7 ms·

The more I look at platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the more I start liking the WeChat “anti-viral” timeline concept. Posts on your WeChat timeline show onl

The more I look at platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the more I start liking the WeChat “anti-viral” timeline concept. Posts on your WeChat timeline show only likes from your friends. This applies even on posts from other people - you can only see likes on those posts from your friends, not any of that person’s friends. Boom - no more platform manipulation, since everything on your timeline is 100% driven by your friends. Unfortunately the Chinese government can and will censor posts on these feeds, which is made super easy by how slow things usually spread on that platform - but that’s a different issue entirely. I’m not advocating literally switching to WeChat - just that the concept feels at once far more “social” and rather less prone to certain kinds of manipulation.

JD557 7y ago
That looks like a cool model, but isn't that pretty close to what Twitter does (at least if you use TweetDeck instead of the twitter webpage/app)? I only see: - Things posted by who I follow - Things retweeted by who I follow - Things liked by who I follow (I think I don't actually see this in TweetDeck)
- bathtub365 7y ago
  It sounds like even the like count on posts is scoped to likes that come from your friends. So if a post has 1000 likes globally but was only liked by 10 of your friends the like count would be 10.
geofft 7y ago
Does WeChat have an equivalent to "Trending"? Part of the strategy of campaigns like this one is to get something globally trending, and Twitter seems to like the idea of global (or even local) trends existing. It'd be interesting to have a per-user concept of "Trending," scoped to just the people you follow, but I suspect Twitter wouldn't like it because it's harder to onboard new users and get them engaged. The other part of campaigns like this is replying to major accounts to push something, so you'd have to have your "anti-viral" timeline hide replies that weren't endorsed by people you don't follow. That is, if friend A retweeted something by a famous politician, and a thousand people replied including none of your friends, and friend B liked one of those replies, only that one reply would show up for you if you looked at the tweet. Again, I suspect this is bad for engagement (so I'm wondering if WeChat actually does this?).
- science4sail 7y ago
  In my recollection, Tencent (WeChat's owner) derives a lot of their revenue from microtransactions, so engagement in the core app isn't as big a deal for them.
  - Jommi 7y ago
    I think it's not giving the whole picture of paint WeChat/tencent as a normal company trying to make profit. They are providing a national service, it doesn't need to be profitable.
- physicles 7y ago
  Wechat doesn’t have trending. Trending is literally the opposite of something you want if your #1 fear is bad news about the government going viral. The closest thing to trending is that you notice that a bunch of your friends are all posting about similar stuff. Like when Li Wenliang, the whistleblower-doctor in Wuhan, died, or when everyone bored at home in quarantine was posting photos of brooms balanced to stand on end.
chance_state 7y ago
I don't think we should extol the virtues of features that were literally designed to improve censorship.
- physicles 7y ago
  That maybe have been their original purpose — who can say — but I also appreciate that this model tends to separate social from news. I personally prefer a model that makes it impossible for me to see Nazis arguing about an article posted by my grandma.
  - jamiek88 7y ago
    You know its the old boiling frog trope - until you pointed that out > this model tends to separate social from news. i hadn't realised how much the two had become intertwined. FB, twitter etc all started off as interacting with your friends then drifted very far from that. They should be separate.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
physicles 7y ago
I’ve been living in China for 7 years and I really like Wechat, aside from the censorship and privacy concerns aside. It’s basically WhatsApp with a dumb timeline — literally the algorithm is “show me everything my friends have posted, in chronological order”. It’s wonderful. That’s probably possible for two reasons. First, the app’s principal designer maintains Steve Jobs-level creative control on the product. Second, as a sibling pointed out, Wechat primarily makes money from other stuff besides posts going viral﹡. There’s not even a “repost” feature. You literally have to open the article, copy the URL, and create an entirely new post on your timeline. It cuts down on low effort sharing (of course, if you’re the government, you like this because it also slows the spread of so-called “improper information”) Facebook died for me when it became possible for me to see Nazis arguing in the comments of an article my grandma posted. I mean what the fuck, how did we ever get there. ﹡ which unfortunately involves vacuuming up as much data about every aspect of everyone’s life as possible. It’s impossible to understate how pervasive Wechat is: if you only have this app and no other, you can still live very comfortably here.
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  Until you disagree with censors, then you are cast aside.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    Yes that’s the whole point as the poster pointed out. The Nazis arguing on the grandma’s post would also disagree with the censors too —it’s not a matter of censorship vs none, is a matter of what is considered worthy of censorship in China vs here.
vtange 7y ago
This sounds like it will fall into the same "echo-chamber" problem platforms like Youtube fell into. Note that with the social-credit system, you are docked points if you are friends with the "wrong" people. Thus, you naturally friend with people with similar interests. I don't think they designed it with "anti-viral" as a motive, but instead as a way to weed out and isolate people with contrarian thoughts.
- 101404 7y ago
  When I lived in China 10+ years ago, the West would criticize the Chinese government for limiting the spread of "opinions" on social media. Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too. Give it another 10 years and, at least here in Europe, we will have the first countries copying the "social points" system China is currently rolling out. Not sure what to do about it.
  - dntbnmpls 7y ago
    We, along with Europe, had "social points" system for a long time. If you smoked weed, were associated with communist/socialist circles, etc, you were or could be barred from certain jobs (public and private), banks, voting, etc. The idea that it's bad when china does it is just hypocrisy or borderline jealousy. > Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too. We say/use "civility" or "western values" to censor, attack, etc. The chinese use "harmony", "chinese characteristics", etc to censor, attack, etc. We shame the chinese and demand they treat muslims better while killing millions of muslims and destroying a few muslim countries. The chinese shame the west and demand we treat muslims better while interning millions of muslims. Too bad hypocrisy isn't a currency or we'd all be rich and living large.
    - shadowprofile77 7y ago
      Your false equivalence here is absurdly full of shit on both points. The highly decentralized, mostly non-computerized western social shaming that existed for decades for certain social beliefs and practices, which to some extent still exists in certain limited contexts was in no meaningful way comparable to a systematic, almost entirely centralized government-directed formal social credit scoring system that dictates one's "worthiness" and so many aspects of their social life, economic life and literal freedom to move around based on what political opinions they publish, who they're friends with, what things they read, share on social media or even what things they buy. Comparing the two is ridiculous. It's either blatantly blind or you're trolling for some other reason. No western state has anything like this. No notable number of people in the west are literally ruined economically or banned from travel, or the victims of their friends being nudged by the government into abandoning them because they posted something against Trump, or against Obama or in any other context. Very public, very open debate and protest against numerous government policies is still very much alive and well in the west. In China this is blatantly not the case.
asdff 7y ago
Sounds like facebook before boomers joined
_bxg1 7y ago
This is why I've started using regular group chats more and more to keep in touch with people

