WeChat’s world
economist.com
economist.com
I know that there are better ways to do things, and you don't have to accept the "Chinese way" of doing things, but that's mainly politics, and yes there ARE a lot of privacy concerns, but, and there's a big but.
Technically speaking, the app is amazing. I recently used it to talk to my girlfriend while she's in China and seriously, it's the best (face to face) communication app I have used. I'm not talking about any features in particular, though it does feel very stable. I'm talking about un-interrupted voice communication for hours and hours!
I've lived abroad for the last 4 years, so I use skype and Hangout and facebook call and whatsapp call and appear.in and any new hipster service that comes up a lot. The main thing they have in common is that I spend a quarter of the time saying "hello, hello, do you hear me?"
This is the best VOIP service I've ever tried, period. It just works.
My point does not address the privacy concerns and so on, but seriously, I really think that most people commenting here are implying that the app is necessarily crappy, reality isn't that simple. I'm seriously trying to get my friends to use it, I will not discuss very sensitive matters over it, but seriously, if you're really concerned about privacy, you probably shouldn't be using any of the big ones anyway.
Ultimately, it is not about features or quality, but what the majority of your social network uses. Personally, I would dispense with all the messengers altogether. I usually ask people to e-mail me for the non-urgent stuff, call me for really urgent stuff, and for everything in between there is text and iMessage.
In just a few weeks of using it, I ran into numerous bugs and inconsistencies—not to mention the fact that it's a giant walled garden with zero privacy.
Unfortunately, it is essential in China (primarily because alternatives are throttled/banned). I definitely would never use it anywhere else though if I had a choice.
Not saying the app is perfect though, I'm sure it has lot's of bugs, and to be honest I definitely haven't used it fully, since I just use it for this one contact and mainly just talk, I was specifically talking about having good stable conversation for hours.
This. Also, the app's user interface is super intuitive despite providing so many advanced functionalities (which are very stable and just works). I don't have stats or anything, just my own experience, and also watching others using it.
I personally know people who are in their late 60s, who previously only used mobile phones for making calls (not even texting, let alone web browsing), are happy active WeChat users. My aunt showed me recently her high school classmate group in WeChat and their enthusiastic planning (with text, images, short videos) of the first reunion since they graduated in the early 70s! It will be held in the old home town. Half of the people, including my aunt, are living in other parts of the country currently. She and I watched those videos and read some of the posts for about half an hour. We had a great time talking about the various WeChat features. It was a beautiful experience. I saw a concrete instance of technologies' positive impact on ordinary people's lives.
I am pretty sure their children have tried numerous times to get parents to use some mobile chatting apps in years. But WeChat is the first one I know that has succeeded in the senior demographic, largely due to its amazing UI.
TL;DR: It's more than a privacy concern, censorship is right built in there.
I agree there's a lot to learn from WeChat though.
Fly to China, and try it out and interact with other people in one of their tier 1 cities.
I personally strongly dislike it because you have to set a phone as your primary device. And if you break your phone, all your message history is gone.
In theory it has a desktop client, but the desktop client sucks. It requires you to use your phone to scan a QR code (which is currently failing for me with an "Unable to find (3,-1)" error).
They only recently added the ability on the desktop client to save message history (before, it would be wiped every time you log in). Even now, I can't see messages received while my computer isn't connected to WeChat (e.g. when my computer is off).
In general, anything that makes me use a phone keyboard instead of a computer keyboard to talk to people is a no-go for me.
So yeah, I dislike it for reasons that have nothing to do with the privacy. It has "better" privacy than most apps since it doesn't do cloud message storage unless you tell it to, but I'd rather it did like Facebook or Hangouts or Skype.
But using it between say two people in north, central, and/or south america? Eh. There's some neat things about it, but losing the big firewall advantage, or the local market advantages (payments integration, third party app ecosystem integration for things like didi or even silly social toys) its hard to see why I would use it over the other messengers.
The thing is the OP is not talk just about going across the GFW. Even in Canada calling someone else in Canada, the quality is FAR above what you get with Skype.
I'm happy the Chinese government blocked Facebook, if only because it gave my intellect pause to think about what happens when Facebook isn't allowed to use its network effect to its advantage to snuff out any other fledgling social network that would challenge it. Maybe we should take a second look at network effect and the unfair monopolistic power it provides to companies like Facebook who don't really have to innovate because of their global dominance and established network effect.
Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc.
Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after you refresh the page.
It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology evolves. By trying to please the users at all times, we the tech people have now created these golden cages for users - in which their identities are commodified and sold to the highest bidder.
This is not the Internet we once dreamed about and 'social media' apps like these are getting it further and further for that vision every day.
That's an old argument which totally ignores the network effect.
Would you prefer I use the other old argument, which is 'so build your own app then'? Equally frustrating and annoying, yet at the same time is probably the only other way to fight these walled garden apps. Short of banning popular apps & services that you disapprove of, I'm not sure what else there is to do...
And those who don't like it or discover the downsides later (let alone that some downsides may are added later) have to bite the dust because they are locked in.
In practice, many small businesses in my area only have a Facebook homepage now (and no other website). Many friends and colleagues solely organise get togethers (farewells, engagement parties, birthdays) on Facebook. There have been quite a few web services I would have tried around the place, but they only supported 'Log in with Facebook' or 'Log in with Google+' or similar.
Luckily I have an understanding peer group, who will send me a message outside of Facebook to let me know when stuff is going on. Of course to them I'm spoken of as "... oh hiisukun doesn't use Facebook because of some weird nerd reasons ..."
Not everyone is so lucky as me, and more importantly - there are certainly enough alternatives that I don't -really- miss that particular social network. But if I was in China on WeChat, would I feel the same way?
I have to use Facebook sometimes because people use it to organise events, concerts and other things which are now inaccessible to me unless I use Facebook. Which is terrible.
These services are bad because they are popular and successful and because they try to offer more and more services on top of the 'social' aspect.
>it seems people like that
That's exactly my point. By catering to what the masses 'like', we're slowly closing the door to the 'free Internet', replacing it with a hegemony of "social" networks, owned by big corps.
And people don't just 'like' that - otherwise companies wouldn't have sales and marketing and advertising departments.
They're unwitting players in complex games of chess between these companies and their value to these companies is the tendency to accept subliminal suggestions and then act on those suggestions when they make purchasing decisions. Also called advertising.
Assuming that the rest of the world is wrong because it's moving in a direction you personally disagree with doesn't make you courageous or visionary, it makes you Principal Skinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik
If so, I'd imagine we'd have no use for a word like visionary.
Reminds me of the famous quote from Henry Ford, that if he'd asked the people what they wanted, they'd have answered "faster horses".
But, yeah, if you further qualify it by saying that the inventor was trying to sell ferret-poop rockets, then that marks a scenario that's pretty clear-cut.
That your emotional reasoning leads you to believe that people are being controlled by social networks doesn't make your point any stronger, either.
If the cage is so large that the bird doesn't try to escape it, does the bird care that it's in a cage? Is there really a difference between the cage and freedom?
You can't get the average person to use other products by promising something like "freedom", there needs to be something concrete outside the cage to get them to leave it. Products like WeChat are like this imaginary cage, growing to encompass everything that the users want. From the point of view of the user it might as well not be a cage, because there's nothing left outside of it for them besides a benefit they haven't (not yet) seen value in.
If you really want them to leave one monolithic service for a smattering of smaller ones there needs to be a seriously compelling reason that each of the smaller ones bring to the table, "freedom" isn't going to cut it
Yes. Because the bird ultimately has no control over the cage, cannot be assured of the motives of those who do, and knows its true freedom is always subject to the whims of the same.
Same deal with third party chat apps. I have to install 3-4 separate apps to talk to different people because everyone's using a separate app and there's no integration between them, they don't speak the same protocol. And I would much rather not have WhatsApp but if I deleted it I'd have to leave a few group chats.
Most mobile apps need to die and be replaced by web apps, then wechat will die too, or become a mobile os, which is the same.
Unfortunately, I trust the random website more than I do a closed-source, 'free' mobile app.
So it's a bit of a pickle.
Long-long term, I'd like to see more free software on mobile devices, and more simple HTML web apps.
Facebook isn’t in the business of creating content that’s why they don’t care that much with discoverability of posts. They’re in the business of connecting people and finding their needs and habits.
Why is it a pity that users (aka the crowd) is dictating how a technology should be used? It happens all the time. The iPhone wasn’t build with third party apps in mind, it was the demand of users that allowed that to happen. Twitter was invented as an sms service. Coca Cola was meant to be pharmaceutical product for stomach upset.
This is exactly the Internet we once dreamed about. A widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate.
