Social Network Analysis On Social Q&A Communities Illustrated By The Case Of Zhihu

The development and widespread of the Internet make the behavior of people acquiring knowledge obvious socialization. Social Q&A sites is a kind of newly rising online question-answering community which surrounded by precise rational and meritocratic atmosphere. Because of the high quality contents it contains, the community has become the important way acquiring knowledge for internet users. Social Q&A sites is coming from keyword searching online question-answering communities such as "Baidu Zhidao" which is on the basis of the first generation of question-answering communities adding social genes and emphasizing the mutual multiple information among users and question-answering knots and rebuilding the relationship between people and information.The study chooses Zhihu as the object of study which is the role model of socialization question-answering communities in China, grabbing 88 topic samples and 251 user samples by the way of snowballing and further gathering the date of users attention and attending as well as the date of relationship between users. The gathered date be divided into topics network and users network and using Social network analysis to analyze Zhihu topic and users network. The study describing the structure characteristics of social question-answering communities network from the aspects of density and cohesive subgroup analysis and analyzing the situation of the centrality and structural holes for the purpose of ensuring the knots on top and explaining the effects in the network. In the study, the topics and users network in Zhihu are both appearing high-density. On internet the information exchange frequently and most of them have been the knots located on the center of the internet. That’s the reason why the internet is obvious central. Those knots themselves occupied in the center of internet which hold the power to control other actors acquiring information and remain the dominant position during community network information producing and communication.