Zhihu’s “traders” reflect the ups and downs of the text community over the past 20 years

The highly praised answers on Zhihu are reposted and published on Xiaohongshu or Weibo, and are pushed to the right audiences by big data, attracting traffic and operating accounts at zero cost. The operation of such accounts reflects people's demand for content. Let's take a look at the author's analysis of this matter~

"After realizing what truth, your life began to become easier?"

“What is the ultimate enjoyment in life?”

“What was your most unexpected income?”

These highly-rated questions and answers were screenshoted by a group of Zhihu "traders" and posted on Xiaohongshu, attracting traffic at zero cost and operating very successfully.

Several articles a day, such tested high-quality content will always be delivered to the right audience by big data, with over 10,000 views and over 1,000 likes in minutes.

This type of account is quick to create and can reach thousands of followers within a month or two after the initial posting of a note. Just like the marketing accounts that benefited from Internet dividends and subsidies in the early years, they can make a little money with just a few clicks.

Even if they have missed the initial bonus period, such accounts can still attract specific audiences by reposting relatively vertical content. A few highly praised Zhihu answers can turn into a small Koc with thousands of followers, a mother blogger who shares parenting experience, a learning blogger who focuses on personal growth, and so on.

Unauthorized copying is the only problem that "smugglers" have to deal with. They are not unaware of the gray area they are in. Their personal homepages often have words such as "delete if infringement" and "contact us to delete if there is any infringement", but their conscience only goes so far.

The existence of "smugglers" actually points to a question: why do people read Zhihu answers on Xiaohongshu and Weibo?

Content fragmentation platforms stand on the shoulders of long content platforms. High-quality content will always be needed, but many people don’t read it in text communities.

01

Another text community with the same treatment is Island A, an anonymous forum that is free, neutral, weakly social but strong in discussion.

The last time A Island went viral was "The Strange Zoo Rules", a niche but cult-like topic that was also a challenging puzzle. From being forwarded to Bilibili, Weibo, and Moments, to the tens of thousands of words of word-by-word analysis on Zhihu, many people learned about A Island for the first time and also found various ways to use this page, which was still a text forum in the web1.0 era.

The text is densely packed and the UI is extremely simple. Each user on Island A does not have a nickname, but only a string of seven-digit random characters called "cookies".

The users of A Island who hide their personal identities have a unified name: "Fei Fei". They are a group of otakus who have a strong sense of identification with the two-dimensional culture. More than half of the sections here are related to ACG culture, and the classifications are also numerous and detailed, including Steam, Nintendo, Auto Chess, comics, light novels, Touhou Project, etc.

It is a small circle with high enthusiasm, strong cultural identity and a strong desire to express. The gathering of similar people creates a harmonious community atmosphere. In addition, the front-end anonymous system allows people to speak freely, and some high-quality content is born here.

The small circle could not bear the exposure and traffic after it went viral, the dilution of the community atmosphere, and the chaotic management more or less made old users lose some of their desire to express themselves. The subsequent salary and dividend disputes of the management team and the departure of the only operation and maintenance personnel made the situation even worse, making it a relic of the contemporary Internet, while the interesting and high-quality posts of the year are still circulating among the people.

02

The "Ten Great Posts on Tianya" can definitely be called a special landscape on the Internet, and many people still remember them today. Until May this year, Tianya opened a live broadcast room to raise funds for the 3 million yuan in arrears of Internet fees, which once again sparked a wave of nostalgic and sad discussions.

Compared with the two-dimensional attributes of Island A, Tianya, which is known as the twin stars of BBS together with Mop, appears to be more open and diverse, and its scale and influence are far greater than the former.

In 2003, when there were less than 80 million Chinese Internet users, Tianya already had 3 million registered users and around 20 million daily visitors. Some netizens described their life in 2005 as Super Girl, Jay Chou, QQ Space, World of Warcraft, and Tianya Community.

Tianya became the source of hot topics on China's Internet in the first decade of the 21st century, which is closely related to the community atmosphere when it was first founded.

