User:StefanSong/sandbox

"Zhihu" is a Chinese question-and-answer website where questions are created, answerd, edited and organized by the community of its users. It has a similar product model as Quora. The company was founded on January 26, 2011. Until the end of 2013, the number of registered users on Zhihu has over 10,000,000.

In old Chinese, "Zhihu" means "Do you know?". Different from Quora, Zhihu is a media instead of a platform. That is to say, Zhihu is focus more on delivering information; On the other hand, Quora is focus more on discussion.

History
Starting from August, 2010, Zhihu was under development. It went through a closed beta test at the end of December, 2010. Zhihu went on live on January 26, 2011. It reportedly received fundings from Kai-Fu Lee's Innovation Works, Sequoia Capital and Qiming Ventures.

Product Operation
At the beginning of the company was founded, the users could only be able to edit articles or comments by having invitations from other notable users. If the users had no way of getting invitations, they could apply for an account by fulfilling a good amount of real information on the user pages. That insures a great number of high quality as well as professional questions and answers, which attracts more and more users to the community.

Zhihu opened registration to public in March 2013, which increased users from 400 thousand to 4 million in less than one year. Registered users are able to ask questions in the community while inviting specific users to answer. Each user is able to check his/ her Zhihu followees' updates(Likes, Answers, Following questions). Users are capable to check the status of their own following questions or activities of their answers and comments on the home page.

Impact
Zhihu is an highly interactive with best responses upvoted by others. It features high-profile Chinese entrepreneurs and public intellectuals among its users, increasingly providing Chinese netizens with a space for a rich discussion.