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On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#141

Post by Markoff »

eratins wrote: post #138
Markoff wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you sure you are not ABC (judging by nickname) who lived in China less than me and it's just here supporting their totalitarian government based on fantasies you read about China online without clue about real life in China? Because that's the case of ABCs, they know less about China than non-Chinese living there... not sure what is not civil about my comments, I lived in China, I talk about Chinese app mentioned…

So you are one of those bitter expats then (judging by your comments)?

It's hard to not be bitter, if you live in China for years as adult person and not some student enjoying parties and iresponsible youth years. The amount of ridiculous stuff you have to deal with every day (incompetent Chinese management in companies, unproductive Chinese coworkers, people blocking sidewalks and in general extremely selfish people anywhere you look, overcrowded subway, fighting to get to suburban bus and constant flow of people cutting the queue, toxic air, toxic food, dangerous roads, visa harassment, etc. etc.) is just unbearable after some time and eventually everyone will move away. It's not exactly country welcoming foreigners, which would explain why they have like 0.5% of population consisting of foreigners, now tell me other country with comparable population of foreigners.

But yeah, most of HN readers saw China only online and see how is it booming and stuff like that. Like look at amazing Beijing subway with many new modern nice and dandy lines, somehow everyone fail to see they are still at 50% level compared to any western city (in west you have roughly one line per 500K served population, in amazing Beijing 1mil sharing one line with no suburban trains or trams to supplement it). Same goes for their amazing HSR - omit the fact they stole German and Japanese technology, omit the fact their prices are more expensive than faster and more convenient flying in Europe and that they closed most of cheaper slower lines, so end result for people is to pay significantly more to get home.

Chinese gov propaganda department must be smiling reading comments on this website.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#142

Post by rahimnathwani »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #132
rahimnathwani wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- I never tried. Try it. It's hard due to fragmentation. - Chinese wife buys movie tickets online all the time, chooses seat if the theater has reserved seating. Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone. - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in the states will target Chinese using credit ca…

> Try it. It's hard due to fragmentation. I've never needed to give any money. > Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone. There are literally tons of apps for this. It isn't hard at all. Heck, just use fandango and be done with it, if you want. > - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in th…

"There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone."

You've missed, or are ignoring, my point: in China, if I want to share my location with a bunch of friends, I can do it almost instantly. Just add them to a WeChat group and make two taps.

With a group of friends in the US, I can't, because there's no single app/service that they're all using, that has that feature.

Also:

- Card skimming isn't a uniquely "Chinese problem".)

- The fact that you're comparing mobile utility bill payment in China, with autopay in the US, suggests to me you haven't tried mobile bill payment in China.

- You are right about Fandango - it appears their mobile app has offered seat selection in many theatres for at least a couple of year.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#143

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #142
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try it. It's hard due to fragmentation. I've never needed to give any money. > Which app or site will let me buy a cinema ticket and choose a seat, on a mobile phone. There are literally tons of apps for this. It isn't hard at all. Heck, just use fandango and be done with it, if you want. > - credit cards in America put fraud burden on merchants. This is very different from china (ICBC grumble) and fraudsters in th…

"There are plenty of location services if you don't want to use what is built into iPhone." You've missed, or are ignoring, my point: in China, if I want to share my location with a bunch of friends, I can do it almost instantly. Just add them to a WeChat group and make two taps. With a group of friends in the US, I can't, because there's no single app/service that they're all using, that has that feature. Also: - Ca…

Card skimming isn't uniquely a Chinese problem, but asshole credit card issuers who put the burden of proof in the customer rather than store are. Seriously, china has unique self-made problems that don't exist elsewhere.

Fandango has been around for many years.

We just moved to the USA from Beijing. We have pretty much everything we had back in china without wechat.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#144

Post by seanmcdirmid »

eratins wrote: post #136
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really a western thing. Chinese like crowded pages with lots of functionality, they must feel very 热闹!!! The west prefers more distribution of functionality with simplicity so doing one thing is much more appealing to us.

But when I was visiting Italy and Greece, I noticed the sites most people viewed were also very crowded and busy.

Yes but not by choice. Besides, I've been to both Rome and Athens and didn't find either to be oarcicularly crowded compared to a Chinese tourist place.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#145

Post by anuh »

est wrote: post #113
swang75 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many portions of this reply are categorically and maliciously false including: 2) "Wechant literally stole telecom's SMS cake. Tencent put lots of effort striking deals with telecoms, ordinary IM startups might simply be blocked or QoS'd to death." Amongst WeChat's many local competitors were equivalent messaging apps including China Mobile's "Feixin" messaging app and China Telecom/Netease's "Yixin". Both competitor…

> WeChat doesn't block or QoS other IM products What I mean, telecoms might block IM service because SMS market were rapidly replaced by IM apps. It was highly disputed around 2012. Wechat generates so much traffic that their poor 2.5G cell network can not handle signal storms. Not only that, Wechat had VoIP capability, which requires a high level license to operate in China. The whole OTT controversy can be found he…

Relationships with carriers is not new. WhatsApp negotiated a lot of carrier relationships in India early on.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps...

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#146

Post by dang »

Markoff wrote: post #135
dang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good comment for Hacker News—it contains more inflammation than information. We're hoping to optimize for signal/noise ratio here, which heads in the opposite direction. If you'd comment accordingly, we'd appreciate it. Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've been posting plenty of unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments to Hacker News. We penalize accounts that do that and eventually ban them if they wo…

are you sure you are not ABC (judging by nickname) who lived in China less than me and it's just here supporting their totalitarian government based on fantasies you read about China online without clue about real life in China? Because that's the case of ABCs, they know less about China than non-Chinese living there... not sure what is not civil about my comments, I lived in China, I talk about Chinese app mentioned…

You clearly know more about China than I do. My concern (I'm a moderator here) is merely that you share this knowledge in a way that respects the community guidelines. If you read the pages I linked you to, it isn't hard to see how your comment violated the spirit of this site.

Inflammatory comments on divisive topics are destructive of what we care about on HN. So as a topic gets more divisive, comments need to get more civil and substantive.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#147

Post by anuh »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #115
anuh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code - both of which failed in the US. These two features were critical to support so many use cases that WeChat enables today (payments, peer to peer transfers, offline to online service). Yes the Chinese New Year helped garner interest and a lot of people use WeChat to send red packets, they also connected their bank accounts and…

"WeChat's specific success in China was really driven by WeChat payments and QR code" WeChat was successful (in DAU/MAU) way before WeChat payments existed. WeChat payments couldn't have succeeded without the existing user base.

Before they turned on red packets they had only 300M MAUs. They do claim that red packets was a critical growth lever for them for new users

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#148

Post by anuh »

Markoff wrote: post #134
digi_owl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies maybe, their customers is a different story.

what about customers? so customers have pretty much huge options, you can choose either WeChat, WeChat or Wechat, what will be your choice? kudoz to WeChat for success in such competitive market! /s

There were quite a few local Chinese competitors to WeChat when it originally launched. It took them almost a year to surpass Xiaomi's MiTalk user numbers.

Re: On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat

#149

Post by Markoff »

anuh wrote: post #148
Markoff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about customers? so customers have pretty much huge options, you can choose either WeChat, WeChat or Wechat, what will be your choice? kudoz to WeChat for success in such competitive market! /s

There were quite a few local Chinese competitors to WeChat when it originally launched. It took them almost a year to surpass Xiaomi's MiTalk user numbers.

no, not really, when they launched QQ was big and I was just surprised why some people have different status to find out it's wechat, but anyway QQ was dominating markets, everything else including Xiaomi or MSN had just leftovers
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