Sina Tech News, November 4 afternoon — During the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, Sohu.com founder, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer Zhang Chaoyang shared with media his views on the strategic positioning, product logic, ecosystem progress, and long-term planning of Sohu Video's Follow Feed. He stated that the Follow Feed is a strategic-level product launched by Sohu.com after years of deepening its presence in the social networking space, and that it focuses on real-person social interaction, carving out a differentiated path in an industry dominated by algorithms.
As the company's CEO, Zhang Chaoyang is also a heavy user of the Follow Feed. Many ideas for product feature design and gameplay optimization come from his own daily user experience. In his view, this is a fundamental requirement for building a good internet product: "As the CEO of an internet company, you must be the best user of your product — you must be the number one user of the product. And you must love this product and love this service, and only then can you build it well."
Speaking about the strategic positioning of the Follow Feed, Zhang Chaoyang analyzed it through the lens of the development trajectory of China's internet industry. He said the internet industry has always evolved along two main lines: information acquisition and social connection. On the information acquisition side, efficiency has continued to improve, from portal websites and search engines to information feeds and large models. But connection between people is the more essential value of the internet. He further explained that Sohu.com started as a portal website and has also ventured into search engines, microblogging, and other products, never ceasing its exploration of the social networking track. Today, the Follow Feed carries the core strategy of the platform's transformation toward social networking: "We regard social networking as the most core strategic direction for Sohu's platform as it evolved from a portal website toward a search engine and ultimately to where it is today."
It is understood that Sohu.com currently has multiple social media product lines, including Sohu Video's Follow Feed, Huyou, and Sohu News Timeline. Regarding the product logic of Sohu Video's Follow Feed, Zhang Chaoyang summarized its core gameplay with the phrase: "Take a casual stroll to look around, repost and interact on the Follow Feed." He explained that the Follow Feed distributes content entirely based on relationships formed through users' voluntary following, while the adjacent "Look Around" channel extends content based on likes and comments from followed users — neither relies on algorithmic recommendations. "In the Follow Feed, what you see is reposts or posts from people you follow. The people you follow are decided by you yourself — your own territory, your own rules."
In Zhang Chaoyang's view, algorithmic distribution can efficiently satisfy users' content consumption needs, but it easily creates information cocoons, and users always consume content in isolation. The core of the Follow Feed, by contrast, is "making friends through content," where users build person-to-person connections through content, achieving deep interaction and social accumulation. In terms of interaction mechanisms, the Follow Feed treats reposting as the core bond for content dissemination and relationship building, emphasizing that "reposting and commenting is the king of kings." Zhang Chaoyang explained: "When you repost, you are directly making all your followers see it — this is a process of changing the world." He further pointed out that this user-repost-based dissemination model ultimately forms a mesh-like content distribution structure. "It is a mesh structure, and its rights are decentralized, because everyone has followers, and reposting carries a certain power — so in the end, it is a decentralized platform."
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