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The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

166 points by reimbar 5y ago

barry-cotter 5y ago
This really hits. I never thought about this before but it fits with my experience perfectly. All writing on WeChat and whatever else Chinese people use is ephemeral and email really isn’t used much. We got DingTalk at my school this year and I haven’t checked my work email in weeks.
- alisonatwork 5y ago
  Even before DingTalk became a popular app I found working in China that most work-related communication happened on WeChat, regardless of whether that was company policy or not. Because I chose not to join all the informal WeChat groups, I often ended up missing out on context during live incidents/escalations and being bypassed on technical decisions. One of the things I found most frustrating working there is that nobody ever wanted to summarize the situation in email or even on a wiki page. It felt to me like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail around why decisions were made or who held the responsibility.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    > like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. For example, if there has been an act of sabotage, having access to those ephemeral messages may be crucial to catch perpetrators.
    - alisonatwork 5y ago
      I have no doubt that the government is able to get logs of WeChat messages going back who knows how long, but I was speaking in the context of the workplace. When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. This problem is exacerbated when there are dozens of informal WeChat groups that may or may not include certain people depending on the internal politics of the organization. It's a culture of ass-covering and secrecy that feels uncomfortable to me, although perhaps that's just part of living and working in an authoritarian country.
      - otoburb 5y ago
        >>When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. It's not ideal, but I thought that WeChat had a desktop client (similar to WhatsApp) that allows for slightly easier scrollback, search and export/copy-paste functionality within the group chats. It doesn't help across the wider WeChat platform as the article points out, but in a corporate setting with many adhoc working groups it might help one to maintain context.
        alisonatwork 5y ago
        It's been a few years since I have used WeChat, and I suspect they might have improved their workplace features since then. The desktop app was a thing several years ago, but even then it depended on the right people being added to the right groups. I remember dozens of instances where people would say "oh, well we talked about that the other day" and then scroll back on their device to try find some conversation whose outcome was never logged anywhere else. If you were lucky they had saved a screenshot, without context, of course. This was even more difficult when dealing with clients or third party vendors, because they would have their own WeChat groups where they discussed support issues or purchases. I remember a situation where we had to contact a former employee to find a password to a machine because it had been shared on a chat that only they were on at the time - that sort of thing. To be fair, I do think that a lot of similar stuff happens on Slack, where private groups get created and decisions are made without always including the correct participants according to the org chart. And probably prior to the explosion of workplace chat apps people were doing this by getting together in person for lunch or drinks or golf. It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.
        mschuster91 5y ago
        > It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values. Indeed. It takes good leadership to recognize the problem in the first place and to keep up on combatting it (e.g. actually checking if people keep their notes on a centrally managed system).
    - toast0 5y ago
      > I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. State security concerns aside, deleting messages is less expensive than keeping them. If your plan is to delete everything after N days, it's easy to partition data by day, and then drop the older partitons as needed.
    - shalmanese 5y ago
      > I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. WeChat, like Whatsapp, stores canonical messages on device and not on the server as opposed to services like Messenger that store messages on the server. It has the same limitations as Whatsapp of only one primary device being able to connect to the service at a time and any new device starting from a blank chat history unless a manual transfer is done. Some minimal amount of history is stored for government compliance (I believe it's around 30 days but this could have changed) and the government has the ability to flag certain accounts for longer retention but you can be fairly certain that Tencent does not have long term archives of all of your chats, because if they did, they would almost certainly offer chat history across phones. The disappearance of chats across phones is a major usability pain point of Wechat and something they absolutely would fix if they had the ability but it's a deep technical decision baked in from the early days of the product and the refactor would be non trivial. It also conveniently gets the Chinese government off their back by pointing to a technical reason they can't cooperate to avoid having to deal with the headache of being more deeply enmeshed.
  - jon-wood 5y ago
    Even working as a client of a Chinese company I see the same thing - they only want to communicate via random WeChat groups, and anytime you ask for things to be emailed its a battle to make that happen. Eventually the one specific thing you asked for will be emailed, then everything will revert to WeChat where its all buried away.
- beauzero 5y ago
