
WeChat’s world - kosmos1337
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21703428-chinas-wechat-shows-way-social-medias-future-wechats-world
======
Trufa
Has anyone criticizing it actually tried weChat?

I know that there are better ways to do things, and you don't have to accept
the "Chinese way" of doing things, but that's mainly politics, and yes there
ARE a lot of privacy concerns, but, and there's a big but.

Technically speaking, the app is amazing. I recently used it to talk to my
girlfriend while she's in China and seriously, it's the best (face to face)
communication app I have used. I'm not talking about any features in
particular, though it does feel very stable. I'm talking about un-interrupted
voice communication for hours and hours!

I've lived abroad for the last 4 years, so I use skype and Hangout and
facebook call and whatsapp call and appear.in and any new hipster service that
comes up a lot. The main thing they have in common is that I spend a quarter
of the time saying "hello, hello, do you hear me?"

This is the best VOIP service I've ever tried, period. It just works.

My point does not address the privacy concerns and so on, but seriously, I
really think that most people commenting here are implying that the app is
necessarily crappy, reality isn't that simple. I'm seriously trying to get my
friends to use it, I will not discuss very sensitive matters over it, but
seriously, if you're really concerned about privacy, you probably shouldn't be
using any of the big ones anyway.

~~~
morgante
I have in fact used WeChat (particularly when I was in China) and my opinion
is that it's still incredibly mediocre.

In just a few weeks of using it, I ran into numerous bugs and
inconsistencies—not to mention the fact that it's a giant walled garden with
zero privacy.

Unfortunately, it is essential in China (primarily because alternatives are
throttled/banned). I definitely would never use it anywhere else though if I
had a choice.

~~~
nullnilvoid
Can you elaborate on the bugs you found during the weeks? I have used it years
and have yet found any bug.

~~~
morgante
It was 2 years ago, so I don't really recall most of the bugs. I do remember
struggling mightily when I somehow lost access to my account. Restoring access
required opening a janky web view with a form that wouldn't load properly on
my iPhone so I had to borrow a friend's Android phone to try. Then the form
was entirely in Chinese with no internationalization/translation available.

~~~
Trufa
Oh, coincidentally, I've just had to do that, and it's true it is still a
little bit "janky" since it's a webview and the process is a weird, but it was
perfectly doable, it was also internationalized,

Not saying the app is perfect though, I'm sure it has lot's of bugs, and to be
honest I definitely haven't used it fully, since I just use it for this one
contact and mainly just talk, I was specifically talking about having good
stable conversation for hours.

------
delegate
.. which is terrible. Apps like these (including Facebook) are breaking the
Internet.

Now it's up to the social network to decide how resources are located (what
standards?), who can access them, and for how long, etc.

Saw a good video in your Facebook timeline ? Good luck finding it again after
you refresh the page.

It's a pity how 'the crowd' is now dictating the direction in which technology
evolves. By trying to please the users at all times, we the tech people have
now created these golden cages for users - in which their identities are
commodified and sold to the highest bidder.

This is not the Internet we once dreamed about and 'social media' apps like
these are getting it further and further for that vision every day.

~~~
joosters
So don't use it? I'm not sure how your comments reflect on WeChat; it's not
like stores are insisting on you paying through the app, or that businesses
are forcing you to use WeChat to contact them. It's an added convenience, and
it seems people like that.

~~~
delegate
I generally try to avoid these services, but it's impossible to not use some
of them, because of their monopolistic position.

I have to use Facebook sometimes because people use it to organise events,
concerts and other things which are now inaccessible to me unless I use
Facebook. Which is terrible.

These services are bad _because_ they are popular and successful and _because_
they try to offer more and more services on top of the 'social' aspect.

>it seems people like that

That's exactly my point. By catering to what the masses 'like', we're slowly
closing the door to the 'free Internet', replacing it with a hegemony of
"social" networks, owned by big corps.

And people don't just 'like' that - otherwise companies wouldn't have sales
and marketing and advertising departments.