JD557 7y ago

That looks like a cool model, but isn't that pretty close to what Twitter does (at least if you use TweetDeck instead of the twitter webpage/app)? I only see: - Things posted by who I follow - Things retweeted by who I follow - Things liked by who I follow (I think I don't actually see this in TweetDeck)

bathtub365 7y ago
It sounds like even the like count on posts is scoped to likes that come from your friends. So if a post has 1000 likes globally but was only liked by 10 of your friends the like count would be 10.

geofft 7y ago

Does WeChat have an equivalent to "Trending"? Part of the strategy of campaigns like this one is to get something globally trending, and Twitter seems to like the idea of global (or even local) trends existing. It'd be interesting to have a per-user concept of "Trending," scoped to just the people you follow, but I suspect Twitter wouldn't like it because it's harder to onboard new users and get them engaged. The other part of campaigns like this is replying to major accounts to push something, so you'd have to have your "anti-viral" timeline hide replies that weren't endorsed by people you don't follow. That is, if friend A retweeted something by a famous politician, and a thousand people replied including none of your friends, and friend B liked one of those replies, only that one reply would show up for you if you looked at the tweet. Again, I suspect this is bad for engagement (so I'm wondering if WeChat actually does this?).

science4sail 7y ago
In my recollection, Tencent (WeChat's owner) derives a lot of their revenue from microtransactions, so engagement in the core app isn't as big a deal for them.
- Jommi 7y ago
  I think it's not giving the whole picture of paint WeChat/tencent as a normal company trying to make profit. They are providing a national service, it doesn't need to be profitable.
physicles 7y ago
Wechat doesn’t have trending. Trending is literally the opposite of something you want if your #1 fear is bad news about the government going viral. The closest thing to trending is that you notice that a bunch of your friends are all posting about similar stuff. Like when Li Wenliang, the whistleblower-doctor in Wuhan, died, or when everyone bored at home in quarantine was posting photos of brooms balanced to stand on end.