Initially, a group of journalists, writers, intellectuals, and senior writers with positions, opinions, and a desire to express themselves posted on Tianya, which created a strong agglomeration effect. This group of people paid close attention to social issues and had a strong sense of responsibility, which led to the birth, fermentation, and further spread of social hot spots and news as issues for the entire society.

In the era when the Internet was not yet popular, countless social hot spots were born in Tianya Community. Local people broke the news, "citizen journalists" spontaneously investigated, local newspapers such as Southern Metropolis Daily and Beijing News intervened, writers from "Guan Tian Tea House" and "Tianya Miscellaneous" further commented on the society, and the central media made the final decision. At that time, the saying "Tianya creates the topic of the whole nation" was quite popular, and reporters in the era of paper media would also look for inspiration from here when choosing topics.

At the same time, the "Literary Dance" section has produced a number of currently active writers, from Tianxia Bachang to Dangnian Mingyue, and the Ghost Talk section has spawned a number of well-known IPs such as Ghost Blowing Lights and Grave Robbers' Chronicles. Some old Tianya users even shared anecdotes about how they were employed directly when they applied for a Tianya ID during a job interview.

Later, the entertainment gossip section was added, which attracted even more users. The first batch of people with Internet traffic awareness were born here. They were the behind-the-scenes promoters of the Super Girls and sent two of them to the top ten.

With the rise of mobile Internet, Tianya Community began to decline, due to multiple factors.

First, the proliferation of entertainment gossip content has led to the dilution of high-quality content, causing a number of high-quality creators to leave.

At that time, emerging Internet platforms spent a lot of money to poach talents. First, blogs emerged, and Han Han and Xu Jinglei were iconic bloggers who were in the limelight. In addition, more vertical professional platforms such as Huxiu and 36kr took over many creators, and literary creators turned to publishers, which further exacerbated the decline of Tianya.

Secondly, the community atmosphere deteriorated after the number of users expanded rapidly. The two are by no means a direct causal relationship, but they are indeed closely related.

In the early days, Tianya implemented community self-governance, and the site did not interfere too much in the forum. The management hierarchy of the forum section was moderator < administrator < administrator's administrator, and then company employees. Moderators who had considerable power and the ability to manage directly were actually senior users.

New users have not learned the rules of the forum, and old users discriminate against new users who do not know the rules. New users in turn experience a bad community atmosphere. What's worse, old users have complaints about newcomers who challenge their status. Dangnian Mingyue's departure was more or less due to this reason. After receiving investment from Google, Tianya once recruited some moderators as employees, but the management of such a large number of users was still chaotic.

Finally, it is the community’s temperament and atmosphere, but this may also be a common problem in the text community, which also requires its commercialization path to be carefully considered.

High-level users create high-quality content, which often breeds a culture of professionalism, neutrality, and objectivity within the site. Users have a natural aversion to commercialization. Users hate advertising because they believe it affects the community atmosphere and content quality, and the moderators have to take the blame. In the early days, Tianya vigorously cracked down on advertising and rejected many development directions, thus missing every opportunity on the Chinese Internet. Although Tianya was the number one traffic site at the time, its actual monetization ability was poor, and it always served others well.

Another background is that PC traffic hit bottom around 2012, and using mobile phones to access the Internet became the mainstream. The emergence of the more entertaining Weibo also had an impact on Tianya. Tianya, which spanned the web1.0 to web2.0 eras, obviously has not yet gotten used to this.

03

For those who have experienced the era of spending the entire day on forums, arguing with others, and passionately discussing social issues, Zhihu may have a sense of déjà vu. And the difficulties that Zhihu has faced in recent years are similar in many ways.

But the difference is that Zhihu survived. Although Zhihu is still alive, it is often remembered by people, just like Leonardo Dicaprio, who has gained weight in middle age and always makes people remember his beautiful face in "Titanic".

It seems that there are always people asking: "Today, how many people miss the old Zhihu?"

Like Tianya, Zhihu started out as an elitist platform and has also given birth to many social discussions that are still influential today.

