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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

"Our competitive advantage is Chinese regulations blocking a social network and some domestic market filters" - One can change overnight and two can be pretty easily matched by a deep pocketed competitor who wants to enter your market. I could see these places being ghost towns in 2 or 3 years.

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In 2 or 3 years they'll have the network effect locked down. Chat apps rise and fall between generations ICQ -> AOL -> Text -> Snapchat, but it's rare for a similar product to steal a user base in that kind of market. My understanding is that many Asian countries look to Korea and Japan for fashion and pop culture so this may be the gateway to the rest of E and SE Asia.

Yeah! And on top of it, none of the western social networks have been able to crack the chinese market yet. Wechat/Weibu etc are popular with millions of users. So no deep pocketed company can crack the market easily.

s/have been able to crack the chinese market/are not banned by the government/

"Chat apps rise and fall between generations ICQ -> AOL -> Text -> Snapchat"

I never thought about it that way. That's a pretty astute observation.

Chinese regulations blocking a social network are unlikely to change overnight. It was characterized as "protectionism" elsewhere, but Chinese blocks are generally targeted at social networks. They worry less about whether the company is foreign, and more about whether it allows Chinese people to talk with foreigners.

Any reason that you think this?

This is incorrect. They are much more worried about Chinese people talking to each other than talking to foreigners. Quora is not blocked in China because its mostly Chinese arguing with foreigners, where Chinese are a pretty nationalistic lot when it comes to external interactions. But get two Chinese talking together, and the conversation can quite quickly move to rebellion.

So the gov wants to maintain control over Chinese interactions with each other, hence any major site in Chinese will get blocked immediate (as soon as Quora allows for Chinese content and it becomes popular, it will be blocked in favor of a harmonized Zhihu).

Fair enough. I don't think that takes away from the points that

- They don't do this for economic protectionism (although I know that the Chinese view this as a benefit of the practice).

- and they are unlikely to lift a block on a social network, since social networks and communication channels are what they are primarily afraid of.

There are many heads in the government. Some are worried about control, these guys are the ones who first started using the GFW to its full potential. The protectionism comes later when they realized that blocking out foreign sites had the side effect of blocking out foreign competitors. Once that cat was let out of the bag, tons of Chinese internet startups popped up to take advantage of a uniquely protected market, and the government liked this outcome a lot...even if censorship disappeared tomorrow, they might still enjoy the protectionism, but the bottleneck right now is definitely censorship. Or to say, they might keep censorship around only as an excuse to block out foreign competitors without explicitly breaking WTO rules.

Internet companies that don't enable rebellious interactions between Chinese citizens are perfectly accepted...e.g. LinkedIn. Note also that Chinese social media tech, even very successful ones, have had absolutely no significant penetration outside of their protected market...not Myanmar, not Cambodia, none of China's next door neighbors, nor Taiwan or Hong Kong. There are stuck in their own ecosystem, with those that do get to compete with foreign companies, like Alibaba, doing much better outside of China.

Line Corp. Has also developed a product call Egg, which has similar features without the social network. Perhaps in anticipation of regulatory changes.

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