  Yeah DingTalk is a weird one. Weird in a good way. It doesn't necessarily fit with western business bureaucracy but I found it giving me ideas for throwing together temporary groups of consultants that function for a 3-9 month period. Will be interested to see what they add for tax reporting functionality here in the west. If they make that as seamless it may be something that I pick up and use. An interesting idea.
freebee87 5y ago
To me this is more a reflection of Chinese society. China has always been a highly centralized place (i.e. its name is "middle kingdom") where internal control is prioritized. The media/application space is a reflection of that. If you look at other countries like India or Brazil that are early in their internet adoption, you see a much more diverse writing ecosystem.
iandanforth 5y ago
I like to pay attention to three basic features of evolving information systems. Variability, propagation speed, and durability. Here we see a disparity between propagation speed and durability. A tightly controlled, push based, curated feed can dramatically increase propagation speed. There's little to no effort in discovery, you get fed what's new instantaneously, and can just as easily continue the propagation chain via in-app shares. But as the author notes none of the mechanisms for durability are in place (outside of the company servers). The information may propagate quickly but it "dies" rapidly. This is, sadly, a feature. Or at least a mechanism of artificial scarcity that aids the business goal of gaining and retaining users. With Snapchat this was explicit and open, but if you can get the addictive potential of information FOMO without having to make a guarantee about things being actually deleted, then why wouldn't you?
Shadonototra 5y ago
just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smooth, everyone is on the same page there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first we'll are stuck in the post industrial age, they are already moving past that, they were only just an emerging country yesterday, it's crazy how the west lost so much time, thanks to the capital i guess, our market doesn't want it
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first Contactless payments are already widespread in every Western nation that isn't the US.
  - Shadonototra 5y ago
    It's very recent, wich is the point of my post, we lost so much time with meaningless things
    - ckcheng 5y ago
      Contactless payments was already adopted in Canada for several years by 2010 [1]. It’s not recent. Not sure why US is slow in this adoption though [1] See first two sentences here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-security-problem-1.904220 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-securi...
      - Shadonototra 5y ago
Aperocky 5y ago
> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be relevant for few days. Not that it seems to matter - article by themselves mostly expresses fleeting opinions. It's hard to come across a truly philosophical work with long term implications - and even then it gets buried anyhow, regardless of where it is.
- api 5y ago
  This is even a problem in software. People ignore projects that have not had GitHub commits recently, as if code (which is math) somehow becomes less valid over time. Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be a positive indicator since it might mean there aren't a lot of bugs.
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    The opposite could also be true. Now that I have experience working on vulnerabilities for enterprise software, I've learned there are constantly updates for mitigating software vulnerabilities that didn't exist a month or even week ago. An old java project may still use a version log4j with that major vulnerability. This may not be a big deal depending on the software, but it is a valid reason to be wary of stale code in some cases.
  - JonChesterfield 5y ago
    A lot of software has dependencies that will have changed over time. Likewise a lot of software fails to pin down exact versions of said dependencies. That makes code that hasn't been committed to for a few years relatively likely to be broken. Older C or C++ projects may be "standalone", but when built with the latest GCC or clang produce lots of warning messages and may be miscompiled courtesy of programmer vs optimiser. Older python programs may refuse to run under python3. So while code does not rot, the GitHub project is unlikely to contain all the code for the project, and those external dependencies changing has much the same effect as rotting. A still running CI would be a better indicator that the project works, but failing that, recent commits are the same signal.
dirtyid 5y ago
>My Chinese social media posts reach 100k to 200k people a day vs... >Take two of my blog posts as an example. The post has [...] garnered 30k views as of May 2021 "Good tweets" disseminates to more eyeballs faster than "good blogposts". Just like actual twitter, PRC social media also link to blogposts / longform. RSS power users aside, I don't see how this is much different than how authors push blogs on twitter in west, with occasional repost of old blogposts when relevant. The function of using search to discover old content feels like it's been diminishing in recent years. Usually better to discover through curated specialist forums / subreddits dedicated to specific subject matter. And even then link rot affects a lot of older content, much of which not cached/archived. That said, I do think west (anglosphere specifically) is deluged with expertise from brain draining talent across the world and simply a larger source for content creation, not just knowledge.
irrational 5y ago
The downgrading of email is happening in the US, in my experience. At my work we use Slack continuously, both for communicating with team members and for reaching out to other people at the company. I often go more than a week without checking my email. I can’t remember when the last time an important email came through. As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  > As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types. It's just cold calling, by email, isn't it? Plenty of people write to me cold off HN and I write back to them. At work it's also fairly common to get emailed by someone selling some service, right? Salespeople have their own way to find the people they need.
