The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#11

Post by userbinator » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

Shadonototra wrote: post #5

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 smo…

It's "easy" when you have no choice, no freedom over how you want to live your life.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#12

Post by varispeed » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

Shadonototra wrote: post #5

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 smo…

What makes you think that they don't index, track, process and do whatever with these conversations? Just because users don't see it, it does not mean it doesn't happen.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#13

Post by alisonatwork » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #10

alisonatwork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#14

Post by Aperocky » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#15

Post by netsharc » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:49 PM UTC

Shadonototra wrote: post #5

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 smo…

> the west always want things to be indexed, tracked, advertised, promoted, pumped, dumped, profited, exploited, abused etc etc etc..

Well, seems like you want to look at things from the point of view of "I hate surveillance capitalism!".

I remember trying to look up how to jailbreak an iPhone 6. Google results were a mostly forum posts talking about iPhone 4 jailbreaks, and it'd be 1 forum post of content and dozens and dozens of people saying "Great job!", "Thanks!", etc, which aggravated the hell out of me. This is persisting something which should be ephemeral (since I feel like dozens of "Thanks!" are valueless 10 seconds after they're uttered)

How do you expect to find information if they're not persisted/searchable anywhere, it'd be like in the old ages where you have to figure out the right master who has the know how and reach out to him.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#16

Post by dirtyid » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

>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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#17

Post by coldtea » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:52 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #11

Shadonototra wrote: post #5

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 smo…

It's "easy" when you have no choice, no freedom over how you want to live your life.

I think the freedom in the west is oversold, and lack of it in China is also oversold...

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#18

Post by ckcheng » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:55 PM UTC

Shadonototra wrote: post #7

Mindwipe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's very recent, wich is the point of my post, we lost so much time with meaningless things

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-securi...

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#19

Post by otoburb » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:56 PM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #13

varispeed wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 n…

>>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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#20

Post by api » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #14

> 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…

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.