The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

yiqinfu.github.io

166 pointsreimbar66 comments

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all

This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China.

Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be relevant for few days.

Not that it seems to matter - article by themselves mostly expresses fleeting opinions. It's hard to come across a truly philosophical work with long term implications - and even then it gets buried anyhow, regardless of where it is.

This is even a problem in software. People ignore projects that have not had GitHub commits recently, as if code (which is math) somehow becomes less valid over time.

Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be a positive indicator since it might mean there aren't a lot of bugs.

The opposite could also be true. Now that I have experience working on vulnerabilities for enterprise software, I've learned there are constantly updates for mitigating software vulnerabilities that didn't exist a month or even week ago. An old java project may still use a version log4j with that major vulnerability. This may not be a big deal depending on the software, but it is a valid reason to be wary of stale code in some cases.

A lot of software has dependencies that will have changed over time. Likewise a lot of software fails to pin down exact versions of said dependencies. That makes code that hasn't been committed to for a few years relatively likely to be broken.

Older C or C++ projects may be "standalone", but when built with the latest GCC or clang produce lots of warning messages and may be miscompiled courtesy of programmer vs optimiser. Older python programs may refuse to run under python3.

So while code does not rot, the GitHub project is unlikely to contain all the code for the project, and those external dependencies changing has much the same effect as rotting.

A still running CI would be a better indicator that the project works, but failing that, recent commits are the same signal.

This is the one thing I hate about software. I don't want to have to re-learn how to use a re-invented wheel every couple of years. I just want to use robust, time-tested tools to solve problems, like in virtually every other field of engineering.

I'm not under the impression that e.g. pressure vessel design or bridge building follows the same safety rules now as it did 40 or 80 years ago. You might learn the same basics in university, but in practice the rules and tools are also evolving all the time.

So the "robust, time-tested tools to solve problems" also become obsolete in other fields of engineering. I think this is not unlike "compiler warns about more unsafe practices nowadays".

The velocity (aka churn) is a lot higher in software though, for questionable benefit.

Yeah, but people still do it in, say, Rust, where that's not the case.

A large part of this is simple relevance. Why would I care about a weather forecast from last year, or election coverage after the election? So much of what’s written has an exportation date of some kind that search algorithms just favor the new.

The other half is older articles are competing with everything ever written. You hardly need 1,000 different Calculus textbooks.

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value.

Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature doesn’t help. This again comes from the mobile-first trend, because long-form discussions are difficult on mobile and you can’t fit much more than a chat window on a mobile display.

Public web forums attract trolls, bots, spammers, and all sorts of bad actors. It's ultimately better this way.

In the 90's, the notion of "netizen" as a distinct fun, curious, respectful culture seemed to exist and therefore letting random netizens on your Internet doorstop was fun, even despite trolls and what not.

I honestly believe this culture is an accident - the Cold War ended in the early 90's and that coincided with the rise of home Internet, the vibe was very positive and freewheeling. This vibe ended 9/11/2001.

There's pockets of that culture around still but the hordes of unwashed masses enabled by mobile-internet + Myspace/Facebook age are now dominant, and it's long been past time for netizens to develop their own gatewayed islands.

Public discords are no better for bad actors. You just need active moderation in both cases

I don’t think that’s the causality. Still-existing web forums, mailing lists, places like HN and (to a lesser degree) Reddit show that it is possible to have public forums without them being overrun by spam, bots and trolls, given adequate moderation. This is particularly true for special-interest topics. (The dynamics tend to be a bit different in bike-shedding territory.)

The reason Usenet died is because it didn’t have an easy moderation system, and because web forums were more accessible (no special client software needed). Mailing lists died because people moved from desktop/TUI mail clients to web mail, which didn’t provide good usability for handling mailing lists. Web forums died because they didn’t translate well to mobile and because chat-like platforms appear more accessible to novices.

Mobile plays a major role here. Mobile is more accessible (approachable) than desktop software/hardware, and at the same time is ill-suited to long-form discussions because of the small display and worse typing experience. Platforms want to maximize their audience and therefore tailor their application/functional design to work well on mobile. As a result, their design is ill-suited to long-form discussions.

