Author/ Author of "Finance and Economics" Weekly Zhao Zikun He Chang
Editor/ Dong Yuqing
At the beginning of 2022, Zhihu Video quietly laid off employees. The head of the department, Cai Lin, left his job, and the number of layoffs in the department was about 40, accounting for 60% of the video operation team. A person close to the top revealed to the "Finance and Economics" weekly that "the most direct reason for Cai Lin's departure is the decline of Zhihu DAU." "Although Zhihu disclosed in the latest financial report that last year's Q4 MAU increased by 36% year-on-year, in fact, Zhihu's DAU declined.
"Does your video traffic on other platforms just do well?"
"Why don't you want to be the reason for your own video?"
"Why is some creators good at video traffic?"
On March 30, in response to the question of "why the traffic is not good" raised by the financial blog advocate source, a Zhihu employee even "intimidated" the other party several times in the WeChat group. A few hours later, Zhang Yuan and another creator who helped speak were moved out of the group chat by Zhihu's employees.
This happened in a group run by a creator in Zhihu, which had a total of 347 people. Many of them have made small achievements on platforms such as B station and Douyin. But they don't quite understand, why the same video content, on platforms such as Douyin, has been played more than 10 million times, but only a few thousand in Zhihu?
The "intimidating" operation was only transferred from other departments. According to her statement, her "predecessor" was laid off not long ago, and in a rage, she deleted all the work documents, and she was not smooth in the follow-up docking workflow, so she had a bad attitude.
I know that the video has indeed been shrouded in negative news recently. In February this year, the news that "Zhihu's video department was cut in half" was on the hot search, and Zhihu officials quickly came forward to deny it. After that, Caijing Tianxia Weekly confirmed from a number of different sources that there was indeed a large-scale layoff in the video department, accounting for 60% of the operation team. Some internal employees said that this layoff is equivalent to changing the blood of the video.
"Finance And Economics" Weekly asked Zhihu about related issues, and the other party insisted that "video is an indispensable part of Zhihu's content ecology" and "we have no layoff plans in the video business".
As a Q&A community, Zhihu's early content form was mainly graphic, and in 2017, it first tried video content, but there has been no major improvement. Referring to the situation in the industry, the value of a company is closely related to its degree of video. Also belonging to the community form, since 2018, the public valuation of Xiaohongshu is 6 times that of before, the market value of Station B is 3 times that of before, and the market value of Kuaishou is also 3 times that of before. Only to know, the market value has shrunk by 50%.
On the morning of April 11, Zhihu submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and applied for a second listing. The time to test values has come again. The question for the outside world is whether it can continue to "grow up" and how will the layoffs of its video business affect its subsequent development?
In the latest internal beta version, Zhihu has eliminated the "Video" column and replaced it with "Ideas". "Little Lanhu?" A zhihu user sent a screenshot of the internal test in the circle of friends. The screenshot shows that its new page design is very similar to that of The Little Red Book, and it is also a double-row flow.
The high-level struggle behind the layoffs
At the beginning of 2022, the video began to quietly change blood.
First, after the Spring Festival, Cai Lin, the general manager of Zhihu Video, left, and he reported to Zhou Yuan, CEO of Zhihu, and left in a hurry after less than one year of his term.
A person close to zhihu high-level revealed to the "Finance and Economics" weekly that the most direct reason for Cai Lin's departure was the decline of Zhihu DAU. Although Zhihu disclosed in the latest financial report that last year's Q4 MAU (number of monthly active users) increased by 36% year-on-year, in fact, Zhihu's DAU (number of daily active users) declined. "Before it was 20 million, when Cai Lin left, it was more than 18 million." The decline in DAUs is more indicative of product operations.
