I think people that feel WeChat is simply a social network don't understand WeChat. Though the article doesn't say this, the comments here and popular opinion generally think that.
From my time visiting China I'm not sure it's possible to live, in the urban areas, without WeChat. Payments are basically all through WeChat; I found places that didn't take Visa/Mastercard (or even know what those were, although that may have just been my pronunciation).
So the answer to this article is simple:
- For China: CCP approval
- For America/Europe: WeChat would never happen, unless there was severe monopolisation that allowed a company to roll something like WeChat out successfully, or the federal government / national governments mandated it
The article discusses how a WeChat replacement may be done using blockchain, not what a WeChat replacement needs to be successful (as the title would imply), or what may be the most technically viable way of doing it.
Nowadays, it's literally impossible to live in China without either WeChat or Alipay as health codes are integrated into the apps and it can be impossible to move outside without displaying your health code. Travelling on trains, planes and long haul busses now require you to have the app.
I don't think enough has been made about how extraordinary it is that a sovereign government has let such a core governmental function simply be handed over to for-profit businesses. It would be like, in the US, registering for your drivers license by Signing in with Google and being bound by the Google TOS. Commit an offense that causes Google to delete your account and now you can't legally drive anymore.
> - For America/Europe: WeChat would never happen, unless there was severe monopolisation that allowed a company to roll something like WeChat out successfully, or the federal government / national governments mandated it
Isn't Apple ecosystem basically US/European WeChat? It's not a single app, but they use tight integration and single device lock to create essentially a full copy of all WeChat services with iMessage, Apple Pay, Health, etc? Apple basically control communications, payments and health data of their users and works with other vendors to integrate them primarily as payment, content and preferred identification provider.
You get all of that nicely packaged into a single box. The only difference is that you can't use it on a cheap phone.
The article doesn't really mention blockchain other than 2 times quickly, it seems like everyone in this comment section seems to believe that though as if they said you MUST use blockchain at every step of building something like this.
I think also because wechat outside of china is a very stripped down version of wechat functionality inside china. It's actually very convenient for many aspects of life there.
Of course it is possible to live there without WeChat. That's an illusion I get tired of hearing. Been there in 2019, done it, had no problems using cash. Probably Mastercard would also have wirked for buying a train ticket, if I had persisted and acted as if I did not have it in cash. (And no, no one robbed me.)
People seem to have the idea that WeChat is some sort of amazing application -- it's not. In fact the only reason why it has the market share it does in China is simply because all competitors are blocked.
Some of WeChat's real pain points are:
- No backing up your messages to the cloud like WhatsApp or having them loaded from the server like Facebook Messenger. Moving all your messages from one phone to another is quite the ordeal .
- Complete disregard for platform standards. Specifically notifications on Android and Windows 10 are atrocious. Both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have notifications that are well integrated with the especially the Android notification system, WeChat notifications however are not.
-A lot of nice to have chat features are either non existent or have just recently been introduced. For example a poor implementation of quoting a previous message was just introduced like a month ago, and there are no reactions for specific messages -- and no timeline for implementing them either.
WeChat does have quite a bit of different "apps" built into it, but not really more convenient to use than the separate apps are. It's mainly just a casualty of China's lack of anti monopoly legislation.On my phone I have Alipay (the other half of china's online payment duopoly) installed together with WeChat, and almost always use it for payment (It's pretty much accepted everywhere WeChat is)
>No backing up your messages to the cloud like WhatsApp or having them loaded from the server like Facebook Messenger.
Their old product QQ has it, the reason they didn't do it on WeChat, I think it's because they have no other choice since:
-They have to make WeChat "presentable" internationally, they means they can't appear to store it since they are beholden to China.
-They need to convey a message that they aren't watching you, but in reality their system needs to be monitored by Chinese police real time[1], since that rules out the option of E2E encryption, the only way is at least appear to be hands off.
WeChat Mini Programs (integrations / built-in "apps") usually aren't as rich as the equivalent standalone iOS / Android apps, but they benefit from WeChat's distribution platform and network effect.
Everything shared on WeChat usually deeplinks to the equivalent Mini Program within WeChat. These apps receive organic traffic through social sharing and can also enhance this through advertising on WeChat.
I do not see Chinese consumers switch apps much other than switching to video / streaming apps like 抖音 (TikTok) and gaming apps.