chance_state 7y ago

I don't think we should extol the virtues of features that were literally designed to improve censorship.

physicles 7y ago
That maybe have been their original purpose — who can say — but I also appreciate that this model tends to separate social from news. I personally prefer a model that makes it impossible for me to see Nazis arguing about an article posted by my grandma.
- jamiek88 7y ago
  You know its the old boiling frog trope - until you pointed that out > this model tends to separate social from news. i hadn't realised how much the two had become intertwined. FB, twitter etc all started off as interacting with your friends then drifted very far from that. They should be separate.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

physicles 7y ago

I’ve been living in China for 7 years and I really like Wechat, aside from the censorship and privacy concerns aside. It’s basically WhatsApp with a dumb timeline — literally the algorithm is “show me everything my friends have posted, in chronological order”. It’s wonderful. That’s probably possible for two reasons. First, the app’s principal designer maintains Steve Jobs-level creative control on the product. Second, as a sibling pointed out, Wechat primarily makes money from other stuff besides posts going viral﹡. There’s not even a “repost” feature. You literally have to open the article, copy the URL, and create an entirely new post on your timeline. It cuts down on low effort sharing (of course, if you’re the government, you like this because it also slows the spread of so-called “improper information”) Facebook died for me when it became possible for me to see Nazis arguing in the comments of an article my grandma posted. I mean what the fuck, how did we ever get there. ﹡ which unfortunately involves vacuuming up as much data about every aspect of everyone’s life as possible. It’s impossible to understate how pervasive Wechat is: if you only have this app and no other, you can still live very comfortably here.

mensetmanusman 7y ago
Until you disagree with censors, then you are cast aside.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Yes that’s the whole point as the poster pointed out. The Nazis arguing on the grandma’s post would also disagree with the censors too —it’s not a matter of censorship vs none, is a matter of what is considered worthy of censorship in China vs here.

vtange 7y ago

This sounds like it will fall into the same "echo-chamber" problem platforms like Youtube fell into. Note that with the social-credit system, you are docked points if you are friends with the "wrong" people. Thus, you naturally friend with people with similar interests. I don't think they designed it with "anti-viral" as a motive, but instead as a way to weed out and isolate people with contrarian thoughts.

101404 7y ago
When I lived in China 10+ years ago, the West would criticize the Chinese government for limiting the spread of "opinions" on social media. Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too. Give it another 10 years and, at least here in Europe, we will have the first countries copying the "social points" system China is currently rolling out. Not sure what to do about it.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago
  We, along with Europe, had "social points" system for a long time. If you smoked weed, were associated with communist/socialist circles, etc, you were or could be barred from certain jobs (public and private), banks, voting, etc. The idea that it's bad when china does it is just hypocrisy or borderline jealousy. > Today, in the West, we call that "fake news", and limit its spread too. We say/use "civility" or "western values" to censor, attack, etc. The chinese use "harmony", "chinese characteristics", etc to censor, attack, etc. We shame the chinese and demand they treat muslims better while killing millions of muslims and destroying a few muslim countries. The chinese shame the west and demand we treat muslims better while interning millions of muslims. Too bad hypocrisy isn't a currency or we'd all be rich and living large.
  - shadowprofile77 7y ago
    Your false equivalence here is absurdly full of shit on both points. The highly decentralized, mostly non-computerized western social shaming that existed for decades for certain social beliefs and practices, which to some extent still exists in certain limited contexts was in no meaningful way comparable to a systematic, almost entirely centralized government-directed formal social credit scoring system that dictates one's "worthiness" and so many aspects of their social life, economic life and literal freedom to move around based on what political opinions they publish, who they're friends with, what things they read, share on social media or even what things they buy. Comparing the two is ridiculous. It's either blatantly blind or you're trolling for some other reason. No western state has anything like this. No notable number of people in the west are literally ruined economically or banned from travel, or the victims of their friends being nudged by the government into abandoning them because they posted something against Trump, or against Obama or in any other context. Very public, very open debate and protest against numerous government policies is still very much alive and well in the west. In China this is blatantly not the case.

asdff 7y ago

Sounds like facebook before boomers joined

_bxg1 7y ago

This is why I've started using regular group chats more and more to keep in touch with people