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean.

Majority of the moderation are volunteering position, meaning they don't get paid to moderate those sites. Reddit plagued with this issue, there are power mods that moderating 50 or 100 subs. The reason for that because no one else want to moderate the subs since it requires time investment.

Moderation is always and a thorn on their site for many forum/discussion sites. When Elon Musk announced their consideration creating a new social media platform, I always think of how they will manage the moderation part in those platforms? Look at other small social media platform like Truth, Gab, Parler. Common issue with those sites is moderation.

Yea, and most forums would eventually attract a bunch of die-hard but absolutely insufferable users with all the time in the world. Occasionally these folks would be in cahoots with the admin staff and would get to have their transgressions ignored while banning people who dared to disagree with them.

I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.

You are not wrong. I was in a game modding & hacking forum and there was a discussion about particular game. There was heated debate between the original poster and the moderator in a thread and then this moderator decided to target and respond hateful political comment against the original poster that are not relevant to the gaming mod topic. It is like the mod had their ego bruised and felt like need to take it out on the original poster. I reported that mod to the admin/owner of the forum and the response I got from them is that everything is fine and it is not against their TOS (while it is...). Which is sad because this mod is well known in this community, it is out of character for this mod to react that way. After that response from admin, I lost all respect for that admin and the mod.

> Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere.

A lot of information on Wikipedia is permanently valid and doesn't need to be "couple of days old" fresh. Same for many hobbyist websites from the past

This is the one thing I dislike about Hacker News. We have a diverse and talented commentariat that loses all interest in a topic after 2-3 days max, with no long-term discourse. Perhaps this is by design - a pressure release valve? But it does feel less of a venue for conversation, and more like running down a platform trying to talk to someone whose train is leaving.

We regularly have [2015] flags on articles, in that regard this place is probably better than 99% of the internet.

After all, an article is to inform the current audience, and debates should not last forever.

It’s the lack of notifications and an inbox showing new replies to your comments. I miss 90% of the replies to my comments until it’s way too late to reply in turn.

> Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere.

This is why organic search & YouTube are incredible acquisition channels.

Organic search & YouTube are the only channels that will consistently surface and bring visibility to old content.

YouTube & organic search bring thousands (millions?) of companies millions and millions of visitors per month, and 99.99% of brands cannot distribute their existing content more effectively than Google can for them.

I think this has less to do with technology to be honest and more with the size of the 'chattering class' in a lot of Western countries. The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China, or a lot of Asian countries for that matter. I think it's more cultural than technological.

I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe.

I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.

> The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China

It may not be common, but China makes up for it with a large population, so there are a lot of amateur public intellectuals in terms of absolute numbers.

And they blog. On Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, Jianshu, ... Most readers probably come across an article by being subscribers or having someone they know send it to them or because the platform pushed it.

So pretty similar to Western social media. What's missing for the classic blogosphere feel is probably really just the discoverability across platforms.

Every platform wants to trap as many eyeballs and as much content as possible, so in the end they're all siloed off from each other. Responding across silo boundaries does happen, but tends to involve embedded screenshots instead of links, which makes it a bit harder to discover other people writing on the same topic, so each writer ends up as a bit of a silo as well.

I like to pay attention to three basic features of evolving information systems. Variability, propagation speed, and durability.

Here we see a disparity between propagation speed and durability. A tightly controlled, push based, curated feed can dramatically increase propagation speed.

There's little to no effort in discovery, you get fed what's new instantaneously, and can just as easily continue the propagation chain via in-app shares. But as the author notes none of the mechanisms for durability are in place (outside of the company servers). The information may propagate quickly but it "dies" rapidly.

This is, sadly, a feature. Or at least a mechanism of artificial scarcity that aids the business goal of gaining and retaining users. With Snapchat this was explicit and open, but if you can get the addictive potential of information FOMO without having to make a guarantee about things being actually deleted, then why wouldn't you?

These are not consequences of technology, but human nature.

