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

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#61

Post by yorwba » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #56

I think this has less to do with technology to be honest and more with the size of the 'chattering class' in a lot of Western countries. The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China, or a lot of Asian countries for that matter. I think it's more cultural than technological. I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here…

> The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China

It may not be common, but China makes up for it with a large population, so there are a lot of amateur public intellectuals in terms of absolute numbers.

And they blog. On Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, Jianshu, ... Most readers probably come across an article by being subscribers or having someone they know send it to them or because the platform pushed it.

So pretty similar to Western social media. What's missing for the classic blogosphere feel is probably really just the discoverability across platforms.

Every platform wants to trap as many eyeballs and as much content as possible, so in the end they're all siloed off from each other. Responding across silo boundaries does happen, but tends to involve embedded screenshots instead of links, which makes it a bit harder to discover other people writing on the same topic, so each writer ends up as a bit of a silo as well.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#62

Post by nickfromseattle » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 6:51 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…

> Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere.

This is why organic search & YouTube are incredible acquisition channels.

Organic search & YouTube are the only channels that will consistently surface and bring visibility to old content.

YouTube & organic search bring thousands (millions?) of companies millions and millions of visitors per month, and 99.99% of brands cannot distribute their existing content more effectively than Google can for them.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#63

Post by shalmanese » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 7:07 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 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.

WeChat, like Whatsapp, stores canonical messages on device and not on the server as opposed to services like Messenger that store messages on the server. It has the same limitations as Whatsapp of only one primary device being able to connect to the service at a time and any new device starting from a blank chat history unless a manual transfer is done.

Some minimal amount of history is stored for government compliance (I believe it's around 30 days but this could have changed) and the government has the ability to flag certain accounts for longer retention but you can be fairly certain that Tencent does not have long term archives of all of your chats, because if they did, they would almost certainly offer chat history across phones.

The disappearance of chats across phones is a major usability pain point of Wechat and something they absolutely would fix if they had the ability but it's a deep technical decision baked in from the early days of the product and the refactor would be non trivial. It also conveniently gets the Chinese government off their back by pointing to a technical reason they can't cooperate to avoid having to deal with the headache of being more deeply enmeshed.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#64

Post by layer8 » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #50

layer8 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coinci…

I don’t think that’s the causality. Still-existing web forums, mailing lists, places like HN and (to a lesser degree) Reddit show that it is possible to have public forums without them being overrun by spam, bots and trolls, given adequate moderation. This is particularly true for special-interest topics. (The dynamics tend to be a bit different in bike-shedding territory.)

The reason Usenet died is because it didn’t have an easy moderation system, and because web forums were more accessible (no special client software needed). Mailing lists died because people moved from desktop/TUI mail clients to web mail, which didn’t provide good usability for handling mailing lists. Web forums died because they didn’t translate well to mobile and because chat-like platforms appear more accessible to novices.

Mobile plays a major role here. Mobile is more accessible (approachable) than desktop software/hardware, and at the same time is ill-suited to long-form discussions because of the small display and worse typing experience. Platforms want to maximize their audience and therefore tailor their application/functional design to work well on mobile. As a result, their design is ill-suited to long-form discussions.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#65

Post by cinquemb » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #17

userbinator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Trade of this century: Short US ("Bottled Freedom-Lite"), Short China ("We Peg Our Markets To Bottled Freedom-Lite's")

The trick is to structure it to not be long the USD or CNH/CNY for any of the gains.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#66

Post by Zababa » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 11:47 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #49

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.

I agree that HN is not the best for long-form discussions. However, I'd say that content on HN is not as short-lived as a tweet thanks to the features I talked about. I think that's part of why it feels specials compared to Twitter/Facebook for example.

Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet

#67

Post by Mindwipe » Mon, Apr 04, 2022, 9:30 AM 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

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

But again, outside of the US it isn't. Contactless payments have been common in Europe and had widespread usage for a decade. Chinese and European adoption was pretty similar.