Twitter is now worth less than its Chinese clone | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is now worth less than its Chinese clone

techinasia.com

69 pointsdragonbonheur64 comments

People keep talking about Chinese everything. At the risk of being downvoted into oblivion let me ask you... would you use a Chinese email provider? Chinese Facebook clone? Chinese Twitter clone? I don't know about you, but I'd think twice before feeding my child Chinese formula or taking a flight in a Chinese made airplane. Physical products are one thing but informational products are clearly another.

China's reach is China. They may have a billion person market but last I checked that was only 1/7th the world. I'd venture to say that most folks would rather use some other option than something made in China.

> I'd venture to say that most folks would rather use some other option than something made in China.

The device on which you typed that, where was it made?

This is the physical object and service distinction.

I don't want to use services based in China because they're ultimately subject to the will of the Chinese government. I don't really doubt the technical ability of Chinese CS professionals to create a quality product, but this is orthogonal to why I would avoid them.

And honestly the same is becoming true of US based services when it comes to data security and privacy. Google makes a nice product, but I wouldn't store any data on their servers that I believe has any chance whatsoever of being used against me -- either by my government or private entities.

> I don't want to use services based in China because they're ultimately subject to the will of the Chinese government.

Exactly. Compare this to the case of the United States, where the government never forces its tech companies to share their data.

There's a major difference in degree.

This is like saying that riding a bike on the sidewalk or in the middle of the road is the same because you have a risk of being hit by a car in both cases. I would still highly recommend one over the other

It could be argued that using the Chinese service might be safer. At least the TLAs (Three Letter Agencies) probably don't have data sharing agreements on tap with Chinese services. Ignoring other technicalities of this argument.

Yeah, the calculus depends largely on who you are being targeted by. For example Snowden's probably pretty safe in Russia, despite it generally being unsafe (or at least moreso than the US) for Russian political opposition.

I bet it's easier to bribe your way to the right person in China to get the info you want, though. Though the TLAs can get Google to talk, I bet only huuuge amounts of money would allow a private citizen to get in.

I see that you're very well informed on the subject of Chinese intelligence.

What about hardware backdoors, any concern about that?

> Physical products are one thing but informational products are clearly another.

The GP says they wouldn't use physical products made in China, then says "informational products are another thing", so is his point that he would use those? The comment is self-contradictory.

The two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Lots of people like Chinese products, WeChat and Tencent's QQ are very popular in Asean countries like Singapore and Malaysia. Weibo is also very much used by people outside of China to get updates from celebrities on the platform. The usage don't come close to FB, of course(but who does?), and these people also do use Facebook and Twitter, but they also use these Chinese products because they serve a different need for them, not because they want a "Facebook/Twitter, but made in China". I myself tried these app to keep in touch with friends who use them, but never really got into them, but I can tell you that the internet look very different once you get out of the western-world-centric internet.

So, yeah, I would say they would use it.

Wechat and QQ have very little reach outside of mainland Chinese communities, and even in Singapore, Facebook and Twitter, Whatsapp are much more popular than their Chinese competition. Wechat's inability to compete at all in China's backyard (surrounding countries, newly on the internet, like Myanmar and cambodia) is especially surprising, since it isn't that bad of a product.

Oh, FB/Twitter still dominates, of course. Pretty much everywhere. The FB/Twitter/Instagram handles are what you'll see in print ads, etc. But WeChat and QQ are in no way "have very little reach". Outside the tech-savvy demographics, people are more likely to know what WeChat and QQ are than they are to know about say, Snapchat, or Pinterest, for example.

I asked my Balinese taxi driver, who was using whats app on our ride to the airport, if he knew what wechat was. He didn't. Same in Thailand and the Philippines, the latter isn't surprising, the former is.

In many SE Asia countries, the internet is google and Facebook, the word internet isn't even very meaningful.

People say weterners are in a bubble when it comes to Asia, but I would argue Chinese are even more so. After working in china for 9 years, I found there to be an overwhelming focus on china, so much so that I saw Asian focused projects migrate away from china and to other Asian countries or even the states. There are just more Burmese working for Microsoft in Redmond than all Beijing tech companies...which is just saying there aren't many foreigners in china to help with non Chinese markets.

To give an idea of differences between regions, I have never met anyone in Japan using Snapchat except if they're American. Hell, most people don't even know it's a thing

Yet Twitter is pretty popular in Japan!

Believe it or not, I have quite a handful non-Asian friends here in the US using Wechat. But it may be due to influences of their Asian friends. QQ definitely has no reach outside of the Chinese communities originated from mainland China. That I 100% agree as a Chinese.

Singapore - 72% chinese population Malaysia - 22% chinese population.

