How China is Cashing in on Group Chats

That is ludicrous.

"Cultivating a false sense of safety is key" might have been more accurate.

Does anyone here believe that the commies cannot ready any and all WeChat messages?

Even requiring invitations past 100 members doesn't mean you need some kind of personal connection. Instead of the group QR code, organizers can post their personal one and then add everyone to the group who messages them. It might slow down spammers who constantly try to join random groups, because they won't know whom to ask for an invite.

Lack of global search for groups also isn't much of a hurdle, since you can still globally search for posts inviting people to join a group. It does mean that there's a niche for companies who create groups and assign members to them based on some criteria, as described in the article.

And regarding usernames and anonymity: they work a bit differently than you might expect. Every WeChat user has a unique identifier which is random by default, but can be set to something intelligible if you want to make it easier for others to add you by searching. Then there's a global username, which is shown to your contacts and in groups by default. Per-group aliases don't completely override that; you can still find out someone's global username by looking at their profile. So most people set their alias to their real name in groups that require it and stay pseudonymous otherwise. You can also set aliases for your own contacts, which helps recognize people who constantly change their name and avatar.

I hope that clears things up a bit.

And each question can get it's own topic -- there's a chat but it need not be used for everything?

And, an open source platform? A university can choose to install on their own server.

Then have a look at Talkyard:

https://www.talkyard.io/use-cases (I'm developing it)

If I booked a vacation with some company and they offered me to join their WhatsApp group specific to my destination I see nothing wrong with that. The reason we don't have that here is probably that it's too expensive. In China you can hire someone for next to nothing to monitor some WeChat groups and have them answer frequent questions or extract potentially useful new information from other users conversation in that group. Shouldn't be too surprising and if you don't want this, don't join. Like when you're uncomfortable with sharing random recordings from your home with Amazon, don't buy Alexa.

Err, WeChat doesn't have any advertising, notably unlike Google and Facebook.

Bold claim. I do not think this is true outside of very specific use-cases.

I heard you can’t even order ramen without using WeChat/WePay.

1.4 billion people use it as their dominant payment method. Not mobile payment method, but payment method full stop. I think it's safe to say they're incredibly profitable.