Technically, the ultimate ruler is the one (who controls the person) who can produce the private keys or passwords for the 'core systems'.
When most of your personal information, friends, your communication and organisation tools are behind one single account, that account now becomes very valuable.
If someone then decides to deny you access to your account - for whatever reason - you're practically excluded from the platform where everyone else is.. A digital outcast.
This is very different from the 'widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate'.
True, this system might be more convenient for users and advertisers right now, but in the long term this can have strange repercussions, like companies totally 'owning' people's lives.
Note though that before Apple allowed third-party apps, they took time to invent the concept and technology of the "app store" which allows then to strictly regulate all apps by their own (often arbitrary) standards.
This is exactly the Internet we once dreamed about. A widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate.
No one would complain if that were the case. But we do have central commands. Not a single one, but a handful of them. With the network controlled liked this, the huge participation rate could actually result in the opposite of the original vision of the internet: Not a network that allows people to grow and become more free but a network that enfoces conformity and enhances suppression. I think China's Sesame Credit system is a good example of that direction.
For me it shows more, to western apps, how you build an app that always works... with wechat I can do sync and async voice calls, chat and photo sending with any connection, even if it is very slow or intermittend. No western app I have tried, including the actual phone app, does that as well as wechat. I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where Skype and Whatsapp will not even connect or send anything over.
Payments are nice when they do not take card here in China (as I do not have a CUP card).
But that, for me it is secondary: the always connected and stable is better. And that works on my mountain in Spain too :)
Edit: for people that always have fast internet, apps that are totally unusable with bad connections are: skype, slack, office 365 (google docs is still workable). OK apps are Facebook messenger, google hangouts, google docs and whatsapp. And so far the only that just works is Wechat.
No wonder it's so popular in Asia, Russia and Middle East.
Compared to LINE - originally Japanes app, popular in these regions - it's a godsend. LINE is terrible.
The network effect is hard to overcome. I migrated to it just because a lot of people in my company used it.
You can try to persuade just the friends that you talk to the most, and if they will like it, let them share it further. Or not, if they don't.
Are you sure this is not due to the effects of both 1) the GFW and 2) the atrocious traffic shaping Chinese ISPs apply to international connections?
Not sure about Skype, but Whatsapp always works for me even down to 2G, outside of China.
- go on 2g with 1 bar (really bad/intermitted 2g) - upload a photo to a friend on wechat & whatsapp => whatsapp is significantly worse, not to mention Skype which is horrendous
Same goes for audio snippets or voice calling via whatsapp compared to wechat.
In and outside China.
But yes, for messages (text) whatsapp & wechat both work reliably. Skype mixes up and loses messages randomly, even text only ones. Not to mention Slack and Hipchat; those are just funny if you don't have perfect internet.
Disclaimer; I use wechat a lot more for work than whatsapp; whatsapp is more for social contacts which means they are far less critical most of the time.
I found Wechat to be a resource hog on my phone, and the few times I've tried it, most recently less than a month ago, I immediately uninstalled it.
Whatsapp and Wechat both behave well on my phone (Android 5something on a modern Huawei); Skype doesn't.
It actually starts saying it is unable to connect to my speakers and microphone...
"HSBC, a bank" "BMW, a german car maker" "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank"
Which got me thinking... who is the audience for this article? Probably not the average Economist reader, who knows who HSBC, BMW and GS are. In fact they know that "GS" means Goldman Sachs in this kind of context.
It's also wildly pro-wechat, in a very boosterism way. For an editorial this would be fine, but this is pushed as news. It also cites businesses, not people, as various 'proof' points, and inconsistently uses informal and formal language in the same sentence. Most investment banks don't "reckon" about the rise of multibillion dollar firms.
As an introduction to nonfiction writing, I feel like this piece would struggle to get a C-, if not a F.
I have always understood the Economist to be a newspaper held to a different standard (self-imposed even). But this kind of stuff suggests that perhaps they are trying to infringe upon Forbes' territory.
The paper (they insist on calling themselves a newspaper, another quirk) is prone to these sorts of booster articles. Other times, they write in-depth, balanced, and informative articles from a Liberal view point. The thing that irks me most is how they casually omit criticisms from other viewpoints, but that's expected as they wear their bias on their sleeve.
I feel like their analysis here is lacking, and I learned nothing from it. Other than some people love wechat, which is something I could have guessed.