- api 5y ago
  We (ZeroTier) run our own Mattermost (self-hosted Slack), which has largely replaced e-mail but has the benefit of us owning the database and all chat logs.
kjellWho 5y ago
From what I understand a lot of the long-form "blogging-style" content in Chinese is found on Zhihu, which is commonly referred to as the Quora of China (although from my limited experience with it it seems a lot better in multiple ways). I do get the impression that the Chinese internet is very centralized. As the author pointed out the practice of having your own site or independent niche forum/community is rare. Almost all content/people/communities exist in Weibo, BiliBili, Zhihu or WeChat.
Zababa 5y ago
Maybe this reasoning can be applied to Hacker News itself. The moderation probably plays a big part in the quality of the content found here. However, HN is also indexed on Google, has a few way to discover more ("past" button, seeing a user's comments or posts), and also has an excellent Algolia integration. For example, dang often refers to some of his previous posts using this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20https%3A%2F%2Fhn%2Falgolia%2Fcom&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I wonder if all those things that make the information longer lasting also raise the average quality.
- layer8 5y ago
  Honestly, HN is still badly suited to long-form discussions, because it’s generally limited to a few hours, and due to the lack of read/unread status. You can’t rely on participants to follow a thread for days/weeks/months/years as you can on web forums and mailing lists.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I agree that HN is not the best for long-form discussions. However, I'd say that content on HN is not as short-lived as a tweet thanks to the features I talked about. I think that's part of why it feels specials compared to Twitter/Facebook for example.
bsedlm 5y ago
the internet is not really a library, but a radio (an ephemeral stream)?
mwcampbell 5y ago
I wonder if the same consequences will apply to western children who grow up with mobile Internet without being exposed to the desktop web until they have to use it in a job or higher education.
simne 5y ago
These are not consequences of technology, but human nature. What differ developed countries, they got technologies much earlier, when they where expensive and/or hard to achieve (like broadband internet with low latency, where not achievable on >90% of 1st world territory), personal computer costs like automobile, so internet become means of communication for elite. - In 1990th, when you communicate via internet this automatically assume, you have high iq and good education. Elite difference, they intentionally spent significant resources to achieve awareness, to structure information, that's cause of search engines appearance. When smartphones wide distributed, they lowered the bar very much, so appear new reality in which most new users where not elite, but ordinary persons, not initiative, with average education. But western elites already where capable to moderately good deal with new reality, and to save adequate information infrastructure. China jumped over elite internet period just into period of average persons, Proletariat, and Chinese elite was not ready, it is just too young, not mature for such trials, consider this period as information chaos. I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR country, and see very similar things, but fortunately, our society resists to totalitarianism and grow, because of this we have much less chaos, but we still suffer of problem that no information lasts long enough. I have few ideas on how western elites solve this, and could share and discuss, but at the moment I have not much success in implementation if my ideas.
Barrin92 5y ago
I think this has less to do with technology to be honest and more with the size of the 'chattering class' in a lot of Western countries. The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China, or a lot of Asian countries for that matter. I think it's more cultural than technological. I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe. I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.
- yorwba 5y ago
  > The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China It may not be common, but China makes up for it with a large population, so there are a lot of amateur public intellectuals in terms of absolute numbers. And they blog. On Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, Jianshu, ... Most readers probably come across an article by being subscribers or having someone they know send it to them or because the platform pushed it. So pretty similar to Western social media. What's missing for the classic blogosphere feel is probably really just the discoverability across platforms. Every platform wants to trap as many eyeballs and as much content as possible, so in the end they're all siloed off from each other. Responding across silo boundaries does happen, but tends to involve embedded screenshots instead of links, which makes it a bit harder to discover other people writing on the same topic, so each writer ends up as a bit of a silo as well.
hintymad 5y ago
There is also an interesting phenomenon in China's internet: concentration of communities, for good or for bad. For instance, zhihu.com, the Chinese copycat of Quora has way more deeper discussion on machine learning, math, or STEM in general than Quora. On zhihu, it's easy to find the in-depth discussion of latest papers, hundreds of posts on intuition or interpretation of pretty much every STEM concepts and their historical context, dozens if not hundreds of lengthy articles that compare Raft and Paxos and ZABs and what not, all kinds of recommendations of interesting papers in top-tier conferneces, and etc. Quora, in contrast, has few such discussions because people would go to reddit, stackexchange, or some mailing list for such discussion.

