echevil

A great milestone! Congrats

"supposed" to. That's how the "democratic" governments market themselves to be

Why I don't feel any surprise at all?

Meta hired them and required them to fit into Meta's culture

As far as I can remember it all started since Trump got elected. Before then the tone on Facebook was much more positive than it is now

It's just what media always do. No surprise in the words they choose. The words the choose shows they report based on opinions not facts

Nah, that is also bogus claim shifting people's attention away from what really matters. A government ultimately needs to deliver policies benefitial for the country and its people. It is a failure if it cannot do that, not matter how "democratic" it is, like UK or current US. Being more "democratic" won't change anything

Democracy is overrated, period

lol doesn't look legit. not surprising it malware built in

Curious because I do use a lot of devices from Chinese makers myself and had no issues so far. If it's from a legit brand, I'd need to take a closer look at their products before buying more.

What was the brand / model of the tablet? And did the malware do anything else than force setting your homepage?

I'm not familiar with news media consumption in Australia, but I wonder would this push users to news aggregators like "News Break" or "Apple News"?

Does Australia have businesses in similar model like Facebook? Or are you talking about completely different models?

No this is not "be like China", don't flatter yourself. When Facebook and Twitter was banned, there were imminent security threats as these platforms were used for organized crimes in China, and these companies simply ignores the requests from Chinese government to remove certain accounts. Google decided to not comply with local rules and left China by itself.

US didn't even bother to find a plausible excuse

AirBnB would still get crushed like most other American companies when they face strong local competitors even if they have full support from CCP. These companies are usually terrible at localization and what works in America won't just work in China. Doesn't mean it's not possible for them to succeed, LinkedIn for example, did fairly well in China so far.

AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"

I was able to use Google fine for many years before it was banned. It can get banned when you search for certain keywords, not arbitrary at all.

Google was about the only one I can think of that is not worse than their competitors, and their own product actually don't need much localization.

However, Google failed the growth part in China. Chinese users won't go ahead and set the default search engine to google.com on their own unless they already know about it, especially those don't know English. The homepage used by most Chinese are local websites like hao123 that would send traffic to Baidu

How so? Google operated in China for more than a decade and never got a major market share, and they already did fairly well compared to others. Facebook was largely unheard of after being available in China for many years before finally got banned in 2010. Amazon has been operating in China forever but is basically irrelevant to most Chinese. Most American companies did terrible job in localization and I see no chance of them winning the competition with their local competitors.

If they face strong local competition in any other country, they'd fail too

Good examples. AirBnB operated fine in China even has a China BU last time I checked. Uber sold it's operation in China to local competitors as they were losing any way.

That explains so much

WeChat has lots of things hidden behind low impression entrypoints. You can explore them when you want. Its primary features, chat and moments, are dead simple, like WhatsApp. Facebook on the other hand, are mixing lots of stuff into their main feed, making the experience horrible for everyone

Douyin is a mix of lots of things but you barely realize that. It has one main surface - the feed. IG on the other hand, feels like several unrelated things stitched together

In China (especially in tier 3,4 cities and rural places) and similar markets alike where many user have low digital literacy, installing apps from App Store is a skill that lots of users don't have. Their first few apps on their phone were most likely installed with someone else's help.

Actually learning every new app is an obstacle, but they managed to learn to a few apps like WeChat because it's super useful. They won't spend time to learn about something that won't bring immediate reward. Once they have a few apps installed on their phone, they'd feel that's enough.

Chinese companies are also thinking about that so it's matter of what works better in those markets

I think it largely depends on how much Apple Pay / Google Pay could abandon their western centric design and invest heavily on localization. Payment solutions are just hard to unify - Lots of people in Indonesia don't have bank accounts, Bank transfer is actually a popular way of transaction in Brazil...

Apple Pay works in China, but basically nobody use it. It's designed with mindset that works in developed markets, and never worked out well in China.

Yeah, if Apple Pay and Google Pay has the same market share then website could integrate those service and achieve the same, I agree. However, Apple Pay and Google Pay are also harder to use from the perspective of both consumers and merchants in these countries in the beginning, and IMO that's the reason they failed in the first place.

I don't know what payment methods these services require now, but in the beginning at least, they both supports just credit cards, which is basically suicidal. Most users won't be able to use it at all.

From merchants' perspective, they don't need to pay for transactions on WeChat Pay or AliPay, whereas both Apple Pay and credit card companies would charge them for usage. For this reason most small business wouldn't even think of using them.

No it's not. With WeChat you can easily get new features by visiting mini-apps. It is actually a distribution channel

Possible, but I see two big obstacles: 1. Mini-apps are optimized for this one purpose and feels much faster and native, websites won't be able to achieve the same. 2. Some features provided by WeChat is actually important, especially the payment part. Websites won't be able to integrate something like WeChat pay seamlessly as mini-apps do. If it requires users to put in credit card information, it would instantly fail in these countries

The way WeChat distributes additional content is in the form of mini-apps, which has no similarly to GMS. It is something that does not exist in the ecosystem of US apps.

In China and other emerging markets, downloading apps from app store are just something that many users would rarely do, no matter it is App Store, Play Store, or many other Android App Stores available in China. It is a big obstacle that most US developers never realised.

The main benefit of super apps, and why it is so popular in those countries, is that it doesn't require users to download anything to use new feature. In some use cases I also found that so convenient.

Just as an example, WeChat has an ecosystem of mini-apps. When you go to a restaurant in China, you can often find QR code on each table. If you can that QR code, it would open a mini-apps that lets you place orders and make payments, without waiting for the waiter to serve you. A mini app is like a website that doesn't require download and storage on the phone, but the user experience feels more native and is tightly integrated with features available in WeChat. It would be much harder to get users if the same thing requires you download an app.