Where the Chinese Name "Sifou" Came From

For a long time, our community had only the English brand SegmentFault and the fully-spelled-out domain segmentfault.com. While the word is familiar to programmers, many people still didn’t know how to pronounce it — and for non-programmers, remembering how to spell it was even harder.

The short domain sf.gg

To make the community quicker to access, we launched the short domain sf.gg at the end of 2012. Because this non-mainstream TLD couldn’t be registered for ICP filing in China, it could only be used as a redirect domain. Our design partner @Fenbox even made an animation for it.

Because of the sf.gg domain and the letters “sf” in our logo, community users jokingly gave us all sorts of nicknames — most of them Chinese puns on the letters “SF,” like “the SF Express of the tech circle,” “the algorithm factory,” and “the sofa factory.”

The origin of the Chinese brand name Sifou

Later, to make SegmentFault known to more professionals and companies in the tech industry, I spent much of my spare time in 2015 thinking about our Chinese name. Back in the early days, when we only had the Q&A section, we had a name — “Siwen” (思问, roughly “thinking and asking”) — but it was very limiting. It wasn’t until late 2015 that I came up with the name Sifou (思否), the Chinese brand name we use today: it carries the meaning of “think independently, dare to question,” which fits the spirit of developers and hackers. Around the same time, my co-founders and I pooled our money and bought the sifou.com domain back from a foreign owner — paid for in bitcoin — and registered other TLDs like .net, along with trademarks for Sifou across multiple categories.

Because our thinking on brand positioning wasn’t yet clear at the time, and many parts of SegmentFault’s business were still immature, we didn’t adopt the brand right away. It wasn’t until early 2018 that we officially launched “Sifou” as our Chinese brand name — used for both the company and the team.