7 ms·

How China is Cashing in on Group Chats

142 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

RonaldSchleifer 7y ago
So we are essentially talking about a more accessible and immediate forum, not really anything more; this forum you are currently reading, transposed into a group chat functionality, like the yahoo chat rooms of the 90s, on mobile. That’s all this group chat thing is. But whatever, let’s do this, “what a genus and wonderful innovation. It’s definitely worth $100 billion, pre-money!”
- duguxu 7y ago
  It's definitely worth $100 billion today if it will be "worth" (valued) $200 billion tomorrow.
  - o_p 7y ago
    Of course, the worse thing than being an idiot is being a slow idiot.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dfischer 7y ago
Personally I’ve been working on Chat based commerce in the U.S for over 5 years now... crazy. The adoption in US markets is definitely slower compared to SEA. Habits and behavior are much more in favor of mobile, and specifically chat for everything experiences in SEA. WeChat is the prime example that doesn’t have a strong comparison in the West. However, the tide is here past the hype of “Chat Bots” and I’m happy to be working on this problem for helping people find jobs. Messaging is the ultimate form of UX. Communicate it, and it’s done. At Edvo, we’re having a lot of positive feedback from the job seeker side over Messenger. We have a lot to work on still but, definitely see and feel the adoption of messaging based commerce and general ux. It’ll be interesting how that transitions in a post mobile era. I’m excited!
- Hendrikto 7y ago
  > Messaging is the ultimate form of UX Bold claim. I do not think this is true outside of very specific use-cases.
  - kees99 7y ago
    Retail customer support is one such use-case. In the Netherlands, national railway company, many banks, telecoms, etc - all have webchat/twitter dm/whatsapp contact options prominently displayed either alongside phone numbers or replacing them altogether: https://www.ns.nl/klantenservice/contact https://www.ns.nl/klantenservice/contact https://www.ing.nl/particulier/klantenservice https://www.ing.nl/particulier/klantenservice https://www.robinmobile.nl/klantenservice https://www.robinmobile.nl/klantenservice
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    It's the most used form of interaction. Text messaging.
  - snazz 7y ago
    If you’re interacting with a human, I’ll argue that synchronous messaging is the most efficient and comfortable way to communicate. Imagine how much faster customer service problems are to solve that way than with a ticketing system, email, or phone (where you have to wait on hold and one operator can only help one person at a time).
    - 9dev 7y ago
      The biggest advantage of messenger apps is that they're both synchronous and asynchronous, depending on the client and user behaviour. I'm working at a place that builds a customer service platform based on connecting messenger apps to a web client for agents to work in. The speedup you notice compared to Callcenter agents is astounding - they can handle multiple cases simultaneously, without having to wait for individual customers. They, in turn, can respond whenever they like to. It's really cool!
  - snaky 7y ago
narrator 7y ago
"On WeChat, for example, group chats are discovered entirely by word-of-mouth or QR code—there is no global search option. The QR code is automatically disabled once a group reaches 100 members. Once the group grows to that size, users can only join if invited by a friend; groups are capped at 500. This means that even large group chats have a built-in social filter, since anyone who joins the group is likely the friend of at least one other existing group member. As a result, every group feels like a secret, known only to other members." I couldn't imagine Facebook limiting group size. It seems like mass groupings and mass trends are kind of the bread and butter of western culture. I am reminded of how anti "Sorcery of the Spectacle" this is. * The paranoia about mass action in china has created a new kind of artificial collectivism/individualism hybrid: The capped size group. * We are seeing a new form of social organziation! People, this is momentus! Seriously, go read "Sorcery of the Spectacle" again and think deeply about what this means. It's practically a re-conquering by the proletariat of the social sphere! The no global search thing is crazy. You actually have to know people who tell you about things? How absurdly 1990s! The whole thing reminds me a bit of the mailing list culture of the late 90s. That all got eaten by Facebook groups, but it could have been something different. "Cultivating a sense of safety is key. Unlike WhatsApp and Signal, which reveal users’ private cell phone numbers to the group– or the now-defunct chats within Facebook Groups, which exposed users’ real identities–WeChat allows its users to adopt aliases. Those anonymous usernames act as a privacy shield, giving users control over how their identities are displayed. (Though it’s hidden from other group users, WeChat does require a phone number and real-name verification to sign up, which curtails anonymous troll abuse.)" So they've learned from 4chan!
- Proven 7y ago
  > Cultivating a sense of safety is key. That is ludicrous. "Cultivating a false sense of safety is key" might have been more accurate. Does anyone here believe that the commies cannot ready any and all WeChat messages?
  - FooBarWidget 7y ago
    This isn't about safety from the government, it is about safety from non-government harassers.
dragonsh 7y ago
Well this sows seeds of mistrust. If commerce infiltrate our private conversation, it turn from convenience to creepy. Every conversation will invoke a feeling that someone is trying to sell something for profit. This is one of the issues in modern commerce in China.
- llarsson 7y ago
  Sounds like a whole platform built for MLM type of commerce. Somebody you ostensibly trust and think you know just tries to sell you stuff.
