Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

yiqinfu.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#41

Post by jon-wood »

alisonatwork wrote: post #8
barry-cotter wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#42

Post by Shadonototra »

ckcheng wrote: post #18
Shadonototra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Come on, it was just for a very small minority, and you couldn't do it for every payments, most businesses refused for small payments because of the fees, "CC only after X dollar" kind of rules

And you still can't use your phone, a joke this system is

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#43

Post by jon-wood »

School-Cotton wrote: post #23
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…

I can buy almost anything by tapping my phone in NYC today, including public transit fare.

China really does take that to another level - when you order a meal in a restaurant and get the bill it has a WeChat or AliPay QR code on it. Scan the code and you've got a pre-populated payment for your meal that can be processed without sitting around trying to get the waiter to bring a card machine to you.

At least in the UK that exists to some degree post-covid, but its in the form of every pub chain in the country having its own crappy mobile app for ordering via a phone.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#45

Post by layer8 »

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…

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value.

Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature doesn’t help. This again comes from the mobile-first trend, because long-form discussions are difficult on mobile and you can’t fit much more than a chat window on a mobile display.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#46

Post by layer8 »

MauranKilom wrote: post #40
biofox wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The velocity (aka churn) is a lot higher in software though, for questionable benefit.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#47

Post by simne »

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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#48

Post by pie_flavor »

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…

Yeah, but people still do it in, say, Rust, where that's not the case.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#49

Post by layer8 »

Zababa wrote: post #36

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=al…

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.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#50

Post by tenebrisalietum »

layer8 wrote: post #45
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…

An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value. Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature do…

Public web forums attract trolls, bots, spammers, and all sorts of bad actors. It's ultimately better this way.

In the 90's, the notion of "netizen" as a distinct fun, curious, respectful culture seemed to exist and therefore letting random netizens on your Internet doorstop was fun, even despite trolls and what not.

I honestly believe this culture is an accident - the Cold War ended in the early 90's and that coincided with the rise of home Internet, the vibe was very positive and freewheeling. This vibe ended 9/11/2001.

There's pockets of that culture around still but the hordes of unwashed masses enabled by mobile-internet + Myspace/Facebook age are now dominant, and it's long been past time for netizens to develop their own gatewayed islands.

Post reply on HN