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Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

>a great proven model that the lagging west took ages to adopt.

I’d be careful with this type of thinking. Sometimes things can just be different.

Take KOLs/live-streaming e-commerce for example. Works in China for a lot of reasons (they’re the worlds most populous time zone for example), but it comes off as a negative utility interaction for Westerners (why is a pretty girl begging me to buy tires?).

Again, a lot of the differences are culture, especially in terms of China’s relatively controlled internet vs. the West’s relative free for all.

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This was also said before about microtransactions in games and here we are. My take - it's just lagging execution due to much less competition in the west. Yeah, this may sound crazy until you actually see the number of companies in China competing in every niche.

Eg, in the west there was just Periscope/Meerkat. In China there were dozens of apps doing that with a much wider set of features. Same with electric scooters - I recall in Shanghai many years ago when this trend just started to boom, they had literal huge piles of scooters on every corner from like 10 different companies in the first or second year of this trend. And the fact that Onlyfans is the dominant player in the space in the west is just simply ridiculous.

So my takeaway is: west is generally slower to adopt with less competition and slower execution. Human nature is pretty much the same. Cultural norms shift and quickly given enough incentives.

I mean feel free to have a different opinion than me, but I don’t really understand the point you’re making?

Twitch is the US’s dominant streaming platform and it predates (as Justin.tv) all the China players. It’s had less of an impact because for the most part, the West isn’t into as into live-streaming as China (we can post videos without worrying so much about censorship, so the “live” component matters less).

OnlyFans is not a live-streaming platform and does not have even a remote comparable company in China.

On the scooter front, again, China has more bicycle/scooter infrastructure, so it works in lots of places there, but barely in the US.

Id argue all of those examples are things that work in China but not elsewhere, though I guess you assume scooters/live-streaming are still on the upswing in the West and will have a bigger impact as time goes on (if you really hold that belief, I’d recommend monetizing it with Amazon and Bird stock, both of which price neither of those trends in)

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