebrities either didn’t blog or didn’t become famous, not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t.
No one expected that with the advent of weibo, most of the famous bloggers of the year disappeared. This is the second power shift, and the new celebrities are people you’ve probably never heard of and who didn’t seem to make it as writers before. For example, homework, an ordinary young man, living an ordinary life, suddenly became popular on weibo. At that time, how popular the exercise book was, we should remember, one of his micro blog can cause events, directly forced some local governments to declare or even admit mistakes.
The third is more recent, and you are all participants, and that is the emergence of wechat. On the wechat public account, the situation of the past is once again staged, in the wechat public account era, how many people will remember the original homework? But some people have taken its place, such as Weiwei, a popular wechat account started by a civil servant in Shandong province who resigned to concentrate on it and has millions of followers. We will not discuss its merits or copyright, but its power and influence, which is very large.
What’s going on here? The hallmark of a new content platform is that it suddenly gives a group of previously unknown people widespread influence. You’ll find that every time a platform changes, a bunch of celebrities disappear and a bunch of unknowns become famous. Why is that?
Relying on content to become famous, this thing is both accidental and inevitable. Necessity is simple: diligence, love of study, understanding of human nature. Contingency refers to luck, or “timing.” A person with excellent ability can write very good reports. Why can’t he become a weibo celebrity? Why did not do a very cattle micro channel public number? Most of the time it is really random, a platform has just been established, some people have a keen sense of smell, rushed over painstakingly, and then carry the platform rapidly rising draught, become a big shot. Many grassroots tubas are successful in this way. When the power structure is basically established, and then want to succeed, you need to have a particularly strong ability, ordinary people have been very difficult to do.
This process, I think, is a lot like dynastic succession. In the old dynasty, when ordinary people could no longer be high officials, a group of hopeless men joined the rebellion early and became the founding generals. And then the cycle starts again. But Mr. Huang offered a better analogy, one that I think captures the gap between us. ‘It’s like starting a new suit,’ he said. In the game, during the opening of the old server, everyone competes fairly, and strives to become a high player (senior player) with competent people, while others have no hope and feel bored and ready to stop playing. At this time, the official opens a new server, and ordinary players flood in, so a fight, and the civilians in the past have the opportunity to become a new high player.
Can a new platform become a new power structure maker? I think it depends on whether it completely changes the power path of existing platforms. Micro channel is a subversion of Micro blog, and as far as the eye can see, all the current new content platform, more or less is the imitation or translation of micro channel public number, inviting a group of famous old platform players to come here to attract popularity, in this case, the past big V or big V, this platform has no value.
New platforms are only possible when old paths cannot be relied upon and new gameplay must be explored equally.
Is the daily a new dynasty, or a new server? I dare not say. Man proposes, God disposes. But it does provide new rules of complete equality. In my opinion, this rule is the core, that is, “recommendation”, almost everyone has the ability to make recommendations, that is, everyone can equally come here to build their own brand and influence. I’ve noticed that there are already a few “normal” players making their mark here. I think that’s a good place to start.