Zhihu.com based on UGC
UGC refers that the users present their original contents on internet platforms or provide the contents to other users, in particular to the contents which are public and available with certain innovation. The diversified socialised media based on UGC has sprung up, so the network Q&A community is representative.
The network Q&A community refers that the users raise their questions publicly on internet and anyone can response with corresponding answers. Zhihu.com, launched in December 2010, focuses more on socialised interaction and forms the knowledge Q&A community through social network.
UGC problems from the perspective of Zhihu.com
The socialised media operated on the UGC , such as Wikipedia, Facebook and microblog, all operate the information system by the form of self-organisation and obtains great sense of organisation through minimum management cost, the communication capability of which is out of reach of the traditional media.
However, such kind of platform will face a lot of junk or fake information inevitably because everyone can share and give their own opinions. And these junk or fake information may have an negative impact on readers and the society in the communication process.
Taking Zhihu.com as an example, they adopted the invitation-based registration form at the beginning of its launching in 2012, which refers to registration based on inviting friends through emails. In the first two weeks of its launching, most of 200 users come from IT entrepreneurial circle. For example, Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, contributed many professional and incisive solutions at Zhihu.com. Zhihu.com established higher threshold at that time, therefore, mostly questions and answers were all of high quality.
Such kind of mode had attracted many elites from various fields to enter Zhihu.com. Since it was for public in registration in March 2013, Zhihu.com had increased its users from thousands to millions within one year, which was phenomenal on internet then. Then, anyone can answer the questions, which causes the declining of content quality and the rising of rumours. And even the purchase agency transaction information appears at Zhihu.com through private messages and replies, which makes the serious and amicable knowledge discussion become impure.
Here is another example of UGC’s dark side. The organisation wanted to use UGC to promote Cleveland. Then, a video was created, but obviously it had completely opposite effects. However, when people search Cleveland on YouTube, this video comes up on first place.
Ruizhi Zhao 