166 points by reimbar 5y ago

This really hits. I never thought about this before but it fits with my experience perfectly. All writing on WeChat and whatever else Chinese people use is ephemeral and email really isn’t used much. We got DingTalk at my school this year and I haven’t checked my work email in weeks.

alisonatwork 5y ago
Even before DingTalk became a popular app I found working in China that most work-related communication happened on WeChat, regardless of whether that was company policy or not. Because I chose not to join all the informal WeChat groups, I often ended up missing out on context during live incidents/escalations and being bypassed on technical decisions. One of the things I found most frustrating working there is that nobody ever wanted to summarize the situation in email or even on a wiki page. It felt to me like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail around why decisions were made or who held the responsibility.
- varispeed 5y ago
  > like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. For example, if there has been an act of sabotage, having access to those ephemeral messages may be crucial to catch perpetrators.
  - alisonatwork 5y ago
    I have no doubt that the government is able to get logs of WeChat messages going back who knows how long, but I was speaking in the context of the workplace. When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. This problem is exacerbated when there are dozens of informal WeChat groups that may or may not include certain people depending on the internal politics of the organization. It's a culture of ass-covering and secrecy that feels uncomfortable to me, although perhaps that's just part of living and working in an authoritarian country.
    - otoburb 5y ago
      >>When business decisions are made on WeChat, the longer in the past they are, the more difficult it is for other employees to scroll back and find out why they happened. It's not ideal, but I thought that WeChat had a desktop client (similar to WhatsApp) that allows for slightly easier scrollback, search and export/copy-paste functionality within the group chats. It doesn't help across the wider WeChat platform as the article points out, but in a corporate setting with many adhoc working groups it might help one to maintain context.
      - alisonatwork 5y ago
        It's been a few years since I have used WeChat, and I suspect they might have improved their workplace features since then. The desktop app was a thing several years ago, but even then it depended on the right people being added to the right groups. I remember dozens of instances where people would say "oh, well we talked about that the other day" and then scroll back on their device to try find some conversation whose outcome was never logged anywhere else. If you were lucky they had saved a screenshot, without context, of course. This was even more difficult when dealing with clients or third party vendors, because they would have their own WeChat groups where they discussed support issues or purchases. I remember a situation where we had to contact a former employee to find a password to a machine because it had been shared on a chat that only they were on at the time - that sort of thing. To be fair, I do think that a lot of similar stuff happens on Slack, where private groups get created and decisions are made without always including the correct participants according to the org chart. And probably prior to the explosion of workplace chat apps people were doing this by getting together in person for lunch or drinks or golf. It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.
        mschuster91 5y ago
        > It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values. Indeed. It takes good leadership to recognize the problem in the first place and to keep up on combatting it (e.g. actually checking if people keep their notes on a centrally managed system).
  - toast0 5y ago
    > I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. State security concerns aside, deleting messages is less expensive than keeping them. If your plan is to delete everything after N days, it's easy to partition data by day, and then drop the older partitons as needed.
  - shalmanese 5y ago
    > I highly doubt that messages are actually being deleted from the system - that's rather an expensive affair and not fashionable from state security point of view. WeChat, like Whatsapp, stores canonical messages on device and not on the server as opposed to services like Messenger that store messages on the server. It has the same limitations as Whatsapp of only one primary device being able to connect to the service at a time and any new device starting from a blank chat history unless a manual transfer is done. Some minimal amount of history is stored for government compliance (I believe it's around 30 days but this could have changed) and the government has the ability to flag certain accounts for longer retention but you can be fairly certain that Tencent does not have long term archives of all of your chats, because if they did, they would almost certainly offer chat history across phones. The disappearance of chats across phones is a major usability pain point of Wechat and something they absolutely would fix if they had the ability but it's a deep technical decision baked in from the early days of the product and the refactor would be non trivial. It also conveniently gets the Chinese government off their back by pointing to a technical reason they can't cooperate to avoid having to deal with the headache of being more deeply enmeshed.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  Even working as a client of a Chinese company I see the same thing - they only want to communicate via random WeChat groups, and anytime you ask for things to be emailed its a battle to make that happen. Eventually the one specific thing you asked for will be emailed, then everything will revert to WeChat where its all buried away.
beauzero 5y ago
Yeah DingTalk is a weird one. Weird in a good way. It doesn't necessarily fit with western business bureaucracy but I found it giving me ideas for throwing together temporary groups of consultants that function for a 3-9 month period. Will be interested to see what they add for tax reporting functionality here in the west. If they make that as seamless it may be something that I pick up and use. An interesting idea.

freebee87 5y ago

To me this is more a reflection of Chinese society. China has always been a highly centralized place (i.e. its name is "middle kingdom") where internal control is prioritized. The media/application space is a reflection of that. If you look at other countries like India or Brazil that are early in their internet adoption, you see a much more diverse writing ecosystem.

