11 ms·

WeChat’s world

137 points by kosmos1337 10y ago

happy-go-lucky 10y ago
Google and Facebook, what are you waiting for? Go vie for the app.
baybal2 10y ago
qq+weixin > facebook many times over even without considering that fb casually lies about the number of active users they have
pipio21 10y ago
"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 10y ago
  To be fair, central-bank-hating cryptocurrency enthusiasts also dream of a cashless economy. It sounds like you're kind of projecting.
ting_bu_dung 10y ago
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.
zakki 10y ago
Social media chat is the new Facebook.
delegate 10y ago
.. 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.
- gbog 10y ago
  Agree that wechat and the like are going against the grain of the open nature of internet, but one positive side effect of wechat is that it will force many service and content to develop simple web apps instead of mobile apps, because it is the only way to exist there inside. Most mobile apps need to die and be replaced by web apps, then wechat will die too, or become a mobile os, which is the same.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    I don't know if that's actually a good thing. In general, I prefer native apps (real apps) to web apps; in particular, I trust an open-source application I compiled myself far more than I do some random website. Unfortunately, I trust the random website more than I do a closed-source, 'free' mobile app. So it's a bit of a pickle. Long-long term, I'd like to see more free software on mobile devices, and more simple HTML web apps.
  - inimino 10y ago
    People are developing Wechat apps exclusively for use inside Wechat, and using Wechat-specific APIs. There's no chance whatsoever of the built-for-Wechat app ecosystem somehow killing Wechat.
- elorant 10y ago
  As much as I dislike Facebook saying that they break the Internet is a bit of an overstretch. The Internet isn’t a static thing, a set of rules carved on stone that has to remain like that for an eternity. It’s an evolving medium constantly reinventing itself. And the ultimate ruler is users themselves. Facebook isn’t in the business of creating content that’s why they don’t care that much with discoverability of posts. They’re in the business of connecting people and finding their needs and habits. Why is it a pity that users (aka the crowd) is dictating how a technology should be used? It happens all the time. The iPhone wasn’t build with third party apps in mind, it was the demand of users that allowed that to happen. Twitter was invented as an sms service. Coca Cola was meant to be pharmaceutical product for stomach upset. This is exactly the Internet we once dreamed about. A widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate.
tluyben2 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      It works for me. It's stable and down-regulates the stream quality really well with a bad connection.
      - 10y ago
Borating 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
mirap 10y ago
This seems more like 1984 future...
wineisfine 10y ago
Soon, all the internet we hackers like will be called the darkweb
- mxuribe 10y ago
  So true; I agree 100%!
Trufa 10y ago
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.
- mynegation 10y ago
  I am not criticizing it, but I am not using it either (I did use it, out of novelty and because of couple of friends of east Asian descent). Ultimately, it is not about features or quality, but what the majority of your social network uses. Personally, I would dispense with all the messengers altogether. I usually ask people to e-mail me for the non-urgent stuff, call me for really urgent stuff, and for everything in between there is text and iMessage.
- djfergus 10y ago
  I would not be surprised if the great Chinese firewall does DPI and degrades the connections of all those western built technologies you mentioned. China has been accused of protecting its companies from competition under the guise of security/order/regulation especially in the communications space.
  - Trufa 10y ago
freewizard 10y ago
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.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
Perhaps the most amazing thing about WeChat I've discovered is Chinese in America using it to order from Asian businesses in America.
Macuyiko 10y ago
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 :).
methou 10y ago
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'.
ryanobjc 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
- kartickv 10y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "boosterism" (is that a US term?) but I don't see what's wrong with a pro-WeChat article if The Economist genuinely believes WeChat is amazing, or is recognising its advantages. Not shying away from expressing opinion makes The Economist 10x more useful than other news sources, which merely report the facts, which I often know because everyone has already repeated them ad nauseam. I learn much more from reading an article in The Economist than other sources. Regarding your other point, The Economist style guide says that writers shouldn't assume that readers already know what a given company does. Hence, "HSBC, a bank". Because there are many companies that are not familiar. Do you know what Idea is, for example? Answer: An Indian cell network.
hyh1048576 10y ago
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.
jordache 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
nayuki 10y ago
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
jjcc 10y ago
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.
kccqzy 10y ago
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?
kartickv 10y ago
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 10y ago
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.

