![]() On the small screen of a phone, it’s a strenuous process for anyone without young eyes, tiny fingers, and a firm grasp on literacy. No matter the method, however, text input still involves a good deal of knowledge about the Chinese language and some degree of searching for and tapping on the character you intended in a grid of contenders. I exclusively use the phonetic method, an absolute godsend for someone who can speak and read but not handwrite my parents and grandmother prefer handwriting. Over the decades, we’ve shed some terribly convoluted ways of organizing the characters, settling on three main input formats: phonetic, shape-based, and handwriting. What lies at the core of WeChat’s success is a series of smart design decisions that reflect the culture they were created in and, together, generate a unique experience that is as functional as it is addictive.Ĭonsidering that there are 2–3,000 Chinese characters in common usage, digital Chinese text input is always nothing short of an UI miracle. But these features, introduced in late 2013, only work because they capitalize on WeChat’s already dizzying adoption rate. These days, the buzz around WeChat centers on its impressive sprawl into an entire operating system of features: in certain regions, a user can hail a cab, shop, and even manage their bank accounts all in the app. There’s also a conspicuous lack of presence and typing status indicators as compared to iMessage and other apps, allowing the receiver some measure of plausible deniability about when each message is received. Even while adding someone as a Contact, there is an option to secretly prevent them from seeing your Moments updates. You can chat with people without adding them as contacts: someone you met on a chat-coordinated dinner doesn’t automatically become a Contact with access to details about your social life. In a culture where connections are everything, many of WeChat’s features are subtly optimized for “saving face” in complicated situations. This decision to prioritize context separation over the ability to perform social popularity is an important concession to what sociologist Tricia Wang calls the Elastic Self. On my own Moments posts, I can see all the likes and comments but my friends can’t see each other’s activity unless they’re contacts on WeChat themselves. In other words, my cousin-in-law could perform his groomal duties without worrying about messy (and potentially embarrassing) context collapse. This automated privacy curtain means that group social dynamics can remain hidden in plain sight without any moderation effort required from the original poster. On Moments, however, each user can only see activity from their own contacts: not even a total count of Likes is available to anyone other than the original poster. When my soon-to-be cousin-in-law posted that photo, he no doubt received both sincere congratulations from his professional contacts and older relatives as well as jokes from his closer friends. Yet its Facebook-esque feature, Moments, manages to avoid feeling like the Walmart of social interaction. He and his groomsmen huddled to block screen glare and sent frantic requests for help to everyone they knew.ĭespite being only four years old, WeChat is more popular in China than Facebook is in the US: 72% of all Chinese people with mobile devices use it, versus the 67% penetration rate Facebook has among American internet users. But to get into the building at all, the maid of honor had decreed that he had to post a goofy picture of himself in his groom’s getup to Moments and get 25 Likes from his WeChat contacts. Inside the apartment building, he and his groomsmen would have other trials to face: drinking vile concoctions of vinegar and wasabi, doing pushups, and liberally bribing everyone for hints to impossible trivia questions. On the morning of his wedding day, my cousin’s fiancé waited impatiently for Likes so that he could retrieve his bride.
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