Not shying away from expressing opinion makes The Economist 10x more useful than other news sources, which merely report the facts, which I often know because everyone has already repeated them ad nauseam. I learn much more from reading an article in The Economist than other sources.
Regarding your other point, The Economist style guide says that writers shouldn't assume that readers already know what a given company does. Hence, "HSBC, a bank". Because there are many companies that are not familiar. Do you know what Idea is, for example? Answer: An Indian cell network.
I will correct that a cashless economy is a recurring dream of central bankers and their more fervent supporters, like "The economist" or Keynesians or whatever.
I prefer the old model in which companies compete against each other instead of having a panopticon company that knows all your private conversations, control all your money transactions, knows when you are, who you are with and by the way, censors you, etc.
When I have been(living) in China I came to the realization that central planning is a retarded idea, responsible for China 5 century standstill. You really appreciate freedom when you have lost it.
But it seems central planning is all the rage now. We have to let "expert" economist academics to tell us what to do with our money, forget the open web to become citizens of facebook (or Google or Microsoft) land, and let those companies control our computers, so we don't watch videos or books that panopticon does not give us rights to access, and copy dictatorship regimes in our policies because people in power envy it.
The domestic criticizes about WeChat is mainly in these aspects: 1. Using WeChat for Work, I have ZERO idea why people just did this, but even in my workplace, it's a common practice. It sounds unprofessional and risky to use an external tool for work purposes.
2. Lack of Openness, the only successful crawler works with WeChat is Sogou's search engine. Indexability is just the beginning of the issue.
3. Lazy moderation, rumor, pseudoscience, (domestic) copyright infringement articles are just everywhere and non-stoppable. WeChat officials said to put some force to stop these, but their 'official account hasn't been updated for ages. Maybe it's just what 'Chinternet' is like.
4. WeChat is a network of people you known in the 'outside world', friends/family/co-workers, this part just as bad as facebook.
There's also an awesome part about WeChat, the payment. WeChat got into payment business not long ago in a traditional measurement of time. A few years later, can you imagine that you can buy vegetables with WeChat/AliPay? Back in my college days (2009), it was a Country where only some decent restaurants, chain markets accept debit/credit cards. WeChat is accepted everywhere now, only and offline.
Speak of payments, there's one thing to add, you can check out how Alipay, a payment app, like PayPal are so much into communication business that flooded its app with all the SNS crap, even made friend suggestions based on who you had transactions with. I uninstalled the app immediately after they demonstrated their determination in the social network business, creepy.
Not only WeChat is the only choice of social network on the go, but also it's a quite predictable software, more decent than most of its competitors. So I think this is more than just the "Convenience weighs more than risk mgmt" scenario, more likely something weighs more than 'Der Freiheit'.
- Photo zooming and scrolling is broken
- Large photos and videos don't load half the time, and the retry mechanism is unclear (but eventually works given enough patience)
- Arbitrary limits like 9 photos per post in moments
- Really bad for writing and reading paragraphs of text
- I use Facebook as my primary social media, and the difference is stark. On a big desktop monitor, I can scroll through a hundred posts and comment on a few per minute. WeChat is mobile-only, and reading and writing is painful compared to PC.
- You can't log into WeChat on multiple devices simultaneously. Logging in will kick out the other device. Only the active device will receive and save current messages. And if you switch back and forth, you will fragment your message history across devices. This is unlike services like Facebook Messenger where messages are saved on the server and multiple logins are supported.
- Properly transferring message history from one device to another is painful. I did it on ~3000 messages plus ~300 MB of attached photos, and it took 10 minutes of transferring over Wi-Fi plus another few minutes just to digest/re-index all the messages on the new device.
- It forcefully uses your cell phone number as your identity, rather than a separate user name
[1] How China Is Changing Your Internet (The New York Times) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8
To add: there's still more attempts to break NN in India.
The civil groups which are being formed don't have the same environment or support that the first world has developed after years of civil liberties battles.
So yes, people are always thinking of something. It's just that the time to defend the commons is here.
My wife and me have been trying to set up a service on top of WeChat using their payments and other APIs. (A very small idea, takes two days to implement on top of, say, Facebook and using Stripe for payments.)
