I feel foolish for not having realized that the UX must make perfect sense to everyone who has used WeChat since the days of it being a simple communication app.
By that logic, I'm not sure we could say quite yet that Instagram's bundling is a mistake.
It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.
TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.
Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).
On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.
Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.
PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:
* Buy everything, or course.
* Pay for electric, gas, and water.
* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.
* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.
* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.
I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid.
I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.
As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat.
I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.
And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.
Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.
Rename it "Skype for Teens". Make no changes to the codebase.
They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.
You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.
At a certain scale, a person doesn't make this decision... their friends make it for them.
On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.
East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.
What is Reels immitating here?
TikTok or Doubin, just swipe up/down would be enough for 90% of your input
When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse.
tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.
Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.
Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then).
Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore.
I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.
UI wise, Snapchat is the worst.
This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)