The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet(yiqinfu.github.io) |
The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet(yiqinfu.github.io) |
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 relevant for few days.
Not that it seems to matter - article by themselves mostly expresses fleeting opinions. It's hard to come across a truly philosophical work with long term implications - and even then it gets buried anyhow, regardless of where it is.
Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature doesn’t help. This again comes from the mobile-first trend, because long-form discussions are difficult on mobile and you can’t fit much more than a chat window on a mobile display.
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 coincided with the rise of home Internet, the vibe was very positive and freewheeling. This vibe ended 9/11/2001.
There's pockets of that culture around still but the hordes of unwashed masses enabled by mobile-internet + Myspace/Facebook age are now dominant, and it's long been past time for netizens to develop their own gatewayed islands.
Majority of the moderation are volunteering position, meaning they don't get paid to moderate those sites. Reddit plagued with this issue, there are power mods that moderating 50 or 100 subs. The reason for that because no one else want to moderate the subs since it requires time investment.
Moderation is always and a thorn on their site for many forum/discussion sites. When Elon Musk announced their consideration creating a new social media platform, I always think of how they will manage the moderation part in those platforms? Look at other small social media platform like Truth, Gab, Parler. Common issue with those sites is moderation.
The other half is older articles are competing with everything ever written. You hardly need 1,000 different Calculus textbooks.
Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be a positive indicator since it might mean there aren't a lot of bugs.
Older C or C++ projects may be "standalone", but when built with the latest GCC or clang produce lots of warning messages and may be miscompiled courtesy of programmer vs optimiser. Older python programs may refuse to run under python3.
So while code does not rot, the GitHub project is unlikely to contain all the code for the project, and those external dependencies changing has much the same effect as rotting.
A still running CI would be a better indicator that the project works, but failing that, recent commits are the same signal.
After all, an article is to inform the current audience, and debates should not last forever.
A lot of information on Wikipedia is permanently valid and doesn't need to be "couple of days old" fresh. Same for many hobbyist websites from the past
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.
I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe.
I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.
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.
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?
What differ developed countries, they got technologies much earlier, when they where expensive and/or hard to achieve (like broadband internet with low latency, where not achievable on >90% of 1st world territory), personal computer costs like automobile, so internet become means of communication for elite.
- In 1990th, when you communicate via internet this automatically assume, you have high iq and good education. Elite difference, they intentionally spent significant resources to achieve awareness, to structure information, that's cause of search engines appearance.
When smartphones wide distributed, they lowered the bar very much, so appear new reality in which most new users where not elite, but ordinary persons, not initiative, with average education. But western elites already where capable to moderately good deal with new reality, and to save adequate information infrastructure.
China jumped over elite internet period just into period of average persons, Proletariat, and Chinese elite was not ready, it is just too young, not mature for such trials, consider this period as information chaos.
I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR country, and see very similar things, but fortunately, our society resists to totalitarianism and grow, because of this we have much less chaos, but we still suffer of problem that no information lasts long enough.
I have few ideas on how western elites solve this, and could share and discuss, but at the moment I have not much success in implementation if my ideas.
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.
As for cold-emailing, I’ve never heard this term before. I’ve certainly never established any sort of relationship through cold-emailing anyone (or being cold-emailed), and I’ve been working professionally for more than 24 years. Maybe this is peculiar to certain job types.
It's just cold calling, by email, isn't it? Plenty of people write to me cold off HN and I write back to them. At work it's also fairly common to get emailed by someone selling some service, right? Salespeople have their own way to find the people they need.
I do get the impression that the Chinese internet is very centralized. As the author pointed out the practice of having your own site or independent niche forum/community is rare. Almost all content/people/communities exist in Weibo, BiliBili, Zhihu or WeChat.
vs...
>Take two of my blog posts as an example. The post has [...] garnered 30k views as of May 2021
"Good tweets" disseminates to more eyeballs faster than "good blogposts". Just like actual twitter, PRC social media also link to blogposts / longform. RSS power users aside, I don't see how this is much different than how authors push blogs on twitter in west, with occasional repost of old blogposts when relevant. The function of using search to discover old content feels like it's been diminishing in recent years. Usually better to discover through curated specialist forums / subreddits dedicated to specific subject matter. And even then link rot affects a lot of older content, much of which not cached/archived.
That said, I do think west (anglosphere specifically) is deluged with expertise from brain draining talent across the world and simply a larger source for content creation, not just knowledge.
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
Pretty sure South Korea invented these, and China copied them.
i said it is the addition of the steps and their expectation in the west that i find weird, replying to OP's story
wich i assume he has an agenda to push some services over there to compete with chinese ones
then i mention things they have and we don't
maybe that is the result of not always expecting what the west expect, wich allows them to be this agile and adopt things much quicker, wich allows them to go past the post industrial age quicker
we seen it already with 5G
what prevented that to happen in the west? lack of education, lack of market will to invest, they wanted their society to remain in the bronze age because more profitable, and also some of westerners believe 5G is a conspiracy
it's weird isn't it?
they do what we can't do because we built a society around profits first
Contactless payments are already widespread in every Western nation that isn't the US.
this is literally what China does lol
At least in the UK that exists to some degree post-covid, but its in the form of every pub chain in the country having its own crappy mobile app for ordering via a phone.
Well, seems like you want to look at things from the point of view of "I hate surveillance capitalism!".
I remember trying to look up how to jailbreak an iPhone 6. Google results were a mostly forum posts talking about iPhone 4 jailbreaks, and it'd be 1 forum post of content and dozens and dozens of people saying "Great job!", "Thanks!", etc, which aggravated the hell out of me. This is persisting something which should be ephemeral (since I feel like dozens of "Thanks!" are valueless 10 seconds after they're uttered)
How do you expect to find information if they're not persisted/searchable anywhere, it'd be like in the old ages where you have to figure out the right master who has the know how and reach out to him.
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.
The trick is to structure it to not be long the USD or CNH/CNY for any of the gains.
I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.
[1] See first two sentences here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-credit-cards-pose-securi...
And you still can't use your phone, a joke this system is
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.
So the "robust, time-tested tools to solve problems" also become obsolete in other fields of engineering. I think this is not unlike "compiler warns about more unsafe practices nowadays".
It's not ideal, but I thought that WeChat had a desktop client (similar to WhatsApp) that allows for slightly easier scrollback, search and export/copy-paste functionality within the group chats. It doesn't help across the wider WeChat platform as the article points out, but in a corporate setting with many adhoc working groups it might help one to maintain context.
This was even more difficult when dealing with clients or third party vendors, because they would have their own WeChat groups where they discussed support issues or purchases. I remember a situation where we had to contact a former employee to find a password to a machine because it had been shared on a chat that only they were on at the time - that sort of thing.
To be fair, I do think that a lot of similar stuff happens on Slack, where private groups get created and decisions are made without always including the correct participants according to the org chart. And probably prior to the explosion of workplace chat apps people were doing this by getting together in person for lunch or drinks or golf. It does make me feel a bit cynical about organizations that claim to hold values of transparency and accountability, though. It seems to me that cliques form regardless, and quietly influence direction regardless of any alleged corporate values.
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.
State security concerns aside, deleting messages is less expensive than keeping them. If your plan is to delete everything after N days, it's easy to partition data by day, and then drop the older partitons as needed.
Indeed. It takes good leadership to recognize the problem in the first place and to keep up on combatting it (e.g. actually checking if people keep their notes on a centrally managed system).