They're unwitting players in complex games of chess between these companies
and their value to these companies is the tendency to accept subliminal
suggestions and then act on those suggestions when they make purchasing
decisions. Also called advertising.

~~~
Feuilles_Mortes
I'm in a similar position to you in regards to facebook. My strategy is to use
custom CSS to remove the elements of the site that only serve to distract me
(newsfeed, etc.). I still get notifications for events, chat, etc. so it works
out alright.

~~~
walterbell
Are there example open-source stylesheets to accomplish this filtering?

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Many of the user styles (e.g. for Stylish) are purely cosmetic[1], but you can
see what elements they're matching on and roll your own.

1:
[https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/facebook](https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/facebook)

------
tluyben2
Bit offtopic;

For me it shows more, to western apps, how you build an app that always
works... with wechat I can do sync and async voice calls, chat and photo
sending with any connection, even if it is very slow or intermittend. No
western app I have tried, including the actual phone app, does that as well as
wechat. I can call, on 2g crappy China Mobile to colleagues in the EU where
Skype and Whatsapp will not even connect or send anything over.

Payments are nice when they do not take card here in China (as I do not have a
CUP card).

But that, for me it is secondary: the always connected and stable is better.
And that works on my mountain in Spain too :)

Edit: for people that always have fast internet, apps that are totally
unusable with bad connections are: skype, slack, office 365 (google docs is
still workable). OK apps are Facebook messenger, google hangouts, google docs
and whatsapp. And so far the only that just works is Wechat.

~~~
lhopki01
One thing you need to be careful about is comparing a service in China with
the service outside of China. For example Skype in China because of the
monitoring put on it disconnects all the time where it would be fine outside
of China. Services like WeChat have an inbuilt advantage in that their
connectivity isn't as interfered with in the same way that western apps are.

~~~
tluyben2
Skype doesn't work in the west (I live 5 months per year in Spain and the rest
I work in UK/NL/China/HK/Aus; it is no different in other places hence I like
wechat which works well everywhere) either on bad connections; it won't
connect or will be very slow/unreliable at sending even small pieces of text,
let alone images.

~~~
aantix
It works for me. It's stable and down-regulates the stream quality really well
with a bad connection.

~~~
jasonlingx
It's horrible and I often have to reboot my computer whilst using it.

~~~
aantix
Why would you have to reboot your computer if an app is failing? I don't think
I've had to do this since running Windows 2000..

~~~
jasonlingx
Exactly...

It actually starts saying it is unable to connect to my speakers and
microphone...

------
ryanobjc
This article is a little weird to me. It seems to read fairly ok, seems pretty
pro wechat, which is fine. Then I realized that the article was saying things
like:

"HSBC, a bank" "BMW, a german car maker" "Goldman Sachs, an investment bank"

Which got me thinking... who is the audience for this article? Probably not
the average Economist reader, who knows who HSBC, BMW and GS are. In fact they
know that "GS" means Goldman Sachs in this kind of context.

It's also wildly pro-wechat, in a very boosterism way. For an editorial this
would be fine, but this is pushed as news. It also cites businesses, not
people, as various 'proof' points, and inconsistently uses informal and formal
language in the same sentence. Most investment banks don't "reckon" about the
rise of multibillion dollar firms.

As an introduction to nonfiction writing, I feel like this piece would
struggle to get a C-, if not a F.

I have always understood the Economist to be a newspaper held to a different
standard (self-imposed even). But this kind of stuff suggests that perhaps
they are trying to infringe upon Forbes' territory.

~~~
pradn
Summarizing the mentioned companies, no matter how big, is a quirk of The
Economist. A more notable quirk is their lack of by-lines. Presumably,
multiple authors work on each article. Perhaps that's why you feel the tone is
inconsistent. Or perhaps its because they write in UK English, where words
have different tonal attributes.

The paper (they insist on calling themselves a newspaper, another quirk) is
prone to these sorts of booster articles. Other times, they write in-depth,
balanced, and informative articles from a Liberal view point. The thing that
irks me most is how they casually omit criticisms from other viewpoints, but
that's expected as they wear their bias on their sleeve.

~~~
ryanobjc
ok fair enough. I guess my expectations were out of step with the reality of
their writing.

I feel like their analysis here is lacking, and I learned nothing from it.
Other than some people love wechat, which is something I could have guessed.