I think you're missing the point and the reason for the appeal of wechat. In China it's much more than just a messaging platform, and reality is most people don't care about notification standards and such.
I've used wechat expensively in China and I wish there was something like that in the US. Wechat just makes it so much easier to do somethings and has a nice integration with life. Some examples outside of messaging:
- payments obvious, but also ability to send money, split bills etc.
- Orders things. Either in person at restaurants, delivery or a ride
- The social media aspect. A lot of events, tickets etc are sent via wechat.
Definitely. Literally half of the features in the "What do we want?" section would get his replacement banned in the PRC, which is one of the few markets where WeChat is popular enough to even be something to replace.
I would be interested in a we hat replacement, but as soon as I read ethereum I thought: nah. Cryptocurrencies are just not compatible with mainstream consumption. Why? Because I get paid in euros. And you might get paid in dollars. And a wechat user gets paid in Yuan. But nobody gets paid in ethereum.
Seems like a silly article. Even if they had feature parity today, very few people would use the replacement because their friends aren't using it, their family aren't using it, the shops they want to buy from aren't using it, the people they meet aren't using it...
Exactly. Setting aside the issues of whether Google would be preferable to Facebook as a central "portal" like this, they ran into the exact same issue when they launched G+.
At the time it had feature parity (and in many cases, superiority) with Facebook, but even though loads of people already had Google accounts for Gmail or Docs, etc. they didn't want to post to both Facebook and G+.
Since everyone was on Facebook and less than everyone was on G+, it didn't matter that you could silo your contacts more easily, integrate voice/video chat, make online/in person payments, or maintain some semblance of a personal "page" in addition to just looking at an activity stream.
And as we've seen over and over, once something is seen as an "also-ran" or less popular option, it largely becomes a joke among the potential userbase and definitely not a success.
This i think, they are grossly overestimating how much people really care about privacy.
To make the transition to a more private ecosystem etc.
I'm still surprised why Facebook still has multiple apps for feed and chatting.
Because Friends and Family are still using Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram etc i also keep on using those apps.
Im just navigating those app with the thought of they will probably save this somewhere.
- A payments platform called WeChat Pay (think PayPal, Venmo, Apply Pay, Android Pay all combined)
- A consumer messenger platform with voice and video chat (think Facebook Messenger + WhatsApp)
- A friends newsfeed called Moments with audio and video support, external links but visibility of
content is timeboxed in days, weeks or months (think Facebook News Feed with a touch of Instagram Stories)
- An e-commerce store platform called WeChat Store (think Shopify)
- A business platform called "Official Accounts" with many features:
* A business / bot messaging platform (think Facebook Messenger for Business)
* An advertising platform
* A content distribution platform, primarily through Official Account Subscription Accounts (like blogs, news, think Medium). WeChat offers this through "Channels", "Top Stories", "Official Accounts" and "Mini Programs".
* WeChat Official Accounts Service Accounts can create "Mini Programs" which are rich integrations and tightly integrate with your linked WeChat Payments account, for example:
1. Didi Chuxing for Ridesharing (Uber)
2. Mobike for Bike Rental (Lime Bike etc)
3. Meituan Dianping for e-commerce and food delivery
4. Douban, Yishenghuo, Yoopay etc for Event / Concert Tickets (think Eventbrite, Ticketmaster)
Most noteworthy is that WeChat Mini Programs are standalone and don't deeplink to other apps. No aspect of WeChat does Deeplinking to any other app. You always stay in WeChat.
Surprised to see no Payments mentioned at all, which makes the post makes very little sense.
WeChat is also, and by large, a financial service. Payment and transfer is happening all the time on this platform, and to replace that is a magnitude difficult than just replace the chat.
You will probably never come up with the right answer for this question because the question itself is wrong. You never build a "WeChat replacement" by building a WeChat replacement. You just end up with a knockoff if you start from this question.
This might be onpopular, but I don't think you should aim for "no censorship" and "no way for authority to police people". As we're seeing in today's social media, unfettered communication is not something you might want. Think of all the misinformation, trolling and conspiracy theories going on in our western social media _despite_ very heavy efforts to contain them by Facebook, Google and Twitter. This is biting us hard in our current crisis, where people are going as far as burning down 5G masts, thinking they are heros fighting against the government-ordered spread of Covid-19 [0]. The older I get, the more I start to think that the police fulfills a very fundamental function in our society, no matter how free that society thinks it is. And we likely do want some policing in our virtual worlds as well. Whatever the next social media is going to be (it seems to me that this is what you're trying to plan out here), it should include some sort of moderation option of some case.