  - PakG1 7y ago
    Social commerce would be different from MLM though. MLM has incentive to recruit salespeople and then profit off of the salespeople you recruit, usually several levels down. This creates immense pressure on those at the bottom, as their revenue potential is much more difficult to realize. China started heavily regulating MLM due to the social problems it was creating among a large populace that was only still just starting to develop their economy. M without the multiple levels (ML from MLM) is completely different and still feasible in this social setting.
    - dragonsh 7y ago
      In China Amway (called Anli in China) and Mary Kay generates over 40% of its global revenue. It's memebers actively promote and use WeChat and their relationship with personal friend for sale. All the live broadcaster use their friends network. Every conversation happening in WeChat or other messaging app is analyzed multiple times to figure out what could be sold to those people to generate profit. It becomes tiring when you can only see in everything one do someone is trying to sale something, be it taking taxi, trying to talk with your friends, watching movie, even when people sleep companies try to analyze their sleep and process the information to find what can be sold to that person.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  How so? Nobody forces you to join such a group, or is trying to hide the fact that it's commercial. If I booked a vacation with some company and they offered me to join their WhatsApp group specific to my destination I see nothing wrong with that. The reason we don't have that here is probably that it's too expensive. In China you can hire someone for next to nothing to monitor some WeChat groups and have them answer frequent questions or extract potentially useful new information from other users conversation in that group. Shouldn't be too surprising and if you don't want this, don't join. Like when you're uncomfortable with sharing random recordings from your home with Amazon, don't buy Alexa.
thunderbong 7y ago
This is a seriously interesting article. I've never thought of chat applications the way these guys are doing it.
- johnmarcus 7y ago
  A highly government censored chat with riot group size limits? Yeah, who would have think.
simplecomplex 7y ago
WeChat is a financial disaster for all we know. Tencent doesn’t share any financials. Internet chat has always been hugely popular. Building a profitable business out of Internet chat has not been so easy historically. Historically, successful free chat software have been loss leaders (FB messenger for FB, yahoo messenger, AIM for AOL). Snapchat has never made money. LINE is the only chat app I know of to really turn a profit from just their app, and it has come at the expense of active users and squeezing more advertising into the app. Odd title “cashing in” considering there’s no talk of the business behind WeChat...
- coolspot 7y ago
  Doesn’t WeChat is shopping and payment monopoly in China? I heard you can’t even order ramen without using WeChat/WePay.
  - kwizzt 7y ago
    By no means is WeChat a shopping or payment monopoly. There's Taobao and Alipay by Alibaba. From what I know they are fairly even in terms of market share (payment). WeChat's shopping scene is mostly on a very small scale and personal level.
- contingencies 7y ago
  WeChat is a financial disaster for all we know. 1.4 billion people use it as their dominant payment method. Not mobile payment method, but payment method full stop. I think it's safe to say they're incredibly profitable.
  - simplecomplex 7y ago
    They could be losing money on 1.4 billion in transactions. Their super low transaction fees might indicate WeChat Pay is a loss leader. That’s my point. Tencent intentionally hides WeChat in their financials. You assume it’s wildly profitable because Tencent is. Usually when a company tries to hide the financial narrative of a product it’s not because it’s doing great. “We consider payment at this point in time as to [sic] infrastructure service rather than a service that generates profit for us. And I think that status will maintain for quite some time,” Martin Lau
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I like the idea of building small groups on platforms like WeChat, especially the online school. Sounds like a good way to leverage one instructor helping 100 students. The big problem however is getting locked in on one proprietary platform. I guess what we can realistically hope for is for there to be three or four big players and competition will keep them from being exploitive monopolies. I still think that we are going to end up with a world out of William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi novels: a few mega corporations with small groups, arcologies, and individual hustlers living on platforms they don’t control. A mixture of mega corps with small scale entrepreneurs.
- kajmagnusmobile 7y ago
  What about not only the teacher helping the students, but the students also helping each other? And each question can get it's own topic -- there's a chat but it need not be used for everything? And, an open source platform? A university can choose to install on their own server. Then have a look at Talkyard: https://www.talkyard.io/use-cases https://www.talkyard.io/use-cases (I'm developing it)
johnmarcus 7y ago
This reads like it was written by a Chinese government official trying to sway HK protesters. WeChat asks for so much personal info in order to onboard, and your messages are definitely monitored and censored by the government - funny how they left out that tiny detail. It is the exact opposite of privacy and secure messaging.
rednivs 7y ago
Super interesting. Chat is something that is becoming more and more important in an age where people are becoming more nationalistic with online communities. Rather than Facebook they are joining smaller niche communities like those seen on www.communityhunt.io