------
pipio21
"Among all its services, it is perhaps its promise of a cashless economy, a
recurring dream of the internet age..."

I will correct that a cashless economy is a recurring dream of central bankers
and their more fervent supporters, like "The economist" or Keynesians or
whatever.

I prefer the old model in which companies compete against each other instead
of having a panopticon company that knows all your private conversations,
control all your money transactions, knows when you are, who you are with and
by the way, censors you, etc.

When I have been(living) in China I came to the realization that central
planning is a retarded idea, responsible for China 5 century standstill. You
really appreciate freedom when you have lost it.

But it seems central planning is all the rage now. We have to let "expert"
economist academics to tell us what to do with our money, forget the open web
to become citizens of facebook (or Google or Microsoft) land, and let those
companies control our computers, so we don't watch videos or books that
panopticon does not give us rights to access, and copy dictatorship regimes in
our policies because people in power envy it.

~~~
wmf
To be fair, central-bank-hating cryptocurrency enthusiasts also dream of a
cashless economy. It sounds like you're kind of projecting.

------
methou
The terrible part of the WeChat's world is quite simple, it's a very private
network piggybacked on the open internet. Even worse, unlike facebook, it's
poorly moderated in the 'Chinese Way'. As for privacy/security concerns,
WeChat is doing better than most of its counterparts in China, and let's just
limit our scope in China.

The domestic criticizes about WeChat is mainly in these aspects: 1\. Using
WeChat for Work, I have ZERO idea why people just did this, but even in my
workplace, it's a common practice. It sounds unprofessional and risky to use
an external tool for work purposes.

2\. Lack of Openness, the only successful crawler works with WeChat is Sogou's
search engine. Indexability is just the beginning of the issue.

3\. Lazy moderation, rumor, pseudoscience, (domestic) copyright infringement
articles are just everywhere and non-stoppable. WeChat officials said to put
some force to stop these, but their 'official account hasn't been updated for
ages. Maybe it's just what 'Chinternet' is like.

4\. WeChat is a network of people you known in the 'outside world',
friends/family/co-workers, this part just as bad as facebook.

There's also an awesome part about WeChat, the payment. WeChat got into
payment business not long ago in a traditional measurement of time. A few
years later, can you imagine that you can buy vegetables with WeChat/AliPay?
Back in my college days (2009), it was a Country where only some decent
restaurants, chain markets accept debit/credit cards. WeChat is accepted
everywhere now, only and offline.

Speak of payments, there's one thing to add, you can check out how Alipay, a
payment app, like PayPal are so much into communication business that flooded
its app with all the SNS crap, even made friend suggestions based on who you
had transactions with. I uninstalled the app immediately after they
demonstrated their determination in the social network business, creepy.

Not only WeChat is the only choice of social network on the go, but also it's
a quite predictable software, more decent than most of its competitors. So I
think this is more than just the "Convenience weighs more than risk mgmt"
scenario, more likely something weighs more than 'Der Freiheit'.

------
nayuki
WeChat's features (text, photo post, video post, live phone and video) mostly
work correctly for me, but a number of things frustrate me about it:

\- Photo zooming and scrolling is broken

\- Large photos and videos don't load half the time, and the retry mechanism
is unclear (but eventually works given enough patience)

\- Arbitrary limits like 9 photos per post in moments

\- Really bad for writing and reading paragraphs of text

\- I use Facebook as my primary social media, and the difference is stark. On
a big desktop monitor, I can scroll through a hundred posts and comment on a
few per minute. WeChat is mobile-only, and reading and writing is painful
compared to PC.

\- You can't log into WeChat on multiple devices simultaneously. Logging in
will kick out the other device. Only the active device will receive and save
current messages. And if you switch back and forth, you will fragment your
message history across devices. This is unlike services like Facebook
Messenger where messages are saved on the server and multiple logins are
supported.

\- Properly transferring message history from one device to another is
painful. I did it on ~3000 messages plus ~300 MB of attached photos, and it
took 10 minutes of transferring over Wi-Fi plus another few minutes just to
digest/re-index all the messages on the new device.

\- It forcefully uses your cell phone number as your identity, rather than a
separate user name

------
Borating
What I am worried about is that Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple are
copying the same model [1]. These companies are killing the open web.

[1] How China Is Changing Your Internet (The New York Times) -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8)