You don’t just build a product like WeChat or Facebook. You grow your product to that level.
What WeChat/Facebook are today is highly path-dependent hence you don’t get to replicate that, and your intelligence and ambition probably won’t let you either.
Stop try to replace them, build sth different and help people in a new and better way. With that, you might be able to transcend them.
Telegram was on a good path to become WeChat replacement, with its Telegram Open Network blockchain an Gram cryptocurrency coming and plans to add wide range of services including decentralized storage, web pages and payment channels. But now it looks that part has been killed by SEC, so the niche is still unoccupied.
WeChat's dominance in Chinese social media is mainly due to its close relationship with CCP. It would be a different story if the market was open to west tech companies.
Talking about a censorship resistant social media in China is completely a waste of time.
This technology has a lot of potential. I have played around with Status for a while and it has a real potential to surpass the safety functionalities of Telegram and Signal.
Instead of cloning wechat, an alternative would be developing a proxy between IM apps, i.e. all wechat messages can be forwarded to whatsapp so it become part of whatsapp, well, kind of, it's painful to use whatsapp, LINE, telegram, wechat at the same time, need something to "unite" them so we can go to one place and do it all.
Chat vendors have no incentive to support standards based interoperability. They all want to leverage network effects to maximize switching costs and keep users confined to their walled gardens. The only way to break this would probably be government mandates.
WeChat is a not a chat app. It's a micro universe. Imagine WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Uber, etc. and an entire app platform all integrated into a single app. That's WeChat.
This is what facebook wanted to do when they launched their APIa long time ago, never came to pass. WeChat did it. Its a whole operating system in itself.
That's definitely not true. WeChat has a bunch of ecommerce stuff built in among other features. You can pay for stuff on WeChat and there are stores. It even has translation built in to facilitate buying and selling between people from different countries.
I think there are also apps and other stuff there too. It's more like a chat app that became an ecommerce and mini-app platform.
[+] [-] m11a|6 years ago|reply
From my time visiting China I'm not sure it's possible to live, in the urban areas, without WeChat. Payments are basically all through WeChat; I found places that didn't take Visa/Mastercard (or even know what those were, although that may have just been my pronunciation).
So the answer to this article is simple:
- For China: CCP approval
- For America/Europe: WeChat would never happen, unless there was severe monopolisation that allowed a company to roll something like WeChat out successfully, or the federal government / national governments mandated it
The article discusses how a WeChat replacement may be done using blockchain, not what a WeChat replacement needs to be successful (as the title would imply), or what may be the most technically viable way of doing it.
[+] [-] shalmanese|6 years ago|reply
I don't think enough has been made about how extraordinary it is that a sovereign government has let such a core governmental function simply be handed over to for-profit businesses. It would be like, in the US, registering for your drivers license by Signing in with Google and being bound by the Google TOS. Commit an offense that causes Google to delete your account and now you can't legally drive anymore.
[+] [-] mcelhinney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|6 years ago|reply
Isn't Apple ecosystem basically US/European WeChat? It's not a single app, but they use tight integration and single device lock to create essentially a full copy of all WeChat services with iMessage, Apple Pay, Health, etc? Apple basically control communications, payments and health data of their users and works with other vendors to integrate them primarily as payment, content and preferred identification provider.
You get all of that nicely packaged into a single box. The only difference is that you can't use it on a cheap phone.
[+] [-] decanus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yibg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway6250|6 years ago|reply
Some of WeChat's real pain points are: - No backing up your messages to the cloud like WhatsApp or having them loaded from the server like Facebook Messenger. Moving all your messages from one phone to another is quite the ordeal .
- Complete disregard for platform standards. Specifically notifications on Android and Windows 10 are atrocious. Both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have notifications that are well integrated with the especially the Android notification system, WeChat notifications however are not.
-A lot of nice to have chat features are either non existent or have just recently been introduced. For example a poor implementation of quoting a previous message was just introduced like a month ago, and there are no reactions for specific messages -- and no timeline for implementing them either.