I guess that explains everything ?

One of the reason, I'm sure. Keep in mind that they are Chinese Singaporeans/Malaysians, not Chinese nationals living in Singapore/Malaysia, so they aren't bringing in their habit from China over, but I'm sure the similar cultural tastes, choice in media, language, celebrities and tv shows that they watch, etc contributes to the high use of Chinese social media services.

Despite conflicts and power games one might follow on the news, the world economy is totally global. This also includes supplies coming from armed conflict or politically volatile regions.

If you completely disassemble your Detroit-branded car, you will be surprised how many countries supplied parts for it, from all across the world, including Europe, Japan, China, etc.

This isn't advertised as much, but for some components, Japan is the world leader due to quality, despite the situation of their overall economy. Just like Germany supplies many components or instruments you won't read about on news sites. Fifty percent of the world's surgical equipment is manufactured in Tuttlingen (Germany). Over 400 medical supply companies are situated there. It's like the Shenzhen of medical tools in terms of concentration and market penetration. It's even more interesting in the context of what you wrote, if you look at where the rest of the surgical supplies come from.

Therefore, given that you trust a car which consists of many components built outside the US, and your surgeon probably operates on you with tools made in Germany, everyone is already trusting the global economy and "evil countries" with their lives.

Now, to answer your question about email providers, I'm with StavrosK here that using a Russian or Chinese service is safer if you're a European or US resident because of data access laws. The US govt is still fighting Microsoft to provide access under US laws to data stored in European data centers, now in revision after initial defeat. You should still encrypt or skip email for sensitive communication, but the ease with which the government that can imprison you can access your emails is proportionally more difficult the farther away from your region and its close allies you get.

EDIT: My impression is that the global economy began in earnest with the great European resource grab (or robbery if you like) via sea shipping across the globe, and it only got more global with time and stayed mostly on sea.

> would you use a Chinese email provider? Chinese Facebook clone? Chinese Twitter clone?

I'd use it more readily than I'd use the american counterpart. I have to travel to the US sometimes, but not so much in China, so China knowing things about me affects me much less.

> I don't know about you, but I'd think twice before feeding my child Chinese formula or taking a flight in a Chinese made airplane.

As others said, yeah, you're already doing those things. Everything is made in China.

> China's reach is China.

That's why you never see "made in China" stickers on anything.

> They may have a billion person market but last I checked that was only 1/7th the world.

That's also the largest country in the world, and it's the only market you can say that for. The US is 1/20th of the world.

> Everything is made in China.

Well then allow me to introduce you to the fun fact of the day: were US manufacturing output a stand-alone economy, it would nearly be the size of the entire French economy. As the #2 manufacturer - only overtaken by China in 2011 - the US is twice the size of the #3 manufacturer. US manufacturing output has also doubled since the early 1990s and is now greater than the #3 (Japan) + #4 (Germany) + #5 (S.Korea) manufacturing nations combined.

> I'd use it more readily than I'd use the american counterpart. I have to travel to the US sometimes, but not so much in China, so China knowing things about me affects me much less.

Why does traveling in the US and the US knowing things about you affect you?

> As others said, yeah, you're already doing those things. Everything is made in China.

Not by Chinese companies though. Individual parts are made there, but they are designed by non-Chinese companies and the manufacturing process is overseen by these companies.

> That's why you never see "made in China" stickers on anything.

See my last point.

> That's also the largest country in the world, and it's the only market you can say that for. The US is 1/20th of the world.

Last time I checked, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (not to mention Apple products and Google) were used outside the US as well. I don't think anyone in Europe uses a Chinese Facebook clone or Twitter clone.

> Why does traveling in the US and the US knowing things about you affect you?

Because I can be detained by a country (or denied entry) much more easily when I am in the country than when I am not.

> Not by Chinese companies though. Individual parts are made there, but they are designed by non-Chinese companies and the manufacturing process is overseen by these companies.

I don't believe that "Chinese company" automatically equals "crap". Xiaomi makes some of the best products I've ever used (and they definitely have the best quality to price ratio of anyone), my Huawei phone is amazing, everything I bought from Ali has been good, etc.

> Last time I checked, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (not to mention Apple products and Google) were used outside the US as well. I don't think anyone in Europe uses a Chinese Facebook clone or Twitter clone.

The western world uses those products. I would be surprised if nobody outside China uses them. Maybe they don't, I don't know the WeChat penetration numbers for countries outside China...

> so China knowing things about me affects me much less.

Not if you have a few experiences when a recipient or sender verified with you that his/her/your email had disappeared. When that happened, we keep wondering did who say what which angered the email provider or hit the censor black list. Such things never happened with email provider from other countries. The same emails finally got through when we switched to gmail or alike.