What differ developed countries, they got technologies much earlier, when they where expensive and/or hard to achieve (like broadband internet with low latency, where not achievable on >90% of 1st world territory), personal computer costs like automobile, so internet become means of communication for elite.

- In 1990th, when you communicate via internet this automatically assume, you have high iq and good education. Elite difference, they intentionally spent significant resources to achieve awareness, to structure information, that's cause of search engines appearance.

When smartphones wide distributed, they lowered the bar very much, so appear new reality in which most new users where not elite, but ordinary persons, not initiative, with average education. But western elites already where capable to moderately good deal with new reality, and to save adequate information infrastructure.

China jumped over elite internet period just into period of average persons, Proletariat, and Chinese elite was not ready, it is just too young, not mature for such trials, consider this period as information chaos.

I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR country, and see very similar things, but fortunately, our society resists to totalitarianism and grow, because of this we have much less chaos, but we still suffer of problem that no information lasts long enough.

I have few ideas on how western elites solve this, and could share and discuss, but at the moment I have not much success in implementation if my ideas.

This really hits. I never thought about this before but it fits with my experience perfectly. All writing on WeChat and whatever else Chinese people use is ephemeral and email really isn’t used much. We got DingTalk at my school this year and I haven’t checked my work email in weeks.

Even before DingTalk became a popular app I found working in China that most work-related communication happened on WeChat, regardless of whether that was company policy or not. Because I chose not to join all the informal WeChat groups, I often ended up missing out on context during live incidents/escalations and being bypassed on technical decisions. One of the things I found most frustrating working there is that nobody ever wanted to summarize the situation in email or even on a wiki page. It felt to me like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail around why decisions were made or who held the responsibility.

> like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail

I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. For example, if there has been an act of sabotage, having access to those ephemeral messages may be crucial to catch perpetrators.

I have no doubt that the government is able to get logs of WeChat messages going back who knows how long, but I was speaking in the context of the workplace. When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. This problem is exacerbated when there are dozens of informal WeChat groups that may or may not include certain people depending on the internal politics of the organization. It's a culture of ass-covering and secrecy that feels uncomfortable to me, although perhaps that's just part of living and working in an authoritarian country.

>>When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened.

It's not ideal, but I thought that WeChat had a desktop client (similar to WhatsApp) that allows for slightly easier scrollback, search and export/copy-paste functionality within the group chats. It doesn't help across the wider WeChat platform as the article points out, but in a corporate setting with many adhoc working groups it might help one to maintain context.

It's been a few years since I have used WeChat, and I suspect they might have improved their workplace features since then. The desktop app was a thing several years ago, but even then it depended on the right people being added to the right groups. I remember dozens of instances where people would say "oh, well we talked about that the other day" and then scroll back on their device to try find some conversation whose outcome was never logged anywhere else. If you were lucky they had saved a screenshot, without context, of course.

This was even more difficult when dealing with clients or third party vendors, because they would have their own WeChat groups where they discussed support issues or purchases. I remember a situation where we had to contact a former employee to find a password to a machine because it had been shared on a chat that only they were on at the time - that sort of thing.

To be fair, I do think that a lot of similar stuff happens on Slack, where private groups get created and decisions are made without always including the correct participants according to the org chart. And probably prior to the explosion of workplace chat apps people were doing this by getting together in person for lunch or drinks or golf. It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.

> It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.

Indeed. It takes good leadership to recognize the problem in the first place and to keep up on combatting it (e.g. actually checking if people keep their notes on a centrally managed system).

> I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view.

State security concerns aside, deleting messages is less expensive than keeping them. If your plan is to delete everything after N days, it's easy to partition data by day, and then drop the older partitons as needed.

> I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view.

WeChat, like Whatsapp, stores canonical messages on device and not on the server as opposed to services like Messenger that store messages on the server. It has the same limitations as Whatsapp of only one primary device being able to connect to the service at a time and any new device starting from a blank chat history unless a manual transfer is done.

Some minimal amount of history is stored for government compliance (I believe it's around 30 days but this could have changed) and the government has the ability to flag certain accounts for longer retention but you can be fairly certain that Tencent does not have long term archives of all of your chats, because if they did, they would almost certainly offer chat history across phones.