142 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

So we are essentially talking about a more accessible and immediate forum, not really anything more; this forum you are currently reading, transposed into a group chat functionality, like the yahoo chat rooms of the 90s, on mobile. That’s all this group chat thing is. But whatever, let’s do this, “what a genus and wonderful innovation. It’s definitely worth $100 billion, pre-money!”

duguxu 7y ago
It's definitely worth $100 billion today if it will be "worth" (valued) $200 billion tomorrow.
- o_p 7y ago
  Of course, the worse thing than being an idiot is being a slow idiot.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dfischer 7y ago

Personally I’ve been working on Chat based commerce in the U.S for over 5 years now... crazy. The adoption in US markets is definitely slower compared to SEA. Habits and behavior are much more in favor of mobile, and specifically chat for everything experiences in SEA. WeChat is the prime example that doesn’t have a strong comparison in the West. However, the tide is here past the hype of “Chat Bots” and I’m happy to be working on this problem for helping people find jobs. Messaging is the ultimate form of UX. Communicate it, and it’s done. At Edvo, we’re having a lot of positive feedback from the job seeker side over Messenger. We have a lot to work on still but, definitely see and feel the adoption of messaging based commerce and general ux. It’ll be interesting how that transitions in a post mobile era. I’m excited!

Hendrikto 7y ago
> Messaging is the ultimate form of UX Bold claim. I do not think this is true outside of very specific use-cases.
- kees99 7y ago
  Retail customer support is one such use-case. In the Netherlands, national railway company, many banks, telecoms, etc - all have webchat/twitter dm/whatsapp contact options prominently displayed either alongside phone numbers or replacing them altogether: https://www.ns.nl/klantenservice/contact https://www.ns.nl/klantenservice/contact https://www.ing.nl/particulier/klantenservice https://www.ing.nl/particulier/klantenservice https://www.robinmobile.nl/klantenservice https://www.robinmobile.nl/klantenservice
- ThomPete 7y ago
  It's the most used form of interaction. Text messaging.
- snazz 7y ago
  If you’re interacting with a human, I’ll argue that synchronous messaging is the most efficient and comfortable way to communicate. Imagine how much faster customer service problems are to solve that way than with a ticketing system, email, or phone (where you have to wait on hold and one operator can only help one person at a time).
  - 9dev 7y ago
    The biggest advantage of messenger apps is that they're both synchronous and asynchronous, depending on the client and user behaviour. I'm working at a place that builds a customer service platform based on connecting messenger apps to a web client for agents to work in. The speedup you notice compared to Callcenter agents is astounding - they can handle multiple cases simultaneously, without having to wait for individual customers. They, in turn, can respond whenever they like to. It's really cool!
- snaky 7y ago

narrator 7y ago

"On WeChat, for example, group chats are discovered entirely by word-of-mouth or QR code—there is no global search option. The QR code is automatically disabled once a group reaches 100 members. Once the group grows to that size, users can only join if invited by a friend; groups are capped at 500. This means that even large group chats have a built-in social filter, since anyone who joins the group is likely the friend of at least one other existing group member. As a result, every group feels like a secret, known only to other members." I couldn't imagine Facebook limiting group size. It seems like mass groupings and mass trends are kind of the bread and butter of western culture. I am reminded of how anti "Sorcery of the Spectacle" this is. * The paranoia about mass action in china has created a new kind