137 points by kosmos1337 10y ago

Google and Facebook, what are you waiting for? Go vie for the app.

qq+weixin > facebook many times over even without considering that fb casually lies about the number of active users they have

pipio21 10y ago

"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 10y ago
To be fair, central-bank-hating cryptocurrency enthusiasts also dream of a cashless economy. It sounds like you're kind of projecting.

ting_bu_dung 10y ago

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.

zakki 10y ago

Social media chat is the new Facebook.

delegate 10y ago

.. 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.

gbog 10y ago
Agree that wechat and the like are going against the grain of the open nature of internet, but one positive side effect of wechat is that it will force many service and content to develop simple web apps instead of mobile apps, because it is the only way to exist there inside. Most mobile apps need to die and be replaced by web apps, then wechat will die too, or become a mobile os, which is the same.
- wtbob 10y ago
  I don't know if that's actually a good thing. In general, I prefer native apps (real apps) to web apps; in particular, I trust an open-source application I compiled myself far more than I do some random website. Unfortunately, I trust the random website more than I do a closed-source, 'free' mobile app. So it's a bit of a pickle. Long-long term, I'd like to see more free software on mobile devices, and more simple HTML web apps.
- inimino 10y ago
  People are developing Wechat apps exclusively for use inside Wechat, and using Wechat-specific APIs. There's no chance whatsoever of the built-for-Wechat app ecosystem somehow killing Wechat.
elorant 10y ago
As much as I dislike Facebook saying that they break the Internet is a bit of an overstretch. The Internet isn’t a static thing, a set of rules carved on stone that has to remain like that for an eternity. It’s an evolving medium constantly reinventing itself. And the ultimate ruler is users themselves. Facebook isn’t in the business of creating content that’s why they don’t care that much with discoverability of posts. They’re in the business of connecting people and finding their needs and habits. Why is it a pity that users (aka the crowd) is dictating how a technology should be used? It happens all the time. The iPhone wasn’t build with third party apps in mind, it was the demand of users that allowed that to happen. Twitter was invented as an sms service. Coca Cola was meant to be pharmaceutical product for stomach upset. This is exactly the Internet we once dreamed about. A widespread communication network with no central command where everyone and their dog can participate.

tluyben2 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    It works for me. It's stable and down-regulates the stream quality really well with a bad connection.
    - 10y ago

Borating 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

mirap 10y ago

This seems more like 1984 future...

wineisfine 10y ago

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

mxuribe 10y ago
So true; I agree 100%!

Trufa 10y ago

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.

mynegation 10y ago
I am not criticizing it, but I am not using it either (I did use it, out of novelty and because of couple of friends of east Asian descent). Ultimately, it is not about features or quality, but what the majority of your social network uses. Personally, I would dispense with all the messengers altogether. I usually ask people to e-mail me for the non-urgent stuff, call me for really urgent stuff, and for everything in between there is text and iMessage.
djfergus 10y ago
I would not be surprised if the great Chinese firewall does DPI and degrades the connections of all those western built technologies you mentioned. China has been accused of protecting its companies from competition under the guise of security/order/regulation especially in the communications space.
- Trufa 10y ago

freewizard 10y ago

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.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

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

Macuyiko 10y ago

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 :).

methou 10y ago

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'.

ryanobjc 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
kartickv 10y ago
I don't know what you mean by "boosterism" (is that a US term?) but I don't see what's wrong with a pro-WeChat article if The Economist genuinely believes WeChat is amazing, or is recognising its advantages. Not shying away from expressing opinion makes The Economist 10x more useful than other news sources, which merely report the facts, which I often know because everyone has already repeated them ad nauseam. I learn much more from reading an article in The Economist than other sources. Regarding your other point, The Economist style guide says that writers shouldn't assume that readers already know what a given company does. Hence, "HSBC, a bank". Because there are many companies that are not familiar. Do you know what Idea is, for example? Answer: An Indian cell network.

hyh1048576 10y ago

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.

jordache 10y ago

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 10y ago
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

nayuki 10y ago

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

jjcc 10y ago

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.

kccqzy 10y ago

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?

kartickv 10y ago

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 10y ago

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.