The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
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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
#2This 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.
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#3To me this is more a reflection of Chinese society. China has always been a highly centralized place (i.e. its name is "middle kingdom") where internal control is prioritized. The media/application space is a reflection of that. If you look at other countries like India or Brazil that are early in their internet adoption, you see a much more diverse writing ecosystem.
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#4I like to pay attention to three basic features of evolving information systems. Variability, propagation speed, and durability.
Here we see a disparity between propagation speed and durability. A tightly controlled, push based, curated feed can dramatically increase propagation speed.
There's little to no effort in discovery, you get fed what's new instantaneously, and can just as easily continue the propagation chain via in-app shares. But as the author notes none of the mechanisms for durability are in place (outside of the company servers). The information may propagate quickly but it "dies" rapidly.
This is, sadly, a feature. Or at least a mechanism of artificial scarcity that aids the business goal of gaining and retaining users. With Snapchat this was explicit and open, but if you can get the addictive potential of information FOMO without having to make a guarantee about things being actually deleted, then why wouldn't you?
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#5just 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 smooth, everyone is on the same page
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
we'll are stuck in the post industrial age, they are already moving past that, they were only just an emerging country yesterday, it's crazy how the west lost so much time, thanks to the capital i guess, our market doesn't want it
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#6just 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…
> 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.
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#7just 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…
> 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
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#8This 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 nobody ever wanted to summarize the situation in email or even on a wiki page. It felt to me like people were deliberately avoiding leaving a paper trail around why decisions were made or who held the responsibility.
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#9This 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.
Yeah DingTalk is a weird one. Weird in a good way. It doesn't necessarily fit with western business bureaucracy but I found it giving me ideas for throwing together temporary groups of consultants that function for a 3-9 month period. Will be interested to see what they add for tax reporting functionality here in the west. If they make that as seamless it may be something that I pick up and use. An interesting idea.
Re: The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet
#10This 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…
> 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.