of artificial collectivism/individualism hybrid: The capped size group. * We are seeing a new form of social organziation! People, this is momentus! Seriously, go read "Sorcery of the Spectacle" again and think deeply about what this means. It's practically a re-conquering by the proletariat of the social sphere! The no global search thing is crazy. You actually have to know people who tell you about things? How absurdly 1990s! The whole thing reminds me a bit of the mailing list culture of the late 90s. That all got eaten by Facebook groups, but it could have been something different. "Cultivating a sense of safety is key. Unlike WhatsApp and Signal, which reveal users’ private cell phone numbers to the group– or the now-defunct chats within Facebook Groups, which exposed users’ real identities–WeChat allows its users to adopt aliases. Those anonymous usernames act as a privacy shield, giving users control over how their identities are displayed. (Though it’s hidden from other group users, WeChat does require a phone number and real-name verification to sign up, which curtails anonymous troll abuse.)" So they've learned from 4chan!

Proven 7y ago
> Cultivating a sense of safety is key. That is ludicrous. "Cultivating a false sense of safety is key" might have been more accurate. Does anyone here believe that the commies cannot ready any and all WeChat messages?
- FooBarWidget 7y ago
  This isn't about safety from the government, it is about safety from non-government harassers.

dragonsh 7y ago

Well this sows seeds of mistrust. If commerce infiltrate our private conversation, it turn from convenience to creepy. Every conversation will invoke a feeling that someone is trying to sell something for profit. This is one of the issues in modern commerce in China.

llarsson 7y ago
Sounds like a whole platform built for MLM type of commerce. Somebody you ostensibly trust and think you know just tries to sell you stuff.
- PakG1 7y ago
  Social commerce would be different from MLM though. MLM has incentive to recruit salespeople and then profit off of the salespeople you recruit, usually several levels down. This creates immense pressure on those at the bottom, as their revenue potential is much more difficult to realize. China started heavily regulating MLM due to the social problems it was creating among a large populace that was only still just starting to develop their economy. M without the multiple levels (ML from MLM) is completely different and still feasible in this social setting.
  - dragonsh 7y ago
    In China Amway (called Anli in China) and Mary Kay generates over 40% of its global revenue. It's memebers actively promote and use WeChat and their relationship with personal friend for sale. All the live broadcaster use their friends network. Every conversation happening in WeChat or other messaging app is analyzed multiple times to figure out what could be sold to those people to generate profit. It becomes tiring when you can only see in everything one do someone is trying to sale something, be it taking taxi, trying to talk with your friends, watching movie, even when people sleep companies try to analyze their sleep and process the information to find what can be sold to that person.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
How so? Nobody forces you to join such a group, or is trying to hide the fact that it's commercial. If I booked a vacation with some company and they offered me to join their WhatsApp group specific to my destination I see nothing wrong with that. The reason we don't have that here is probably that it's too expensive. In China you can hire someone for next to nothing to monitor some WeChat groups and have them answer frequent questions or extract potentially useful new information from other users conversation in that group. Shouldn't be too surprising and if you don't want this, don't join. Like when you're uncomfortable with sharing random recordings from your home with Amazon, don't buy Alexa.