Some video department employees have long sensed something is wrong. "There's less that can be done all at once, and the weekly meetings are stopped." Engineering Fei, a staff member, said that he was not surprised, "I know that the video did not begin to decline at a certain time node, and there has been no direction and planning for half a year, and the whole is in an unorganized state." ”
The sound of the wind reached the outside world. On February 11, Zhihu video suspected large-scale layoffs on Weibo hot search, the company level quickly came forward to deny, and the remaining middle level also quickly re-divided the business group for employees, "even if it is to give everyone a reassurance pill, but also said that there will be business planning", but the change is also very fast, less than a week later, someone came to talk about layoffs. Later, Cheng Fei understood that the company planned to lengthen the battle line and "break through" one by one.
The first to be "cut" was a young employee who was close to the probationary period, and initially knew that he wanted to dissuade him without compensation on the grounds of "substandard performance". After the employees fought for it, the N+1 compensation was negotiated, and the subsequent layoffs were also compensated according to this standard.
Cheng Fei joined the Zhihu video department in the fall of 2021, and she vaguely remembers that Zhihu video began to expand wildly during this period, and the department would come to 1-2 new people every week. But people have not yet established a big business plan, "nothing has been done."
Among the new recruits, there are many senior employees with an annual package of 1.7 million yuan and more than 10 years of working experience, doing basic operation work. Even, in the state of saturation of personnel and someone who has nothing to do, it is still recruiting externally.
Another operations employee, Tina, also confirmed that after joining the company, she found that it was "completely inconsistent" with the internal situation described by HR. Tina believes that she has become a "tool man" for high-level infighting. "Cai Lin is responsible for the entire video and product center, doing things radically, offending a lot of old people, seeing that the status is not secure, and began to recruit and operate in large quantities, hoping for many people, a large number of social animals that fool information asymmetry, the responsibilities are completely unplanned, just fool in and then say."
Now, in less than half a year, this group has been laid off by two-thirds.
Among them, the video production department led by Yang Meng, a subordinate of Cai Lin, has cut from more than 20 people to only 8 people. Another department in charge of video creator operations has also been cut from more than 30 people to single digits. Overall, the total scale of the video layoffs is about 40 people, accounting for about 60% of the entire video operation team.
Many employees recalled that after Cai Lin came, he tended to "vibrato" to do videos, pushing some videos such as singing and dancing that did not conform to the tonality, so that users had a poor sense of somatosensory.
But some employees believe that the decline in DAU cannot be completely blamed on video strategy. Another factor is that in the process of commercialization, there are more ads, which directly leads to a decline in user experience, "this is the most serious core problem, but everyone is not easy to mention in management, because there is pressure to make money." Said the above-mentioned people close to the top.
Some video department employees also analyzed that Cai Lin's departure was related to factional struggles. Steven, the head of sales, and Leo, the head of strategy, sent a "confidant" to Cai Lin's department as eyeliner, collected evidence, and quickly determined Cai Lin's fault. For example, Zhang Ning's department has issued a data report to prove which factors are positively correlated with the decline of Zhihu DAU. Among them, it shows that it is related to Cai Lin's unreasonable video strategy. Many video production department employees feel that these rumors are not unreasonable, because the video department is indeed "factional".
"I know that the video is dead in pieces, it is not a business volume at all, it is a relationship that is killed." Cheng Fei said, "They don't shy away from it at all, and they blatantly pull gangs and factions." ”
Image source/Visual China
Two know-it-all
In 2017, Zhihu opened the video experiment for the first time in the mode of "answering in the form of video", and also launched a video area based on 3-5 minute short videos. But the problem answered by video is that the threshold is too high. The number of videos has not been able to go up, and the quality of content has been uneven. User objections continued, and the top brass eventually halted the business.
Wanting to make videos has always been a wish of knowing, but who will do it has not been solved.
"Knowing that without its own training system, you can only continue to dig people from the market, which is bound to bring about a conflict of interests between multiple parties." Gu Zheng, who joined Zhihu in 2019, recalled that for a period of time Zhihu recruited a lot of Weibo people to go in, and later he dug up some people with short video backgrounds against ByteDance and B station.