iandanforth 5y ago

I like to pay attention to three basic features of evolving information systems. Variability, propagation speed, and durability. Here we see a disparity between propagation speed and durability. A tightly controlled, push based, curated feed can dramatically increase propagation speed. There's little to no effort in discovery, you get fed what's new instantaneously, and can just as easily continue the propagation chain via in-app shares. But as the author notes none of the mechanisms for durability are in place (outside of the company servers). The information may propagate quickly but it "dies" rapidly. This is, sadly, a feature. Or at least a mechanism of artificial scarcity that aids the business goal of gaining and retaining users. With Snapchat this was explicit and open, but if you can get the addictive potential of information FOMO without having to make a guarantee about things being actually deleted, then why wouldn't you?

Shadonototra 5y ago

just like casual conversations are ephemeral, why the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc.. china is doing it right, paying for simple things is so easy TODAY, just scan this thing and done, public transport same thing, so easy TODAY, not in 10 years, it's a thing TODAY, you scan your phone and done, no hassle, everything is smooth, everyone is on the same page there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first we'll are stuck in the post industrial age, they are already moving past that, they were only just an emerging country yesterday, it's crazy how the west lost so much time, thanks to the capital i guess, our market doesn't want it

Mindwipe 5y ago
> there is a lot to learn from china, we already copying them with contactless payments, even though our "market" doesn't want it because they want to make sure business are subscribing to service with insane fees first Contactless payments are already widespread in every Western nation that isn't the US.
- Shadonototra 5y ago
  It's very recent, wich is the point of my post, we lost so much time with meaningless things
  - ckcheng 5y ago
    Contactless payments was already adopted in Canada for several years by 2010 [1]. It’s not recent. Not sure why US is slow in this adoption though [1] See first two sentences here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-security-problem-1.904220 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-securi...
    - Shadonototra 5y ago

Aperocky 5y ago

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China. Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be relevant for few days. Not that it seems to matter - article by themselves mostly expresses fleeting opinions. It's hard to come across a truly philosophical work with long term implications - and even then it gets buried anyhow, regardless of where it is.

api 5y ago
This is even a problem in software. People ignore projects that have not had GitHub commits recently, as if code (which is math) somehow becomes less valid over time. Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be a positive indicator since it might mean there aren't a lot of bugs.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  The opposite could also be true. Now that I have experience working on vulnerabilities for enterprise software, I've learned there are constantly updates for mitigating software vulnerabilities that didn't exist a month or even week ago. An old java project may still use a version log4j with that major vulnerability. This may not be a big deal depending on the software, but it is a valid reason to be wary of stale code in some cases.
- JonChesterfield 5y ago
  A lot of software has dependencies that will have changed over time. Likewise a lot of software fails to pin down exact versions of said dependencies. That makes code that hasn't been committed to for a few years relatively likely to be broken. Older C or C++ projects may be "standalone", but when built with the latest GCC or clang produce lots of warning messages and may be miscompiled courtesy of programmer vs optimiser. Older python programs may refuse to run under python3. So while code does not rot, the GitHub project is unlikely to contain all the code for the project, and those external dependencies changing has much the same effect as rotting. A still running CI would be a better indicator that the project works, but failing that, recent commits are the same signal.

dirtyid 5y ago

>My Chinese social media posts reach 100k to 200k people a day vs... >Take two of my blog posts as an example. The post has [...] garnered 30k views as of May 2021 "Good tweets" disseminates to more eyeballs faster than "good blogposts". Just like actual twitter, PRC social media also link to blogposts / longform. RSS power users aside, I don't see how this is much different than how authors push blogs on twitter in west, with occasional repost of old blogposts when relevant. The function of using search to discover old content feels like it's been diminishing in recent years. Usually better to discover through curated specialist forums / subreddits dedicated to specific subject matter. And even then link rot affects a lot of older content, much of which not cached/archived. That said, I do think west (anglosphere specifically) is deluged with expertise from brain draining talent across the world and simply a larger source for content creation, not just knowledge.

irrational 5y ago

The downgrading of email is happening in the US, in my experience. At my work we use Slack continuously, both for communicating with team members and for reaching out to other people at the company. I often go more than a week without checking my email. I can’t remember when the last time an important email came through. As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types.

lordnacho 5y ago
> As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types. It's just cold calling, by email, isn't it? Plenty of people write to me cold off HN and I write back to them. At work it's also fairly common to get emailed by someone selling some service, right? Salespeople have their own way to find the people they need.
api 5y ago
We (ZeroTier) run our own Mattermost (self-hosted Slack), which has largely replaced e-mail but has the benefit of us owning the database and all chat logs.

kjellWho 5y ago

From what I understand a lot of the long-form "blogging-style" content in Chinese is found on Zhihu, which is commonly referred to as the Quora of China (although from my limited experience with it it seems a lot better in multiple ways). I do get the impression that the Chinese internet is very centralized. As the author pointed out the practice of having your own site or independent niche forum/community is rare. Almost all content/people/communities exist in Weibo, BiliBili, Zhihu or WeChat.

