Discussion of https://a16z.com/2018/12/07/when-advertising-isnt-enough-multimodal-business-models-product-strategy/
Let's assume that Chinese digital products have more sophisticated/desirable user experiences, as well as greater diversity of revenue streams.
How might this be explained on a macro level?
Example conjectures:
1. Maybe Chinese possess greater capacity for product complexity. Eg. because of STEM education or introducing computers at an earlier age.
2. Maybe Chinese Keynesian "animal spirit" exceeds that of the West-- greater raw, supply-side entrepreneurial drive, leading to faster experiments and better products.
3. Maybe China has more competition, and hyper-competition (competition within similar strategies) than the West, yielding greater competitive pressures driving product innovation.
4. The a16z article describes Chinese product innovations that are often network-based. Maybe Chinese society is more communal, yielding greater opportunity for network-based products.
5. Maybe Chinese consumers exhibit greater product switching behavior; they are more willing to try a new product vs. settling with a current choice. They are less satisfied with "good enough", leading to greater product innovation due to retention pressure. In the West, young people exhibit greater product switching behavior, and this trait declines with age. Maybe China has more young people than the West, as opposed to greater intrinsic switching behavior.
6. Maybe the greater sophistication/diversity of Chinese products is baseline macroeconomics: paraphrasing Adam Smith, "specialization is limited by the extent of the trade network". Larger trade networks have better stuff of the same type, cheaper stuff of the same type, and new types of stuff. Maybe China's domestic market is so large that their products are naturally of greater variance, including the variance of sophistication and revenue diversity.
This is actually the reason why links are disabled by default in text posts. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:
This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.