~~~
yoz-y
The open web is still there. There are just many people that chose to not
participate in it. There are still many who do and will probably do so for a
long time. The one problem might be funding, but people will always think of
something.

~~~
intended
People are thinking of ways to break the open web too. Witness what just
happened in India and was narrowly avoided because of hubris.

To add: there's still more attempts to break NN in India.

The civil groups which are being formed don't have the same environment or
support that the first world has developed after years of civil liberties
battles.

So yes, people are always thinking of something. It's just that the time to
defend the commons is here.

------
Macuyiko
Quick story time:

My wife and me have been trying to set up a service on top of WeChat using
their payments and other APIs. (A very small idea, takes two days to implement
on top of, say, Facebook and using Stripe for payments.)

The amount of hoops you have to jump through when you don't have guanxi (there
was a huge discussion about this topic on HN some weeks ago) is staggering.
First, forget about getting access without having a Chinese ID, next up, be
prepared to go through multiple rounds of document sending in order to get
access to more "advanced" API features, so you need a Chinese ID and a Chinese
company number. Next, be prepared to go through loads of confusing
documentation and terrible navigation to actually implement the thing (no
English documentation is available, and not many Stackoverflow posts on the
topic... yet). In case you try to be smart like me and only use Wechat's API
for the "social" API features and not payments, you come across another wall:
the API expects call to originate from a domain name having an ICP license:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license)
basically a number registering your domain with the Chinese government. Again
loads of paperwork and weeks of waiting around to get it done.

Give up on the Wechat API and hope people will share your website? Fine. So
which payments API to use? Alipay works a bit better in Europe but most
Chinese are allergic to anything that breaks Wechat's app "flow". Forget about
using Stripe of Paypal: most users forgot about their debit/credit card number
ages ago (the app has it) or don't even have a compatible one.

Still, every day I'm seeing pages from big and small Chinese brands that
apparently can do all of these things with relative ease. Don't they have to
jump through all these hoops, you wonder? Turns out that Tencent will allow
"strong names" to get access quickly in order to help grow the platform, or so
the gossip goes.

Why not use the western offerings then? Well, as of now, it's still "coming
soon":
[https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml](https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml)
... also, it's unclear whether you'd be able to access Chinese users through
this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get anything done in China without
local help. On the other hand, given how well platforms such as Wechat work
for end-users and how feature-complete they are, Facebook better hurry up
before Tencent decides to take on the western market for real.

Rant over :).

------
wineisfine
Soon, all the internet we hackers like will be called the darkweb

~~~
mxuribe
So true; I agree 100%!

------
hyh1048576
Disclaimer partly in response to "has anyone criticizing it has actually tried
weChat": I use WeChat daily.

WeChat is an amazing App with a lot of features. Using it for payment is
convenient. It's video Chat is so much better than Skype in terms of stability
etc. (Consider the network condition in China that's certainly a miracle.)

But there is certainly something Orwellian in WeChat. WeChat has built-in
browser, which they do some censorship on links people click on. I put in a
link from cn.nytimes.com and I got this:
[http://i.imgur.com/jMGZZSH.png](http://i.imgur.com/jMGZZSH.png) (I clicked
this link in China and got that, my friend clicked that link in WeChat while
being in U.S. and get through fine. magic) Please note this is not even the
usual GFW business, GFW doesn't return something like that at all. The text in
the pic says "it was reported by many people", my feeling is that any link
from cn.nytimes.com would got that no matter whether people reported or not.

What is more, they do this to Taobao, the major Chinese online business
website, held by their competitor Alibaba (they are competitor in the same
sense Google, Apple and Facebook are competitors, not because of they are both
in the same niche field), namely if you send a link from taobao.com (e.g.
[https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=531244443418](https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=531244443418)),
you end up seeing this:
[http://imgur.com/e3pHmUe.png](http://imgur.com/e3pHmUe.png) where the text
says "Please copy this link and paste it in the browser to visit." (On the
other hand, WeChat has a "Shopping" entrance to taobao's competitor jd.com
right within the App.) [The actual reason is complicated, Taobao blocked
UserAgent:WeChat long time ago when WeChat is small, but now it's the other
way around.]