The disappearance of chats across phones is a major usability pain point of Wechat and something they absolutely would fix if they had the ability but it's a deep technical decision baked in from the early days of the product and the refactor would be non trivial. It also conveniently gets the Chinese government off their back by pointing to a technical reason they can't cooperate to avoid having to deal with the headache of being more deeply enmeshed.

Even working as a client of a Chinese company I see the same thing - they only want to communicate via random WeChat groups, and anytime you ask for things to be emailed its a battle to make that happen. Eventually the one specific thing you asked for will be emailed, then everything will revert to WeChat where its all buried away.

Yeah DingTalk is a weird one. Weird in a good way. It doesn't necessarily fit with western business bureaucracy but I found it giving me ideas for throwing together temporary groups of consultants that function for a 3-9 month period. Will be interested to see what they add for tax reporting functionality here in the west. If they make that as seamless it may be something that I pick up and use. An interesting idea.

To me this is more a reflection of Chinese society. China has always been a highly centralized place (i.e. its name is "middle kingdom") where internal control is prioritized. The media/application space is a reflection of that. If you look at other countries like India or Brazil that are early in their internet adoption, you see a much more diverse writing ecosystem.

The downgrading of email is happening in the US, in my experience. At my work we use Slack continuously, both for communicating with team members and for reaching out to other people at the company. I often go more than a week without checking my email. I can’t remember when the last time an important email came through.

As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types.

> As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types.

It's just cold calling, by email, isn't it? Plenty of people write to me cold off HN and I write back to them. At work it's also fairly common to get emailed by someone selling some service, right? Salespeople have their own way to find the people they need.

We (ZeroTier) run our own Mattermost (self-hosted Slack), which has largely replaced e-mail but has the benefit of us owning the database and all chat logs.

From what I understand a lot of the long-form "blogging-style" content in Chinese is found on Zhihu, which is commonly referred to as the Quora of China (although from my limited experience with it it seems a lot better in multiple ways).

I do get the impression that the Chinese internet is very centralized. As the author pointed out the practice of having your own site or independent niche forum/community is rare. Almost all content/people/communities exist in Weibo, BiliBili, Zhihu or WeChat.

Maybe this reasoning can be applied to Hacker News itself. The moderation probably plays a big part in the quality of the content found here. However, HN is also indexed on Google, has a few way to discover more ("past" button, seeing a user's comments or posts), and also has an excellent Algolia integration. For example, dang often refers to some of his previous posts using this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I wonder if all those things that make the information longer lasting also raise the average quality.

Honestly, HN is still badly suited to long-form discussions, because it’s generally limited to a few hours, and due to the lack of read/unread status. You can’t rely on participants to follow a thread for days/weeks/months/years as you can on web forums and mailing lists.

I agree that HN is not the best for long-form discussions. However, I'd say that content on HN is not as short-lived as a tweet thanks to the features I talked about. I think that's part of why it feels specials compared to Twitter/Facebook for example.

There is also an interesting phenomenon in China's internet: concentration of communities, for good or for bad. For instance, zhihu.com, the Chinese copycat of Quora has way more deeper discussion on machine learning, math, or STEM in general than Quora. On zhihu, it's easy to find the in-depth discussion of latest papers, hundreds of posts on intuition or interpretation of pretty much every STEM concepts and their historical context, dozens if not hundreds of lengthy articles that compare Raft and Paxos and ZABs and what not, all kinds of recommendations of interesting papers in top-tier conferneces, and etc. Quora, in contrast, has few such discussions because people would go to reddit, stackexchange, or some mailing list for such discussion.

>My Chinese social media posts reach 100k to 200k people a day

vs...

>Take two of my blog posts as an example. The post has [...] garnered 30k views as of May 2021

"Good tweets" disseminates to more eyeballs faster than "good blogposts". Just like actual twitter, PRC social media also link to blogposts / longform. RSS power users aside, I don't see how this is much different than how authors push blogs on twitter in west, with occasional repost of old blogposts when relevant. The function of using search to discover old content feels like it's been diminishing in recent years. Usually better to discover through curated specialist forums / subreddits dedicated to specific subject matter. And even then link rot affects a lot of older content, much of which not cached/archived.