These new forces from the front-line manufacturers have impacted the original Zhihu values. The cognitive gap between the old and the new is also very obvious.
An employee of the video department said that at the beginning of 2021, the daily video playback volume in zhihu station was more than 20 million, and the senior management requirements rose to 90 million by the end of the year, doubling 4 times, "When we joined (the second quarter of 2021), it was only about 30 million, and it was certainly unrealistic to triple in the next 2/3 of the time." ”
In March 2021, Cai Lin took over this KPI after joining the company, for which he asked to adjust the algorithm, everything is based on the amount of video playback, "Its strategy is algorithm recommendation, what you like to watch I will try to push you what." As a result, the zhihu homepage of 2021 is full of "singing and dancing sisters".
What makes new employees stunned is not only the gap in cognition, but also the technical ability of Zhihu and the industry average. A number of internal employees directly told Caijing Tianxia Weekly, "Zhihu's technical architecture is too poor. One former employee recalled: "The same set of data, 10 people running SQL (structured query language) can run 11 results." ”
After joining the company, Cheng Fei was surprised to find that Zhihu did not have his own video library, and there was no manual classification and marking in the background, which was uploaded by the user to choose. "If you choose the wrong label, the classification is not accurate, and the distribution must be messy." Another video producer, Feng Qian, confirmed that the classification of zhihu videos was "very confusing." Under the first-level classification, there are multiple labels that are duplicated.
"It's not surprising at all, the efficiency here is really slow. It is not unreasonable to know that it can be called 'Liudaokou Nursing Home'. "Cheng Fei previously worked in a big Internet factory, and he was not used to the atmosphere of the elderly. The demand made on Friday, even if it is urgent, the technical feedback is "go to work", "he will even ask you why you are asking for a request on Friday?" ”
"The fact that the algorithm has no negative feedback has also been mentioned for a long time, and now it has not been solved." Feng Qian once participated in an algorithm training and learned that the negative feedback of the zhihu algorithm is "useless": the point "not interested" will also be marked as a user behavior. This error will lead to a very poor user experience, more than one user complained: "No matter how to appeal that you are not interested in the video, you will still be pushed, and finally you can only delete the App in anger." ”
Feng Qian recalled that Zhihu's algorithm mechanism had been adjusted once. Before the adjustment, it is the "snowball recommendation method", the more plays, the more recommendations and exposures can be obtained, and if the organic traffic at the beginning is very poor, it will be more difficult to get the recommendation later.
For a period of time, the creator Bi's video has been scrolling on the homepage of Zhihu, with a cumulative playback of more than 20 million. As a result, the employees carefully studied and found that from February to May, the platform pushed the video for three months. "This is obviously a wrong mechanism, how can he use a snowball to push?" Feng Qian felt incomprehensible.
This makes it difficult for medium and long-tail videos to get traffic recommendations, and can only maintain a dismal playback volume. Previously, in order to set the internal traffic KPI, I ran a whole site data, and it turned out that on a certain day, the video with more than 500,000 clicks on the platform did not exceed 5.
It is not that the top management is unaware of the problem. On January 10, 2022, Zhou Yuan also mentioned at the internal meeting that Zhihu's recommendation system and data system lagged behind the industry level. However, the changes are very slow. Until now, the problem of algorithms and video tags has not been completely solved.
"We want to find out the black box of the platform to distribute the recommendation, so that we know what kind of content to do, so that the platform algorithm likes." After listening to a belly fire, negative feedback such an important thing you do not do, how can users not resent the video full of screens? Feng Qian could not stand such an environment, she was waiting for the layoffs to land, and decided to leave even if she was not laid off.
Fragmented internal communication
For Zhihu, the early high-quality graphic content is still an important asset. This made Zhihu think of a way: these graphic content can be turned into videos, and by the way, it also provides video capabilities for graphic creators.