Although I won't put it as 1984, I'd say it's more like "Brave New World".
With WeChat one can do whatever he/she wants "as long as being a good citizen"
(and not using WeChat's competitor's service too much). It could be turned
into a 1984-world very easily -- e.g. You may noticed that I'm paranoid enough
to cut the ISP information when showing the screenshot, but what if the
background image contains information of my WeChat ID? After all it's only 4-5
bytes at most. (To those who think I'm overthinking, this is already happening
to Alibaba's internal network to prevent information leak.)

That's why apps like Signal/Telegram always have a small user base in China,
no matter how much better WeChat are compared to them.

------
kartickv
Sad to see so many comments that seem like knee-jerk or one-sided criticism. I
expected better from Hacker News.

Sure, point out flaws in something, like the centralised nature, but only
after recognising its benefits.

For example, not having to download umpteen apps and juggle umpteen accounts
and enter your credit card everywhere is a big plus. I just want to make an
appointment with the doctor without researching which app to install for that
purpose, choosing between multiple apps, creating a user name and password,
giving my credit card (which I wouldn't give to an unknown app) and so on. It
certainly has downsides, but advantages as well.

Often, I care about getting the job done, not about researching and finding
the best app to make an appointment. Even if the centralised decision-maker
(WeChat) chose a second-best app, using the second-best app to book an
appointment beats booking the appointment on phone because I couldn't bother
to research between multiple apps in an open ecosystem. Sometimes, a good
enough default beats choice.

Again, pros and cons. Let's recognise both. Since many of the other posters
have pointed out (valid) criticisms, I've focused on the other side of the
coin.

------
bwangsta
5 years in China now: WeChat is my primary connection online. I check email
once every 2-3 days, Facebook once every few months and usually just to turn
off notifications that never seem to actually stay off. WeChat allows me to
pay my utility bills, Call taxis, buy a soda, send out promotions for events,
publish my photos, stalk friends, find movie tickets and reserve seats, buy a
box of avocadoes, find a group of expectant mothers, and the list goes on and
on. This is the social network that Chinese people use and folks in the West
don't get how pervasive it is.

------
baybal2
qq+weixin > facebook many times over

even without considering that fb casually lies about the number of active
users they have

------
kccqzy
I haven't really seen anyone doing a decent security audit for WeChat though.
Last time (2014) I tried digging into their third party API, I was put off by
uses of MD5 as the preferred hash function. Does anyone know they have
improved on the security front in the intervening two years?

------
jjcc
A couple of hidden features a lot of people ignore are: 1\. iBeacon 2\.
AirKiss and AirSync protocal for hardware connection.

To me, the 2nd function is a next big thing beyond social media. It seems not
very significant now but will have a big impact in future.

------
rokhayakebe
Perhaps the most amazing thing about WeChat I've discovered is Chinese in
America using it to order from Asian businesses in America.

------
jordache
I love how WeChat allows for sending of large video files. I haven't come
across a US based chat service that allows for this.

~~~
ParadoxOryx
I hate to be the Telegram shill, but Telegram supports sending an unlimited
amount of any type of file up to 1.5GB in size each.

[https://telegram.org/blog/shared-files](https://telegram.org/blog/shared-
files)

------
mirap
This seems more like 1984 future...

------
freewizard
after all, it's us the users who want free internet services, so naturally
these companies are building beautiful walled garden with free admission to
lure us in, and suck our privacy or whatever we don't care about to feed
themselves.

------
happy-go-lucky
Google and Facebook, what are you waiting for? Go vie for the app.

------
zakki
Social media chat is the new Facebook.

------
ting_bu_dung
it seems every month we get an submitted article about how 'inclusive' and
'integrated' wechat is. nobody ever remembers that wechat is a result of
government/state relationship, (unfair) shutting out of all foreign
competition, tech monopoly, and lack of credit card use. Nevermind the
downsides of having _one app_

1.) lack of choices

2.) pricing gouging

3.) monitoring

4.) lack of product innovation

5.) censorship

naturally the big US tech companies would _love_ if the user only used their
one single app. but thank god there are choices in the western world.