That said, I do think west (anglosphere specifically) is deluged with expertise from brain draining talent across the world and simply a larger source for content creation, not just knowledge.

I wonder if the same consequences will apply to western children who grow up with mobile Internet without being exposed to the desktop web until they have to use it in a job or higher education.

the internet is not really a library, but a radio (an ephemeral stream)?

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc..

china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smooth, everyone is on the same page

there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first

we'll are stuck in the post industrial age, they are already moving past that, they were only just an emerging country yesterday, it's crazy how the west lost so much time, thanks to the capital i guess, our market doesn't want it

> there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first

Contactless payments are already widespread in every Western nation that isn't the US.

It's very recent, wich is the point of my post, we lost so much time with meaningless things

Contactless payments was already adopted in Canada for several years by 2010 [1]. It’s not recent. Not sure why US is slow in this adoption though

[1] See first two sentences here:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-securi...

Come on, it was just for a very small minority, and you couldn't do it for every payments, most businesses refused for small payments because of the fees, "CC only after X dollar" kind of rules

And you still can't use your phone, a joke this system is

> It's very recent, wich is the point of my post, we lost so much time with meaningless things

But again, outside of the US it isn't. Contactless payments have been common in Europe and had widespread usage for a decade. Chinese and European adoption was pretty similar.

They are widespread in the US too. Yes, we were slower to adopt them than others, but for the last few years we have had them.

Contactless payments are becoming more widespread in the US. At this point, the only store that I frequent that doesn’t accept contactless payment is Home Depot. I recently went on a week long road trip and 90+% of my transactions were contactless.

It's "easy" when you have no choice, no freedom over how you want to live your life.

I think the freedom in the west is oversold, and lack of it in China is also oversold...

Trade of this century: Short US ("Bottled Freedom-Lite"), Short China ("We Peg Our Markets To Bottled Freedom-Lite's")

The trick is to structure it to not be long the USD or CNH/CNY for any of the gains.

What makes you think that they don't index, track, process and do whatever with these conversations? Just because users don't see it, it does not mean it doesn't happen.

i never said they don't

i said it is the addition of the steps and their expectation in the west that i find weird, replying to OP's story

wich i assume he has an agenda to push some services over there to compete with chinese ones

then i mention things they have and we don't

maybe that is the result of not always expecting what the west expect, wich allows them to be this agile and adopt things much quicker, wich allows them to go past the post industrial age quicker

we seen it already with 5G

what prevented that to happen in the west? lack of education, lack of market will to invest, they wanted their society to remain in the bronze age because more profitable, and also some of westerners believe 5G is a conspiracy

it's weird isn't it?

they do what we can't do because we built a society around profits first

> the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc..

Well, seems like you want to look at things from the point of view of "I hate surveillance capitalism!".

I remember trying to look up how to jailbreak an iPhone 6. Google results were a mostly forum posts talking about iPhone 4 jailbreaks, and it'd be 1 forum post of content and dozens and dozens of people saying "Great job!", "Thanks!", etc, which aggravated the hell out of me. This is persisting something which should be ephemeral (since I feel like dozens of "Thanks!" are valueless 10 seconds after they're uttered)

How do you expect to find information if they're not persisted/searchable anywhere, it'd be like in the old ages where you have to figure out the right master who has the know how and reach out to him.

> always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc..

this is literally what China does lol

I can buy almost anything by tapping my phone in NYC today, including public transit fare.

China really does take that to another level - when you order a meal in a restaurant and get the bill it has a WeChat or AliPay QR code on it. Scan the code and you've got a pre-populated payment for your meal that can be processed without sitting around trying to get the waiter to bring a card machine to you.

At least in the UK that exists to some degree post-covid, but its in the form of every pub chain in the country having its own crappy mobile app for ordering via a phone.

>we already copying them with contactless payments

Pretty sure South Korea invented these, and China copied them.

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