The amount of hoops you have to jump through when you don't have guanxi (there was a huge discussion about this topic on HN some weeks ago) is staggering. First, forget about getting access without having a Chinese ID, next up, be prepared to go through multiple rounds of document sending in order to get access to more "advanced" API features, so you need a Chinese ID and a Chinese company number. Next, be prepared to go through loads of confusing documentation and terrible navigation to actually implement the thing (no English documentation is available, and not many Stackoverflow posts on the topic... yet). In case you try to be smart like me and only use Wechat's API for the "social" API features and not payments, you come across another wall: the API expects call to originate from a domain name having an ICP license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license basically a number registering your domain with the Chinese government. Again loads of paperwork and weeks of waiting around to get it done.
Give up on the Wechat API and hope people will share your website? Fine. So which payments API to use? Alipay works a bit better in Europe but most Chinese are allergic to anything that breaks Wechat's app "flow". Forget about using Stripe of Paypal: most users forgot about their debit/credit card number ages ago (the app has it) or don't even have a compatible one.
Still, every day I'm seeing pages from big and small Chinese brands that apparently can do all of these things with relative ease. Don't they have to jump through all these hoops, you wonder? Turns out that Tencent will allow "strong names" to get access quickly in order to help grow the platform, or so the gossip goes.
Why not use the western offerings then? Well, as of now, it's still "coming soon": https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml ... also, it's unclear whether you'd be able to access Chinese users through this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get anything done in China without local help. On the other hand, given how well platforms such as Wechat work for end-users and how feature-complete they are, Facebook better hurry up before Tencent decides to take on the western market for real.
Rant over :).
WeChat is an amazing App with a lot of features. Using it for payment is convenient. It's video Chat is so much better than Skype in terms of stability etc. (Consider the network condition in China that's certainly a miracle.)
But there is certainly something Orwellian in WeChat. WeChat has built-in browser, which they do some censorship on links people click on. I put in a link from cn.nytimes.com and I got this: http://i.imgur.com/jMGZZSH.png (I clicked this link in China and got that, my friend clicked that link in WeChat while being in U.S. and get through fine. magic) Please note this is not even the usual GFW business, GFW doesn't return something like that at all. The text in the pic says "it was reported by many people", my feeling is that any link from cn.nytimes.com would got that no matter whether people reported or not.
What is more, they do this to Taobao, the major Chinese online business website, held by their competitor Alibaba (they are competitor in the same sense Google, Apple and Facebook are competitors, not because of they are both in the same niche field), namely if you send a link from taobao.com (e.g. https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=531244443418), you end up seeing this: http://imgur.com/e3pHmUe.png where the text says "Please copy this link and paste it in the browser to visit." (On the other hand, WeChat has a "Shopping" entrance to taobao's competitor jd.com right within the App.) [The actual reason is complicated, Taobao blocked UserAgent:WeChat long time ago when WeChat is small, but now it's the other way around.]
Although I won't put it as 1984, I'd say it's more like "Brave New World". With WeChat one can do whatever he/she wants "as long as being a good citizen" (and not using WeChat's competitor's service too much). It could be turned into a 1984-world very easily -- e.g. You may noticed that I'm paranoid enough to cut the ISP information when showing the screenshot, but what if the background image contains information of my WeChat ID? After all it's only 4-5 bytes at most. (To those who think I'm overthinking, this is already happening to Alibaba's internal network to prevent information leak.)
That's why apps like Signal/Telegram always have a small user base in China, no matter how much better WeChat are compared to them.
Sure, point out flaws in something, like the centralised nature, but only after recognising its benefits.
For example, not having to download umpteen apps and juggle umpteen accounts and enter your credit card everywhere is a big plus. I just want to make an appointment with the doctor without researching which app to install for that purpose, choosing between multiple apps, creating a user name and password, giving my credit card (which I wouldn't give to an unknown app) and so on. It certainly has downsides, but advantages as well.
Often, I care about getting the job done, not about researching and finding the best app to make an appointment. Even if the centralised decision-maker (WeChat) chose a second-best app, using the second-best app to book an appointment beats booking the appointment on phone because I couldn't bother to research between multiple apps in an open ecosystem. Sometimes, a good enough default beats choice.
Again, pros and cons. Let's recognise both. Since many of the other posters have pointed out (valid) criticisms, I've focused on the other side of the coin.
even without considering that fb casually lies about the number of active users they have
To me, the 2nd function is a next big thing beyond social media. It seems not very significant now but will have a big impact in future.
1.) lack of choices
2.) pricing gouging
3.) monitoring
4.) lack of product innovation
5.) censorship
naturally the big US tech companies would love if the user only used their one single app. but thank god there are choices in the western world.