You are taking a very short sighted view here, because if Chinese social media became practical monopolies you would be much more worried than if an American company did, because the Chinese government is so much more repressive

Please clarify what you mean by "repressive". The USA still imprisons more people and have much more people on parole or under some kind of judicial oversight than a lot of much more populated countries.

Comparing Chinese repression to American repression and saying they are similar is like comparing North Korea repression to Chinese. Yes there is an element of truth, but the scales and natures are completely different.

The stripping of freedom, interaction with the rest of society, the effects on the imprisoned individual's family and their finances are the same.

Would you dare say that if the USA droned an innocent person based on signature data in Afghanistan his death would be of a higher quality than the Talib killing him?

If you do not want to make such comparisons then answer one question: Which country's actions in recent history ( <30 years ) were more beneficial to improving trade, alleviation of poverty and development of poor countries across the world - the USA or China?

China's PLA has a great track record of winning battles....in China. Ya, the USA military is focused outward, but they aren't killing a bunch of people in their own country.

When you are looking for a country to live in, that is important. You can tell what people think by the immigration rates between the USA and china.

What do you think are the opinions of the families of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and countless others about the benevolence of the US government? say, compared to the millions of Chinese that have been lifted from poverty since Deng Xiaoping was in power?

How does the US middle class feel about the supposed superiority in "democracy", "freedom" and "quality of life" that the USA provides?

How many kilometers in railway and road has the USA built in poor countries recently, still compared to China? How many hospitals and stadiums? How many schools?

Catching up on economic growth is nothing to do with political repression. Racism is a social problem, and not a government repression. China has a lot of racism too, but it's more hidden, because the pres is not free.

Let's not talk about the USA middle class, they are staying put. It is the chinese middle class moving to the USA, if the CCP is so wise, why can't they convince their own people to stay?

Last time everybody checked, China's population was still around a billion or so. Migration is a natural process. Chinese migration is bigger because their population and the amount of wealth that population has been able to achieve is just bigger. Therefore their mobility is just bigger. they are not moving exclusively to the USA.

Last time everybody checked, the US middle class was sliding into poverty.

But you're uncomfortable talking about subjects that paint the USA in an unfavorable light.

Americans aren't fleeing America, also wealth inequality is shooting up in one country much more than the other. I'll let you figure out which one.

In the USA some people are rich while all the others are getting poor, in China some people are rich while the rest are being lifted from poverty every day. Figured it out already. Have you? Obviously not. Did the US government allocate several billions of dollars for getting poor villagers out of poverty just last week or are they all still plotting to cut more and more from social security and food stamps as always?

and the only reason US citizens don't leave is because they can't. The US makes it stupidly hard for US citizens to renounce citizenship. http://fortune.com/2016/08/11/us-citizens-renounce/

You are extremely ill-informed about the suffering of your own people.

China's gini coefficient has been rising rapidly at the same time it has been getting rich, which is why migrant workers living squalor lived right next to (or even in the basement of) our upscale apartment building in Beijing. China has been getting rich, but the money is distributed in an increasing uneven fashion, and didn't get better during my 9 years there.

And as long as you want to fling around ad hominens...

Are you trying to argue that you housed ALL of China's migrant workers near your apartment building or in its basement? Or have you seen a few poor people and thus deducted that ALL of China's poor are not getting better opportunities?

Have you ever seen pictures of Shenzhen when it was being built? Do you know who built it? Migrant workers who got better opportunities.

How many US cities have risen in the last 50 years? Or maybe you'd like to change the subject yet again...

Political freedom. The right to be an idiot in public, perhaps. A free press. Seems strange, but it seems that this is important. The USA 's terrible foreign policy is not the point here. Instead, contrast China with other democracies: Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Iceland etc instead in comparison perhaps

China's government has to be authoritarian because of its history of being invaded by Western powers and because the Communist party knows very well that their country is very vulnerable to Western ambitions of conquest. That is why Tibet will and should remain part of China. And they still manage to jail less people than the USA and that IS the point here.

And would you say that the US press is really free? They drum up war against one country or another when the US government orders it. They avoid covering third party candidates when the Republicans and Democrats order them to. They write cheap hit pieces (21 articles against Bernie Sanders in a single day in Washington Post) when people in power order it.

Not really much freedom here either... And why don't you start comparing the USA with other democracies like Michael Moore did? The USA would still suck in comparison.

