Zhihu begins to force users to log in to their accounts, otherwise they will not be allowed to view the full answers and column content

Zhihu has been using pop-up windows to ask users to log in to their accounts for many years. Such pop-up windows are easy to appear whenever you open a Zhihu sub-page, which is very annoying. But at least you can continue to view the content without logging in to your account, so many developers have launched brute force monkey scripts that can automatically close the window.

This situation has changed now, and all the brute force monkey scripts have become invalid because Zhihu has begun to force users to log in to their accounts before they can view the full content.

This includes the complete answers in Zhihu Q&A and the complete content of Zhihu columns. Now the window will not pop up directly when you are not logged in, but when the user clicks to view the complete content, the login window will pop up.

What is different from before is that closing the login window is useless, because judging from the data of the F12 console, Zhihu did not transmit complete data at all when there was no login, so simply blocking the login window is useless. This will also make it very difficult to bypass the login through technical means.

It is not clear why Zhihu made such an adjustment. Zhihu's current revenue and stock price are very, very ugly. Originally, the pop-up login window was also used to attract more new users to make the data look better. Now the forced login is probably not just for the purpose of active user data.

Artificial intelligence training now requires a large amount of data. The data accumulated by Zhihu over the years is a huge treasure trove for artificial intelligence models, so Zhihu’s change to forced login may be to prevent its data from being directly captured.

On the other hand, although Zhihu’s current reputation is not very good, there are indeed a lot of high-quality content on Zhihu. When people search for content through search engines, there is a high probability that they will encounter Zhihu’s content, so users must either register an account and log in, or they can only completely block Zhihu.