November 9 2026 – Tencent has shut down Sogou Wenwen, one of China’s longest-running online Q&A communities, along with its associated rewards marketplace. The service ended at 23:59 on November 7, after nearly two decades of operation under different brand names.
The platform first appeared in 2007 as Tencent’s SOSO Wenwen, a question-and-answer site tied closely to the company’s QQ account system. Users could log in with a QQ ID, post questions, and earn “wendou” points when their answers were accepted. Those points could later be exchanged for items in the site’s store, though they carried no cash value and could not be transferred to other platforms.
After Tencent invested in Sogou in 2013, the service was folded into Sogou’s product lineup and renamed Sogou Wenwen in March 2014. When Sogou became an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent in 2021, the community returned to Tencent’s direct control. At its peak, it served more than 100 million users and claimed to have helped resolve over 260 million questions across dozens of categories, from computers and games to daily life and education.
Its decline reflected broader shifts in how Chinese internet users find information. Mobile apps, short-video platforms and interest-based communities gradually pulled attention away from PC-era web forums. In its final months, new questions still appeared on the site, but many received no answers at all. The rise of AI-powered assistants has further reduced reliance on human-moderated Q&A boards, as users can now receive instant responses without waiting for strangers to reply.
Under the shutdown notice issued in October, users were required to redeem any remaining wendou points before the cutoff. Accounts that failed to stay active or did not have enough points for a chosen item could not complete exchanges, and unused balances were cleared after the service ended. Users were also urged to save their own questions, answers and profile content before the closure. After shutdown, Tencent said it would delete or anonymize remaining data in line with China’s Personal Information Protection Law.
For many former users, the closure feels less like the end of a single product and more like the fading of an early social web habit. One comment beneath the shutdown announcement summed up the sentiment: Sogou Wenwen was a memory for people who grew up online in the 2000s and 2010s, and it ultimately lost ground to AI.
