I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it. And I live in the Bay Area. If I don't use it I would basically be locking myself up in a prison where I would never see my friends.
Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to organize social events. Hell, I've visited friends at Facebook's HQ and had to tell them by WeChat that I'm downstairs in the lobby.
I personally totally get why this happens, and the network effect is so strong that my first instinct to contact my friends is via WeChat as well. I too organize social events on WeChat, because I know my friends don't really check anything else, so in the process, I too am guilty of propagating this network effect.
I still hate the app though. I just don't hate it enough to want to ditch my social life.
sticker: gifs and emojis all shares the same sticker format. It has natively features for taking, editing and converting photos and videos directly into stickers. Generally, i find memes work a lot better in wechat.
reliability: voice and video calling is buttery smooth. I've taken wechat calls internationally between china, taiwan, us, canada, australia and france. The service is always great even in some rural areas.
consistency: it works on almost all phones of all price ranges. Maybe it's because lower tier phones are of chinese brands and they have closer collaboration with wechat. The point is that wechat works the same on a $100 dollar phone as it does the iphone.
convenience: this one is domestic to china. wechat has mini programs, which are basically web services that make native app obsolete. For example, there is an wechat version of airBNB and it works exactly like the native app. Wechat handles all of the authentication and transaction. There is no need to register for anything!
Personal attacks aren't ok on HN and we ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site to heart when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Mostly, not only, but in any case I'm not disputing that. I'm just expressing that despite the fact that I use WeChat a lot, and need to use WeChat a lot, I still don't actually like the thing. I just like my friends enough that I will grudgingly use WeChat because "everyone" (in my circle) does.
I feel that someone who really respects their privacy should not hang out with friends who don't respect their own privacy. Because inevitably, their friends will post enough material to compromise the privacy of everyone in the circle.
A year after I stopped using Facebook actively, all of my friends have stopped hanging out with me. It's just me, my family, and my coworkers.
wechat is a chinese application. asian people != chinese.
I hang out with "asian people" all the time, but I use kakaotalk because I'm actually hanging out with Koreans. Or I use line with my Japanese friends.
Easy to say, but hard to do when the people who you genuinely value your relationship with don't use anything else. It's also not intended for "chitchatting about nothing of lasting consequence". It's specifically intended to basically be your entire life. In China you can pay all your bills, manage your bank account, buy plane, train tickets, hotel reservations, donate to charities, rent bikes, shop online, order food, and pretty much everything else you would possibly need to do. In the USA, for its active users it basically is all of social life. Potlucks, random dinner parties, hiking trips, wedding invitations, reading groups, badminton court reservations, even ordering gig economy homemade food, it ALL happens on WeChat, right here in Palo Alto, if you are part of the community that uses it.
I do agree though -- avoid using WeChat at all costs for anything secret. I have multiple WeChat accounts and sent a message from one to the other containing a link to one of my own servers. From the server logs, nobody accessed the link. Sent it again with some "interesting" keywords, and lo and behold, the link was accessed by an IP in China.
And "interesting" keywords were nothing of political significance. More business-wise interesting. I have belief that Tencent is spying on certain conversations beyond what government censorship requires them to do.
> Easy to say, but hard to do when the people who you genuinely value your relationship with don't use anything else.
Honestly most of my friends talk and organize on Facebook. I deleted mine. Things haven't really changed much. I just get texts when something is happening. Your friends are still your friends without whatever technology facilitates your social sphere.
My experience, and many others that I know, is that I don't seem to be majorly affected by a lack of a social media account. So I always get confused when people say that WeChat/Facebook/whatever IS their social life. If you don't like it, just dump it. Your friends will still be your friends. If they don't then I'm not sure you can consider them friends. I mean it is kinda ridiculous notion when you consider how surface level and superficial it is to kill a relationship because you don't use a specific communication medium.
You aren't going to lose your relationships. You aren't going to miss out on events. Your friends will still be your friends.
While this is true, you still do need to be able to contact them in today's isolated world where we don't run into our friends on a daily basis in public venues. For a vast amount of my friends, WeChat is effectively the only means of communication to organize an in-person meetup. For a certain group of people, it has replaced phones, e-mail, Facebook, and everything else.
Last time I was in the emergency room and needed a friend to bring over something to me? I sent them a message on WeChat from my hospital bed. I didn't have any other means to reach this particular trusted friend. They don't use Facebook, Signal, Telegram, or anything else, they don't check their e-mail frequently, and I don't have their phone number because the only thing we have ever used to make calls is WeChat voice call.
I have other groups of friends who organize real life events (hiking, dinner, etc.) on WeChat. Without WeChat I'd probably be left out of those. Yes, friends will still be friends, but they won't go out of their way to ping you by e-mail for a random hike that everyone else they know would just respond on WeChat for.
I just don't hate WeChat enough to want to completely ban it from my life. The friction of finding alternate communication methods with all the people I'm already friends with is too much to bother; I just grudgingly use WeChat.
Separately, I'm in China from time to time, have both lots of friends and business contacts there, so it's basically 100% a necessity for keeping in touch.
So get their phone number. It sounds like problem solved.