In February 2021, Yang Meng joined Zhihu, mainly with a video production team, and the work she did was to incubate the content of the graphic answer into a video. In the beginning, the video producer needs to manually contact the answerer one by one to ask for authorization, and then let the supplier do the video. After October 2021, in order to improve the richness of video on the site. The top management requested that the video production department produce 1,000 self-made videos, and the video operation department dock 10,000 videos. Under such data pressure, product managers are required to achieve "one-click authorization": the official sends a private message to the respondent, and does not reply within a limited time to default to authorization.
However, this opportunity to rapidly improve the ecology of video creators has also been cut off from the current situation of internal communication.
Less than a year after Feng Qian joined the company, she has undergone four changes in the business direction and three structural adjustments in the entire department. What is most difficult for her to accept is that normal work is blocked, and too much energy is spent on personnel pulling.
The person in charge of Feng Qian's department is Yang Meng, who arranged a role of "transit station" to be responsible for the external communication of the entire department, and others cannot directly contact colleagues in other departments, "In their opinion, DingTalk to contact people in other groups to talk about business is a very unprofessional behavior." After a year, Feng Qian hardly knew her colleagues in other departments.
"In fact, our business does not overlap with other teams, such as field operations, members, people in other departments are not unwilling to help, if you have high emotional intelligence, anyway, in a large business group, everyone is mutually beneficial and win-win, but once offended, many things will certainly not be able to cooperate." Feng Qian recalled that Yang Meng did not want to become a supplier to other departments, rejected the video production needs of the field operation, on the other hand, asked the member department to transfer the graphic content that sold the copyright to make videos for free, which also made tensions with other departments.
This directly leads to the fact that the content created by the video department is difficult to be supported by the resources of the community, so it is difficult to give birth to a blockbuster.
At Zhihu, video content is graded according to certain criteria. Cheng Fei guessed that each level of video would have recommendations with varying intensity. But no one has ever told her the specific distribution logic, "the operation should know [the distribution logic], and the result is not knowing." I don't even know. Cheng Fei and his colleagues also feel that the zhihu old employees in the audit department are very stingy to give high ratings.
Cheng Fei was not without trying to fight. There was a time when operators struggled to expand a number of fashion wear KOLs from B station, Weibo, Little Red Book and other places. But these KOLs received very little recommendation, and some could not even send videos, just because they showed a slightly cool summer sling in the video, they were manually labeled as "vulgar".
Cheng Fei deliberately pulled the group communication and found that the auditors were very strong and insisted on the standard of knowing: the sense of gain. Later, I learned that before myself, some colleagues had reported the problem of excessive review, but they could not cooperate for a long time. "They are all old employees, and the new people are not easy to say."
Gu Zheng of the content center also mentioned, "I know that some old employees are quite huddled, and their acceptance of new employees is low, and their attitude is not very inclusive." He also found that the average new employee was not on the job for a long time.
A number of Zhihu employees confirmed that Zhihu's structure changes are very frequent. There is basically an adjustment every six months, and employees have to report to different people. This has caused a situation of internal talent internal attrition: the middle level communication is not smooth, the top level is also fighting, and Zhou Yuan's statement is vague.
Li Ta, a former employee close to the top, said that at the executive debriefing meeting, Zhou Yuan's style is not to make decisions, not to express opinions, and let the VP make conclusions, "so it will cause a situation where executives are easy to take sides and spray each other." The boss does not make decisions at the meeting, knowing that this problem is more serious. Li Ta said that everyone agreed that Zhou Yuan's personality could not be changed, "only a few VPs can take responsibility."
Image source/Visual China
Wrapped up in commercialization
Zhihu said in the latest financial report, "In 2021, Zhihu continued to build a video content ecology in line with the community atmosphere, and successfully completed the first stage of multi-media ecological upgrading." In the fourth quarter of 2021, the average monthly video upload volume increased by 211% year-on-year, the number of video creators increased by 33% year-on-year, and the penetration rate of video consumer users in DAUs (daily active users) exceeded 45%. ”
In other words, video content has occupied half of the user's consumption. At the same time, commercialization is also fully invading the Zhihu video ecosystem. However, due to the late development of Zhihu's video, the ecology has not yet fully taken shape, and excessive commercialization has made many creators feel disgusted.
