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14 Years of Zuidaima: What Sharer Data Says About Leaving the Points Economy

Zuidaima (“Most Code”) launched in China in 2012. Version 1.0 was a source-code sharing economy settled in Niubi points:

Upload → earn points → spend points to download → points loop (with withdrawal requests).

It solved a real problem: course projects need a runnable package, and long-tail search matched people with inventory.

1.0 won on circulation. 1.0 also capped at circulation. When search thinned and authors felt “nobody downloads / points don’t feel cashable,” the flywheel stalled on the supply side first.

We are moving to a 2.0 trust economy: curated listings, official checkout, verifiable “it runs,” and clearer cash splits. The classic library and points stay as a long tail; premium is an overlay.


1. Who still supplies? Almost nobody is listing

Year New shares Active authors
2014 731 306
2015 621 349
2017 641 290
2018 479 240
2020 391 110
2022 137 56
2024 48 15
2025 7 6

Supply peaked ~2014–2017; author peak ~2015 (349). 2018 was still a big viewing year, but new listings had already passed their peak. In 2025, both new shares and authors are single digits.

Across ~1.8k sharer accounts and 5,000+ live shares, roughly the top 10% of authors produced about half of all shares.


2. What’s on the shelf: categories & keywords (lifetime)

Category Live shares
Web site development 1,803
Front-end 1,469
Syntax / algorithms 279
Desktop clients 194
Text / file processing 192
Mobile clients 126
Client games 110
Browser games 95

Keyword hits in title/body (overlapping allowed):

Keyword Shares hit
MyBatis 592
SpringBoot 332
SSM 287
Hibernate 244
Permissions (权限) 233
SpringMVC 226
Blog (博客) 157
SSH 152
Android 122
Shop / mall (商城) 117
Vue 97
Mini-program (小程序) 65

The shelf is still Web / front-end / Java-shaped. Low point bands remain the majority; 2.0 should win on complete runnable systems, not more templates.


3. How inventory gets seen and taken

Logged-in views peaked in 2018 (~780k views / ~96k viewers) and fell to about 1.3% of that peak by 2025.

Lifetime downloads (one count per user per project): ~695k deduped downloads · ~287k downloaders. Peak year also around 2018; detail in tomorrow’s downloader article.

Worse shelf outcomes kill the next round of uploads.


4. Withdrawal activity: counts only, no money

Metric Value
Lifetime withdrawal requests 117
Users involved 40
Busiest recent year 2021 (~23 requests / 12 users)
2025 1 request / 1 user

Against hundreds of thousands of downloaders and ~2k sharers, almost nobody reached a withdrawal request. This is not a revenue figure — it shows how weak “cash-out feel” was inside the points loop.


5. Sharer takeaway on 1.0

  1. Points once drove a real UGC wave.
  2. Supply broke first.
  3. Categories/keywords stay course-project friendly, but skewed to templates.
  4. Downloads were large in aggregate; withdrawal requests stayed tiny — circulation without a strong monetization feel.
  5. Late author path: less traffic → fewer downloads → weak cash-out feel → stop uploading.

6. Why we move to a trust economy

1.0 points economy 2.0 trust economy
Upload for points Curated listing, official checkout
Hope for traffic Platform helps find buyers; version-locked delivery
Rare withdrawal requests Clearer cash splits
Zip and done Git versions; keep selling

One line for sellers: Put solid projects up; we help close and pay.

Zuidaima — curated code that saves time.

Official checkout · Sellers get paid · Runs locally

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