The Unintended Consequences of China Leapfrogging to Mobile Internet (opens in new tab)

> 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 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.

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 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.

I 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?

These are not consequences of technology, but human nature.

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.

This 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.

To 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.

The downgrading of email is happening in the US, in my experience. At my work we use Slack continuously, both for communicating with team members and for reaching out to other people at the company. I often go more than a week without checking my email. I can’t remember when the last time an important email came through.

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.

From what I understand a lot of the long-form "blogging-style" content in Chinese is found on Zhihu, which is commonly referred to as the Quora of China (although from my limited experience with it it seems a lot better in multiple ways).

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.

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=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I wonder if all those things that make the information longer lasting also raise the average quality.

There is also an interesting phenomenon in China's internet: concentration of communities, for good or for bad. For instance, zhihu.com, the Chinese copycat of Quora has way more deeper discussion on machine learning, math, or STEM in general than Quora. On zhihu, it's easy to find the in-depth discussion of latest papers, hundreds of posts on intuition or interpretation of pretty much every STEM concepts and their historical context, dozens if not hundreds of lengthy articles that compare Raft and Paxos and ZABs and what not, all kinds of recommendations of interesting papers in top-tier conferneces, and etc. Quora, in contrast, has few such discussions because people would go to reddit, stackexchange, or some mailing list for such discussion.

>My Chinese social media posts reach 100k to 200k people a day

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.

I wonder if the same consequences will apply to western children who grow up with mobile Internet without being exposed to the desktop web until they have to use it in a job or higher education.

the internet is not really a library, but a radio (an ephemeral stream)?

just 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