I'm not saying you have to dump WeChat/Facebook/whatever. But I think saying that they are your only way to communicate with people is a bit ridiculous. We all have phones in our pockets. Your friends will use multiple systems. I guarantee that specifically your Chinese friends will, because they already have to operate in two worlds (unless they completely isolate themselves in America).
> have other groups of friends who organize real life events (hiking, dinner, etc.) on WeChat. Without WeChat I'd probably be left out of those.
I promise you that you won't miss out. Your friends are still your friends. They are your friends because you enjoy each other's company, not because you use WeChat. WeChat is a tool, it isn't the relationship. I don't know you, but I'm willing to bet that those friends enjoy your company enough to send you a text message instead of a WeChat message when they want you to be part of an activity. Though I'll admit that it might be bumpy in the start because people forget that you don't use a specific communication platform.
I just happen to be on both FB and WeChat, because I have friends on both sides of the picture (English-/Chinese-speaking). I tend to have more social interaction with contacts on WeChat but many of them are conversely oblivious to the Facebook world. While they don't know about all your awesome house parties whose invitations appear only on Facebook, there are a whole slew of other awesome house parties happening on WeChat in the Chinese-speaking world of the Bay Area. Yesterday was the Duanwu festival, and my WeChat was flooded with people asking for who/where to buy dumplings from, others organizing parties to make them, yet others organizing camping trips, and you get the idea.
I'd argue that this is a reason for my original comment. Having friends that break out of the social media world forces you to contact them outside those spheres. Which also means that you're now operating in multiple spheres. It reduces the isolation.
Also, I wouldn't say I'm missing out. I'm in a PhD program with a pretty active department. It is pretty easy to find out what is happening. The only events I missed were when I first started, and I chalk that up to more people not knowing who I was.
Another possible explanation would be a system to combat viral content before it spreads too far (i.e. after a link has been shared a few times). You'd probably need to do a few more experiments to determine what triggers it with certainty. That said, I'm interested what those "interesting" keywords were, exactly.
"I absolutely hate WeChat (not necessarily just for the reasons in the article, but many other technical reasons) but I'm forced to use it because all of my friends and my entire social life happens on it."
Genuinely curious - is there a non-app (ie., plain SMS) interface to wechat ?
There is a plain SMS interaction layer for groupme and because I host my own phone service at twilio, I have total control over messaging to groupme groups because I can just interact with groupme on the command line ...
I've already deprecated SMS as a form of communication with me, and auto-trash all SMS with an appropriate deprecation warning returned to sender telling them to e-mail me instead. So an SMS/WeChat gateway wouldn't help (it doesn't exist anyway).
But that aside it's less about it being app. It's more that:
- It's a walled garden that is difficult to build plugins upon. About 10 years ago with QQ/ICQ/AIM/MSN/Gtalk/Zephyr I had written plugins for end-to-end encryption, auto rendering of LaTeX equations, remote control of IoT devices, gateways between platforms so a QQ friend could be in a group with an MSN friend, with me as the gateway, automatic translation, and lots of other features. WeChat is feature-wise a HUGE HUGE HUGE step back for me from what I had built for myself back then.
- It only supports signing on from a single device at a time. I never have a consistent device with me, and change devices multiple times over the course of a day. Facebook messenger and E-mail work extremely well if switch devices frequently, and keep all conversation logs on the server so it's easy to continue conversations in another location without carrying a phone around. My only solution with WeChat is to have multiple accounts, one per device, and pull each friend into a group with all of my other accounts. This emulates the functionality of Facebook messenger.
- Too much spying. It constantly scans my Wi-Fi networks, sensor data, installed applications, IMU/GPS, and lots of other things. I run it on a 2nd phone that has LineageOS on paranoid privacy settings and spit back fake sensor data when it tries to do those things. I don't have anything to hide, but they shouldn't be doing that stuff. Also, if you don't give WeChat permissions to certain things, it won't let you login, period. Much different from, say, Facebook, which will let you login but will just be crippled in the features you didn't give it appropriate permissions for.
- The UX downright sucks. You can't group friends or categorize groups, which means your screen is a mess once you join a bunch of groups. You can pin friends to the top, but once you pin enough friends, the chatrooms get pushed down so you can't see them anymore. People use WeChat to organize events via groups, yet it has no event-related features. The result is that you have to swipe through pages after pages of chitchat just to find the time and location, and screen through the chitchat to look for changes in the time and location from what was originally said. It's a horribly inefficient way to organize events. Just one of many problems.
Its only benefit is its ubiquity, showing the strength of the network effect and the herd mentality of humans. I totally agree that it's a step backwards if your goal is actual communication of information. Even forum boards were better.
Even the majority of my friends who work at Facebook and Google use WeChat to organize social events. Hell, I've visited friends at Facebook's HQ and had to tell them by WeChat that I'm downstairs in the lobby.
I personally totally get why this happens, and the network effect is so strong that my first instinct to contact my friends is via WeChat as well. I too organize social events on WeChat, because I know my friends don't really check anything else, so in the process, I too am guilty of propagating this network effect.
I still hate the app though. I just don't hate it enough to want to ditch my social life.