Zababa 5y ago

Maybe this reasoning can be applied to Hacker News itself. The moderation probably plays a big part in the quality of the content found here. However, HN is also indexed on Google, has a few way to discover more ("past" button, seeing a user's comments or posts), and also has an excellent Algolia integration. For example, dang often refers to some of his previous posts using this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=author%3Adang%20https%3A%2F%2Fhn%2Falgolia%2Fcom&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I wonder if all those things that make the information longer lasting also raise the average quality.

layer8 5y ago
Honestly, HN is still badly suited to long-form discussions, because it’s generally limited to a few hours, and due to the lack of read/unread status. You can’t rely on participants to follow a thread for days/weeks/months/years as you can on web forums and mailing lists.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I agree that HN is not the best for long-form discussions. However, I'd say that content on HN is not as short-lived as a tweet thanks to the features I talked about. I think that's part of why it feels specials compared to Twitter/Facebook for example.

bsedlm 5y ago

the internet is not really a library, but a radio (an ephemeral stream)?

mwcampbell 5y ago

I wonder if the same consequences will apply to western children who grow up with mobile Internet without being exposed to the desktop web until they have to use it in a job or higher education.

simne 5y ago

These are not consequences of technology, but human nature. What differ developed countries, they got technologies much earlier, when they where expensive and/or hard to achieve (like broadband internet with low latency, where not achievable on >90% of 1st world territory), personal computer costs like automobile, so internet become means of communication for elite. - In 1990th, when you communicate via internet this automatically assume, you have high iq and good education. Elite difference, they intentionally spent significant resources to achieve awareness, to structure information, that's cause of search engines appearance. When smartphones wide distributed, they lowered the bar very much, so appear new reality in which most new users where not elite, but ordinary persons, not initiative, with average education. But western elites already where capable to moderately good deal with new reality, and to save adequate information infrastructure. China jumped over elite internet period just into period of average persons, Proletariat, and Chinese elite was not ready, it is just too young, not mature for such trials, consider this period as information chaos. I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR country, and see very similar things, but fortunately, our society resists to totalitarianism and grow, because of this we have much less chaos, but we still suffer of problem that no information lasts long enough. I have few ideas on how western elites solve this, and could share and discuss, but at the moment I have not much success in implementation if my ideas.

Barrin92 5y ago

I think this has less to do with technology to be honest and more with the size of the 'chattering class' in a lot of Western countries. The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China, or a lot of Asian countries for that matter. I think it's more cultural than technological. I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe. I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.

yorwba 5y ago
> The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China It may not be common, but China makes up for it with a large population, so there are a lot of amateur public intellectuals in terms of absolute numbers. And they blog. On Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, Jianshu, ... Most readers probably come across an article by being subscribers or having someone they know send it to them or because the platform pushed it. So pretty similar to Western social media. What's missing for the classic blogosphere feel is probably really just the discoverability across platforms. Every platform wants to trap as many eyeballs and as much content as possible, so in the end they're all siloed off from each other. Responding across silo boundaries does happen, but tends to involve embedded screenshots instead of links, which makes it a bit harder to discover other people writing on the same topic, so each writer ends up as a bit of a silo as well.

hintymad 5y ago

There is also an interesting phenomenon in China's internet: concentration of communities, for good or for bad. For instance, zhihu.com, the Chinese copycat of Quora has way more deeper discussion on machine learning, math, or STEM in general than Quora. On zhihu, it's easy to find the in-depth discussion of latest papers, hundreds of posts on intuition or interpretation of pretty much every STEM concepts and their historical context, dozens if not hundreds of lengthy articles that compare Raft and Paxos and ZABs and what not, all kinds of recommendations of interesting papers in top-tier conferneces, and etc. Quora, in contrast, has few such discussions because people would go to reddit, stackexchange, or some mailing list for such discussion.