thunderbong 7y ago

This is a seriously interesting article. I've never thought of chat applications the way these guys are doing it.

johnmarcus 7y ago
A highly government censored chat with riot group size limits? Yeah, who would have think.

simplecomplex 7y ago

WeChat is a financial disaster for all we know. Tencent doesn’t share any financials. Internet chat has always been hugely popular. Building a profitable business out of Internet chat has not been so easy historically. Historically, successful free chat software have been loss leaders (FB messenger for FB, yahoo messenger, AIM for AOL). Snapchat has never made money. LINE is the only chat app I know of to really turn a profit from just their app, and it has come at the expense of active users and squeezing more advertising into the app. Odd title “cashing in” considering there’s no talk of the business behind WeChat...

coolspot 7y ago
Doesn’t WeChat is shopping and payment monopoly in China? I heard you can’t even order ramen without using WeChat/WePay.
- kwizzt 7y ago
  By no means is WeChat a shopping or payment monopoly. There's Taobao and Alipay by Alibaba. From what I know they are fairly even in terms of market share (payment). WeChat's shopping scene is mostly on a very small scale and personal level.
contingencies 7y ago
WeChat is a financial disaster for all we know. 1.4 billion people use it as their dominant payment method. Not mobile payment method, but payment method full stop. I think it's safe to say they're incredibly profitable.
- simplecomplex 7y ago
  They could be losing money on 1.4 billion in transactions. Their super low transaction fees might indicate WeChat Pay is a loss leader. That’s my point. Tencent intentionally hides WeChat in their financials. You assume it’s wildly profitable because Tencent is. Usually when a company tries to hide the financial narrative of a product it’s not because it’s doing great. “We consider payment at this point in time as to [sic] infrastructure service rather than a service that generates profit for us. And I think that status will maintain for quite some time,” Martin Lau

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I like the idea of building small groups on platforms like WeChat, especially the online school. Sounds like a good way to leverage one instructor helping 100 students. The big problem however is getting locked in on one proprietary platform. I guess what we can realistically hope for is for there to be three or four big players and competition will keep them from being exploitive monopolies. I still think that we are going to end up with a world out of William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi novels: a few mega corporations with small groups, arcologies, and individual hustlers living on platforms they don’t control. A mixture of mega corps with small scale entrepreneurs.

kajmagnusmobile 7y ago
What about not only the teacher helping the students, but the students also helping each other? And each question can get it's own topic -- there's a chat but it need not be used for everything? And, an open source platform? A university can choose to install on their own server. Then have a look at Talkyard: https://www.talkyard.io/use-cases https://www.talkyard.io/use-cases (I'm developing it)

johnmarcus 7y ago

This reads like it was written by a Chinese government official trying to sway HK protesters. WeChat asks for so much personal info in order to onboard, and your messages are definitely monitored and censored by the government - funny how they left out that tiny detail. It is the exact opposite of privacy and secure messaging.

rednivs 7y ago

Super interesting. Chat is something that is becoming more and more important in an age where people are becoming more nationalistic with online communities. Rather than Facebook they are joining smaller niche communities like those seen on www.communityhunt.io