After being invited to enter the institutional account, creator Zhang Yuan received many private messages related to commercial promotion. The other party claims to be from Zhihu and hopes to be able to work with him on marketing and delivery levels. However, Zhang Yuan did not want to pick up, and he did not even ask for a price. "We (the company) are certainly not going to spend money on knowledge."
The reason is simple, the data is too bad. Outside the Zhihu station, the account matrix he operates can reach tens of millions of fans, but in Zhihu, there are only more than 1,000 fans. After four months of operation, fan growth has not improved. More importantly, Zhang Yuan feels that Zhihu has given little help in operation.
Creators began to feel that in the knowledge of not seeing the transformation of commercial value, capable creators have flowed out.
"For a lot of Zhihu native graphic v, they gave up Zhihu video before they gave up the video." Video producer Feng Qian said. Zhihu beauty big V "light is a small sun" and popular science respondent "Su Chengyu" are the key hatchers of their own departments, but the former was signed by Weiya Company after being plagiarized by Ahuai of Douyin, and the follow-up turned to Douyin Development, and the latter did not renew with Zhihu and gradually shifted the direction of video development.
Feng Qian recalled that even if the high-quality graphic answerer, the incubated video only had less than 100,000 views in Zhihu, "Which Party A will buy it?" But she doesn't think it's a problem with the content itself, "The content of Guangguang has been verified by Ah Huai and can be completely commercialized, just depending on which platform." ”
In Zhihu, even if the head video answerer, the quoted price of the business order is only 100,000 yuan, and it may be blocked due to poor operation and realization. An employee of the video production department revealed that when Zhihu answered "Little Lin said" when receiving a financial product business order, because the Zhihu operation responsible for docking "raised the point" she temporarily increased the price, which annoyed customers and sales, "The other party said that he would no longer take the initiative to help pull orders." ”
A person close to Station B told Caijing Weekly, "Station B is very concerned about whether creators make money or not. But in the eyes of a Zhihu employee, "Zhihu is more concerned about whether he makes money or not." ”
The data is the best evidence. The prospectus disclosed that as of December 2020, Zhihu had a total of 43.1 million content creators, of which the number of creators with monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan and 100,000 yuan was 1,000 and 100 respectively. As a comparison, according to the estimate of Huachuang Securities research report in the same period, the number of UP masters with a monthly income of more than 100,000 yuan in Station B is more than ten times that of the former.
What causes the yaw of the center of gravity? The attitude of executives may be one of them.
During a collective training for Zhihu executives in 2021, a group of executives wrote down their own answers to "what problem do you think Zhihu should solve". Above Zhou Yuan's handwritten signature, there is a concise and clear sentence: solve all the problems encountered by Zhi +.
Zhi+ is a new content solution developed by the Zhihu commercialization team. According to the latest financial report, the commercial content solution business represented by Zhi+is the fastest growing sector in Zhihu, with revenue increasing by 617.2% year-on-year, from 136 million yuan in 2020 to 974 million yuan in 2021, accounting for 32.9% of total revenue, second only to advertising.
All kinds of indications prove that Zhihu has given too high expectations for commercialization.
Jiang Yutian, a commercial employee who joined Zhihu not long ago, found that the implementation goals given by the top level were too heavy, and the strategy of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" was like a knife hanging around the neck at all times: "If the second quarter does not meet expectations, the head of the department may be replaced at any time." In her opinion, the existing team is completely incapable of achieving breakthrough development.
External commercial partners can also clearly feel the initiative and initiative of the commercialization team, as well as the strength of the commercialization team – almost all business lines are saddled with revenue targets, including the community. "Because the traffic ceiling of Zhihu is relatively low, DAU and MAU can't go up, and the traffic is simply not enough to sell, but it must consider making money." A person who knows the commercialization partner said.
