WeChat’s world

I am not criticizing it, but I am not using it either (I did use it, out of novelty and because of couple of friends of east Asian descent).

Ultimately, it is not about features or quality, but what the majority of your social network uses. Personally, I would dispense with all the messengers altogether. I usually ask people to e-mail me for the non-urgent stuff, call me for really urgent stuff, and for everything in between there is text and iMessage.

So persuade all your friends not to use it?

I would not be surprised if the great Chinese firewall does DPI and degrades the connections of all those western built technologies you mentioned. China has been accused of protecting its companies from competition under the guise of security/order/regulation especially in the communications space.

Quick story time:

My wife and me have been trying to set up a service on top of WeChat using their payments and other APIs. (A very small idea, takes two days to implement on top of, say, Facebook and using Stripe for payments.)

The amount of hoops you have to jump through when you don't have guanxi (there was a huge discussion about this topic on HN some weeks ago) is staggering. First, forget about getting access without having a Chinese ID, next up, be prepared to go through multiple rounds of document sending in order to get access to more "advanced" API features, so you need a Chinese ID and a Chinese company number. Next, be prepared to go through loads of confusing documentation and terrible navigation to actually implement the thing (no English documentation is available, and not many Stackoverflow posts on the topic... yet). In case you try to be smart like me and only use Wechat's API for the "social" API features and not payments, you come across another wall: the API expects call to originate from a domain name having an ICP license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license basically a number registering your domain with the Chinese government. Again loads of paperwork and weeks of waiting around to get it done.

Give up on the Wechat API and hope people will share your website? Fine. So which payments API to use? Alipay works a bit better in Europe but most Chinese are allergic to anything that breaks Wechat's app "flow". Forget about using Stripe of Paypal: most users forgot about their debit/credit card number ages ago (the app has it) or don't even have a compatible one.

Still, every day I'm seeing pages from big and small Chinese brands that apparently can do all of these things with relative ease. Don't they have to jump through all these hoops, you wonder? Turns out that Tencent will allow "strong names" to get access quickly in order to help grow the platform, or so the gossip goes.

Why not use the western offerings then? Well, as of now, it's still "coming soon": https://pay.weixin.qq.com/wechatpay_guide/help_docs.shtml ... also, it's unclear whether you'd be able to access Chinese users through this. It's frustrating how hard it is to get anything done in China without local help. On the other hand, given how well platforms such as Wechat work for end-users and how feature-complete they are, Facebook better hurry up before Tencent decides to take on the western market for real.

Rant over :).

The terrible part of the WeChat's world is quite simple, it's a very private network piggybacked on the open internet. Even worse, unlike facebook, it's poorly moderated in the 'Chinese Way'. As for privacy/security concerns, WeChat is doing better than most of its counterparts in China, and let's just limit our scope in China.

The domestic criticizes about WeChat is mainly in these aspects: 1. Using WeChat for Work, I have ZERO idea why people just did this, but even in my workplace, it's a common practice. It sounds unprofessional and risky to use an external tool for work purposes.

2. Lack of Openness, the only successful crawler works with WeChat is Sogou's search engine. Indexability is just the beginning of the issue.

3. Lazy moderation, rumor, pseudoscience, (domestic) copyright infringement articles are just everywhere and non-stoppable. WeChat officials said to put some force to stop these, but their 'official account hasn't been updated for ages. Maybe it's just what 'Chinternet' is like.

4. WeChat is a network of people you known in the 'outside world', friends/family/co-workers, this part just as bad as facebook.

There's also an awesome part about WeChat, the payment. WeChat got into payment business not long ago in a traditional measurement of time. A few years later, can you imagine that you can buy vegetables with WeChat/AliPay? Back in my college days (2009), it was a Country where only some decent restaurants, chain markets accept debit/credit cards. WeChat is accepted everywhere now, only and offline.

Speak of payments, there's one thing to add, you can check out how Alipay, a payment app, like PayPal are so much into communication business that flooded its app with all the SNS crap, even made friend suggestions based on who you had transactions with. I uninstalled the app immediately after they demonstrated their determination in the social network business, creepy.

Not only WeChat is the only choice of social network on the go, but also it's a quite predictable software, more decent than most of its competitors. So I think this is more than just the "Convenience weighs more than risk mgmt" scenario, more likely something weighs more than 'Der Freiheit'.