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The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

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Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#31

Post by lordnacho »

irrational wrote: post #26

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 sor…

> 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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#32

Post by kjellWho »

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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#33

Post by api »

irrational wrote: post #26

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 sor…

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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#34

Post by mschuster91 »

alisonatwork wrote: post #27
otoburb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

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 who…

> 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).

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#35

Post by biofox »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #30
api wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 opti…

This is the one thing I hate about software. I don't want to have to re-learn how to use a re-invented wheel every couple of years. I just want to use robust, time-tested tools to solve problems, like in virtually every other field of engineering.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#36

Post by Zababa »

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&que.... I wonder if all those things that make the information longer lasting also raise the average quality.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#37

Post by saddd »

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…

>we already copying them with contactless payments

Pretty sure South Korea invented these, and China copied them.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#39

Post by toast0 »

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 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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#40

Post by MauranKilom »

biofox wrote: post #35
JonChesterfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opti…

This is the one thing I hate about software. I don't want to have to re-learn how to use a re-invented wheel every couple of years. I just want to use robust, time-tested tools to solve problems, like in virtually every other field of engineering.

I'm not under the impression that e.g. pressure vessel design or bridge building follows the same safety rules now as it did 40 or 80 years ago. You might learn the same basics in university, but in practice the rules and tools are also evolving all the time.

So the "robust, time-tested tools to solve problems" also become obsolete in other fields of engineering. I think this is not unlike "compiler warns about more unsafe practices nowadays".

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