The term "involution" was originally a sociological concept. After being shared by a Zhihu answerer, it gained a group of loyal fans. Subsequently, after repeated criticisms, the concept and its application were continuously improved. The fact that a sociological term can be used so frequently in the analysis of contemporary Chinese society is due to the collision of enough ideas, thereby expanding the depth and breadth of the discussion.

In fact, even people who have never visited Zhihu live in a context that Zhihu has helped to shape, and every answer on Zhihu unconsciously participates in shaping the public discourse system. Questions-answers-comments, long texts against long texts, make public sphere discussions possible.

However, a community must first ensure that it can survive, make profits, open up commercialization paths, and expand revenue.

Zhihu's choice seems to be to change the content tone centered on the professional answers of individual answerers to a content orientation oriented towards team answers, paid stories, emotional hype and videos. With the growth of short story content on Zhihu, the platform has attracted a group of users who come for stories.

There are reports that Zhihu has more and more members who choose to pay for novels, and this has become a very important part of Zhihu's revenue. While revenue is rising, word of mouth is declining. After a large number of romance and exciting articles appeared on Zhihu, Zhihu is no longer the same Zhihu in the eyes of old users.

A pessimistic argument is that community products have a life cycle that is difficult to reverse.

From the community growth stage where core audiences are quickly gathered to create high-quality content, to the community popularity stage where high-quality content continues to break through the circle and attract outer circle traffic, to the community standardization stage where a system of institutional norms is established with a mixture of good and bad people, and finally to the decline and termination stage as the scale continues to expand and core users continue to lose.

There always seems to be an irreconcilable contradiction between the small and beautiful community tone and the unswerving commercialization path.

Similarly, there is a popular narrative on the Chinese Internet: in the past PC era, there were fewer people surfing the Internet, and they were basically social elites and highly educated people, who created higher-quality content in online communities. Now, the number of Internet users has increased dozens of times, and almost all 1.4 billion Chinese are Internet users, with varying levels of education and quality, so the online community environment is chaotic.

We cannot deny the complex situation brought about by the rapid expansion of the user group in the mobile Internet era, nor do we need to erase the nostalgia and sadness for that era, but this narrative actually leads to a "platform irresponsibility theory." That is, the key to the platform's abnormality is that the quality of users has deteriorated, which secretly strips the platform of its management responsibility.

The lax management of non-intervention and letting users be the masters of the community has made Tianya prosperous in the past. This strategy sacrifices business efficiency in corporate management. Creators can no longer express their opinions and gain a sense of recognition and achievement in a small circle like in the past, nor can they get a share of the pie on their favorite platforms with their own abilities during the Internet dividend period, so they naturally leave.

Zhihu, which embraced videos to cater to the so-called trend of the times, failed to adapt to the local environment. Yanxuan, LIVE and other attempts to pull it out of the shadow of decline have failed to reverse its decline and have disappointed many elderly people.

In fact, this is also a problem that all content communities have to face: How to carry more traffic while maintaining the community's tone? How to motivate core users to continue to create? How to avoid the monopoly of traffic by top users and the exploitation of newcomers? Is the decentralized management power centralized or decentralized? How can the platform make profits to ensure the survival of the community?

04

Although the early BBS products were simple in form, they had multiple functions such as search, social networking, media, community, and information dissemination. Later, Internet products gradually segmented user needs and replaced specific sections in BBS, bringing users a more convenient and better experience, but also sounded the death knell for the classic BBS. However, after stripping away these functions, vertical BBS will once again highlight its professional side.

Judging from the global BBS landscape, the situation of text communities is not that tragic. Many specialized, vertical BBS forums still have strong vitality, such as game and animation communities such as saraba1st, World of Warcraft player communities such as Azeroth National Geographic, and all-encompassing Reddit and Quora, which still provide comfort to people who need text and provide materials for popular culture elements.

In short, the end of text communities will not and should not be replaced by graphic, text, and video communities, because discussions in the public sphere will always be meaningful to humanity, just as the echoes of the barefoot protesters on the Acropolis of Athens will continue to this day.

Author: Siweiqi; Producer: Duidui

Source: Wu Duidui (ID: esnql520), with technology and the Internet on the left hand and cultural creation and consumption on the right hand.