Another commercial employee, Yuan Di, originally had expectations for Zhihu, as a person with a content background, she hoped to develop in new business areas, "Zhihu hopes that the commercialization department can produce its own content, rather than relying on the community and other departments to provide, but also restricting the commercial rights and interests of customers." But what she did not expect was that the company had the intention to change the contradiction between commercialization and community content ecology, but did not give a real budget.
It is also very difficult to implement. Anxiety is transmitted layer by layer, inefficient meetings are continuous - from morning to evening is the norm, even after 9 pm may be pulled to the meeting at any time, in some departments, all night meetings occur. Yuan Di expressed incomprehension, but colleagues seemed to take it for granted. "Maybe it's because of the lack of ability, so we can only show sincerity with a posture of hard work."
Since joining the company, Jiang Yutian has begun to have a feeling of being deceived: when she joined the company, HR promised that she could lead the team, and now it has shrunk to only one HC, and even the person in charge is skeptical about whether the only remaining HC is necessary; just a few days later, people still can't recognize it, she is required to give a year-round plan independently; colleagues have a single experience, in addition to understanding and knowing, there is basically no concept of other industry forms.
Overall, just as Zhou Yuan reflected at the internal employee meeting: the C-end development of Zhihu has not kept up with the development of the B-side. That is, the total user plate is small, but commercially overdeveloped. According to the above-mentioned close-level sources, Zhang Ning, the head of strategy, had set a target of 23 million in Q1 2022 at the beginning of the year, but only 19 million was actually completed.
According to the "Finance world" weekly, this year only knows that the revenue target of the commercial department is as high as 5 billion yuan. According to Zhihu's 2021 financial report, the combined revenue of its advertising and commercial content solutions was 2.135 billion yuan. A number of internal employees feedback that this goal is too outrageous, one employee complained, "We all know that the environment is not good, but also set such a goal, how do you think?" ”
Cost reduction and efficiency increases are triggering more ripple effects.
In fact, I know that there is not only one senior executive who has left the company recently. According to the "Finance world" weekly, at present, the general manager of the Marketing & User Experience Center, Lai Yuan, is also going through the resignation procedures, and she has been in Zhihu for 5 years. The market center has been handed over to the head of public relations, Zhang Huan, who was previously the public relations director of Xiaomi and joined Zhihu in November 2021.
Image source/Visual China
Do you know there is a future?
Despite knowing that Slogan is "if there is a problem, there will be an answer", within the company, the actual situation is just the opposite.
Zhou Yuan, Zhihu's Employee 001, on his Zhihu profile page, the four labels of "boss", "heavy feelings", "gentleness" and "firmness" together make up his friend impression. But in some cases, affection and tenderness may not be a good thing for the soul of a company.
Zhihu's annual meeting last year set up a session to ask Questions to Zhou Yuan, and some employees asked, what is Zhihu tonality, who can represent Zhihu Tonality? Zhou Yuan gave a long series of small explanations, to the effect that the tonality is determined by all users.
For the current Zhihu, this tone begins to blur. Who can represent the early elite Kochi, the "small town youth" in the sinking process, and the new batch of users who are now pouring in for entertainment topics, hot events and even novel reading?
At the beginning of its establishment, Zhihu implemented a closed invitation system, and the early users were mostly practitioners and experts in various fields, including many well-known entrepreneurs such as Kai-Fu Lee, Ma Huateng, Wang Xing, Wang Xiaochuan, etc., and a professional and Kochi community atmosphere was established. In Zhou Yuan's eyes, the construction of Zhihu was like repairing a city-state, and at that time, Zhihu was more like a small town, serious, serious, small and beautiful.