OK, so the problems with your argument are at least 6-fold:

1. You're still committing a Red Herring fallacy by not addressing the obvious details of Chinese political repression, rather instead just claiming they are necessary

2. You are also diverting by Red Herring by claiming that America is worse or just as bad. Yes, the USA does many things badly, and worse thaan many other Western Democracies. This does not make China any better. Or indeed better than the US. There are many ways in which important principles of open society and government are much better in the US than in China. It is astonishing that this needs to be spelled out, unless you are Chinese and have an emotional bond to its system.

3. China is not in danger of invasion by Western powers. I really think you must be a member of the Chinese Communist party to believe such things. This paranoia is shared by Putin's elite in Moscow. The US might like oil and strategic power, but it's not about to invade huge countries on any whim. This is Cold War illogic and hugely irrational

4. The US press is much freer than most in the world. CErtainly more than China's. IT's not perfectly free, but the 1st Amendment makes it so much more powerful in principle than in the UK, Germany, France, and many other relatively free western democracies, and certainly than almowt all otehrs in the world. In practice, money rules, and it's hard to get balanced voices against the neocons, but NPR would really not happen in China

5. the Great Firewall of China.

6. Repression of Tibetan ethnic identity, and no there is no strategic reason for including Tibet in the Chinese empire. That's all about expansionism Tibet is a barren, mountainous poor country, and being culturally homogenised into Chinese Han culture by deliberate immigration policies such as the ones Stalin used to Russify the Soviet states.

7. China jails people for speaking freely. Political prisoners. It's even abducting booksellers and publishers from Hong Kong. The Hong Kongese are very upset about this and do't want to lose their freedom (and better quality of life) by being subsumed entirely into the Chinese patronage system.

And what does it mean to be 'Chinese'? I am asking, because in way or another, that formula you've mentioned, it parts, the wheat its made of (or whatever else), this plane, its parts, its materials... Some of them, probably a lot are in one way or another 'Chinese'.

My personal definition would be a product assembled, regulated, and QA'd in China. If parts are made in China and sent to the US, the US company has to QA the part, assemble the final product with the part, and is regulated by US law with the final product.

Why do you care about people talking about China? If China's reach is only China, if most folks don't use Chinese products, why do you even bother replying?

A billion people is 3 times the size of America. Even if you can get 30% of that is bigger than the entire twitter user base.

> would you use a Chinese email provider? Chinese Facebook clone? Chinese Twitter clone?

Probably not, but only because I speak English, and (the originals of) those services exist in English. If I spoke or was Chinese, why not?

I may be wrong, but I believe they are trying to imply the government's oversight on such services, which in my opinion is a valid concern.

However, they're (China) at least not pretending like they aren't involved heavily like, say, the US government that tries to hide they have their fingers in mass amounts of data and servers. The reality is most major economic power governments seem to be.

In the past at least you could have pointed to Twitter as having a strong commitment to free speech, but that has completely evaporated.

I use WeChat, so I guess I would. When making video calls, me and my friends joke about whether we want Beijing or Washington to listen in (WeChat or Facebook)

As for using other Chinese made things, I do use an Apple computer and smart phone. They are also made in China (though Apple prefers to use the word "assemble")

What's your point? You seem to be bothered that people are talking about the world's biggest market. Why?

"Chinese clone" makes a catchy headline but is pretty far from an accurate characterization.

A quick Google Image search of Weibo shows mixed results: http://technode.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/anatomy-new-s... - lots of "inspired by Twitter" features there.

Also, most of the articles I found about it referred to it (lovingly or positively) as a Twitter clone.

As someone who is ignorant of said "clone", I feel compelled to ask:

What would be an accurate characterization?

I'm genuinely curious.

"Microblogging platform" is pretty accurate. Calling it a clone is kind of like calling Bing a Google clone. Yes, they are both search engines, but no.

Weibo is Chinese for microblogging, and Sina and Tencent weibo started off as twitter clones, but today they come with everything but the kitchen sink.

When Sina launched Weibo in 2009 it was very much a 'clone', however, I agree not so much now.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that 140 Chinese characters contains way more information than 140 Latin characters. Then again, even Weibo raised its character limit to 2000 characters.

Comparing apples and melons.

Weibo has very strong payment system.

I wouldn't consider the Weibo payment system "strong"... it seems to be based on alipay and I've never heard of anyone using it instead of Wechat or Alipay. But other than that indeed Weibo is now very different from twitter, they've continued to evolve while twitter has staid essentially the same for all these years... 140 character limit and all.

This kind of comparison is dull. It may be worth less for whatever reason, but the Twitter brand is still so much more recognizable at a global scale. When you go to a job fair outside of mainland China and you see, Twitter, Tecent, Sina and Baidu there, which one would you prefer to visit first?

Tecent for sure. WeChat is years ahead of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It is the future.

Baidu...?

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