WeChat does have quite a bit of different "apps" built into it, but not really more convenient to use than the separate apps are. It's mainly just a casualty of China's lack of anti monopoly legislation.On my phone I have Alipay (the other half of china's online payment duopoly) installed together with WeChat, and almost always use it for payment (It's pretty much accepted everywhere WeChat is)
[+] [-] balola|6 years ago|reply
Their old product QQ has it, the reason they didn't do it on WeChat, I think it's because they have no other choice since:
-They have to make WeChat "presentable" internationally, they means they can't appear to store it since they are beholden to China.
-They need to convey a message that they aren't watching you, but in reality their system needs to be monitored by Chinese police real time[1], since that rules out the option of E2E encryption, the only way is at least appear to be hands off.
[1]https://advox.globalvoices.org/2017/12/27/dont-call-xi-the-b...
[+] [-] tanilama|6 years ago|reply
International competitors may be. Till this day, I didn't see something come close to what WeChat is offering in China.
WeChat is like Chrome, it is so big and ubiquitous in China, it can dictate standard.
The online backup of messages itself is a pain point I agree, but local transfer is possible, though a bit cumbersome.
[+] [-] verst|6 years ago|reply
Everything shared on WeChat usually deeplinks to the equivalent Mini Program within WeChat. These apps receive organic traffic through social sharing and can also enhance this through advertising on WeChat.
I do not see Chinese consumers switch apps much other than switching to video / streaming apps like 抖音 (TikTok) and gaming apps.
[+] [-] yibg|6 years ago|reply
I've used wechat expensively in China and I wish there was something like that in the US. Wechat just makes it so much easier to do somethings and has a nice integration with life. Some examples outside of messaging:
- payments obvious, but also ability to send money, split bills etc.
- Orders things. Either in person at restaurants, delivery or a ride
- The social media aspect. A lot of events, tickets etc are sent via wechat.
[+] [-] pwinnski|6 years ago|reply
It would not need a blockchain. There is no reason whatsoever for basing this on a blockchain.
[+] [-] naringas|6 years ago|reply
and governments vary in their trustworthiness
[+] [-] gruez|6 years ago|reply
/snark
[+] [-] ardy42|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timwaagh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soylentcola|6 years ago|reply
At the time it had feature parity (and in many cases, superiority) with Facebook, but even though loads of people already had Google accounts for Gmail or Docs, etc. they didn't want to post to both Facebook and G+.
Since everyone was on Facebook and less than everyone was on G+, it didn't matter that you could silo your contacts more easily, integrate voice/video chat, make online/in person payments, or maintain some semblance of a personal "page" in addition to just looking at an activity stream.
And as we've seen over and over, once something is seen as an "also-ran" or less popular option, it largely becomes a joke among the potential userbase and definitely not a success.
[+] [-] dragonelite|6 years ago|reply
Because Friends and Family are still using Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram etc i also keep on using those apps. Im just navigating those app with the thought of they will probably save this somewhere.
[+] [-] verst|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanilama|6 years ago|reply
WeChat is also, and by large, a financial service. Payment and transfer is happening all the time on this platform, and to replace that is a magnitude difficult than just replace the chat.
[+] [-] cocktailpeanuts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robjan|6 years ago|reply
Site is running slow, here's an archive: https://archive.is/w1HMt
[+] [-] querez|6 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/technology/coronavirus-5g...
[+] [-] freewizard|6 years ago|reply
What WeChat/Facebook are today is highly path-dependent hence you don’t get to replicate that, and your intelligence and ambition probably won’t let you either.
Stop try to replace them, build sth different and help people in a new and better way. With that, you might be able to transcend them.
[+] [-] krcz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foenix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hank_z|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etherpeopleses|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|6 years ago|reply
Instead of cloning wechat, an alternative would be developing a proxy between IM apps, i.e. all wechat messages can be forwarded to whatsapp so it become part of whatsapp, well, kind of, it's painful to use whatsapp, LINE, telegram, wechat at the same time, need something to "unite" them so we can go to one place and do it all.
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0astbread|6 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Connecting_to_other_proto...
[+] [-] thoraway1010|6 years ago|reply
Wechat was doing 1 billion transactions PER DAY. Revenue for 2019 from fintech (wechat pay etc) was up something like 30% + (100B RMB?)
All these competitors "catching up" to wechat - I mean, is line even profitable or at similar scale?
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kgc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaixi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lvturner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tensor|6 years ago|reply
I think there are also apps and other stuff there too. It's more like a chat app that became an ecommerce and mini-app platform.