Zhou Yuanzhi has been on the road to learning, he once wrote: "I don't want the smog and traffic jams in the community like Beijing, which means new challenges, at the beginning of the product launch, you were a project manager, but now you have to learn to be a mayor." ”
But smog and traffic jams inevitably descended, and "residents" began to flee. In August 2017, Wukong Q&A under Today's Headlines spent a huge amount of money to sign more than 300 "Zhihu Big V". In this regard, Zhihu co-founder Zhang Liang's reply was unceremonious: "Great, hurry up and let him go." He thought there were only 300 people writing in China? More than a year later, similar dramas were staged again, and Weibo Q&A announced that hundreds of respondents had settled in, and many people were just from Zhihu.
The larger the manager, the more responsibility he has to take on, but the lack of operation occurs from time to time. More than one interviewee mentioned that the top management did not seem to know exactly what it wanted, and lacked a clear understanding and planning of the company's development.
At the CEO meeting on January 10 this year, Zhou Yuan admitted that there are four aspects that are not good enough: the growth rate of the C-end is slower than the growth of the B-end; the organizational capacity lags behind the business development; the recommendation system and data system lag behind the industry level; and the video creator ecology has not yet taken shape.
Zhihu seems to think very clearly about all issues, but in terms of specific implementation, it has become a different look.
From the end of 2020 to the first half of 2021, Zhihu has rapidly completed the expansion of personnel, from 1500 people to more than 2800 people, doubling the expansion. However, there is a big deviation between the quality of personnel, values and language system.
Taking the video business as an example, Yang Guang, an employee of Zhihu, was surprised by the difference in multi-party cognition, the leader's evaluation of content was very subjective, and the content operation ecology was not established. Employee Feng Qian believes that everyone is making the company better in their own way, but it seems that it is difficult to think about the product from the perspective of the user, and zhihu is also too eager to achieve the attitude of the video, "must eat a fat man in one bite, a blockbuster, a place, a step success."
Under disorderly management, the "city" will lose its former vitality. What Yang Guang is worried about is the decline of the influence of the Zhihu community, and there were hot spots born from Zhihu five or six years ago, but now Zhihu seems to no longer have the ability to create hot spots.
Feng Qian found that in response, Zhihu is trying to introduce more and more social issues into the community to create interaction and generate heat. "But in essence, can it promote the community ecology for a long time, and does it help the tone of the community in any way?" I take a negative view. ”
As a result, what the user sees is a divided zhihu, rising and sinking in parallel. What is even more difficult for Feng Qian to accept is that when she asked the leader for advice and hoped to expand Zhang Jiawei's video content, she got a rhetorical question from the latter: "Is Zhang Jiawei's things seen?" "Feng Qian was extremely disappointed." You can have no love for Zhihu, but you can't insult it like that, can you? It is not the so-called beauty that knows that there is a market. ”
Gu Zheng felt that Zhihu was extremely idealistic. But as Zhihu grew, the "both wanted and wanted" style made two different value systems tear up strongly.
This huge division and contradiction obscures some details that should have been concerned.
Gu Zheng couldn't understand why Zhihu didn't pay any attention to the number of fans internally, which was a rather fragmented state. "You want the creator to give the content, but you only want the content, you don't want you as a person; it doesn't matter who you are, just provide the content." 」 He recalls that many areas operate without even the contact details of creators, "they don't care." ”
In this case, knowing that the expectation of the video can be successful is more like a "delusion". "Creators are most concerned about traffic issues, and then there is the platform operation can give some strategic advice on content," a video creator told Caijing Weekly, "but I feel that there is basically nothing." "This situation is even more pronounced after the layoffs. According to the "Finance world" weekly, in this layoff, a large proportion of creator operation positions have been laid off, which means that it is still difficult to clearly define the strategy of cultivating creators at present.
Just like at the beginning of the story, when the creators want to talk to Zhihu seriously about what happened, Zhihu's way is to kick each other out of the group chat. If both parties feel very aggrieved, then who is the problem? There are questions, but not necessarily answers.
(The interviewees in this article are pseudonyms)
This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.