[catdog]

This development is backwards, it reverses everything what is great about the Internet and made it such superior and successful. Instead of a network of networks where everyone can freely share information and talk to anybody, even directly via standardized protocols it's going back to heavily centralized systems, to the last bit controlled by a a small set of commercial entities which even do not see the user as a customer. WeChat is a dystopia which is not unlikely to become also true in the rest of the wold. No matter how nicely your cage is decorated, it's still a cage.

[BoorishBears]

What's outside this "cage" that consumers want?

[millettjon]

freedom

[BoorishBears]

As a thought experiment, imagine a bird cage that gets larger as a bird approaches its sides. Even if you put a bird that migrates in this cage, eventually the cage would reach some max size where cage size > maximum flight range of the bird.

If the cage is so large that the bird doesn't try to escape it, does the bird care that it's in a cage? Is there really a difference between the cage and freedom?

You can't get the average person to use other products by promising something like "freedom", there needs to be something concrete outside the cage to get them to leave it. Products like WeChat are like this imaginary cage, growing to encompass everything that the users want. From the point of view of the user it might as well not be a cage, because there's nothing left outside of it for them besides a benefit they haven't (not yet) seen value in.

If you really want them to leave one monolithic service for a smattering of smaller ones there needs to be a seriously compelling reason that each of the smaller ones bring to the table, "freedom" isn't going to cut it

[plaguuuuuu]

People already experience the cage. Plenty of my friends don't want to run the FB messenger app and give it permissions on their phones, but FB forces people to use the app on mobile and disables the function on the website.

Same deal with third party chat apps. I have to install 3-4 separate apps to talk to different people because everyone's using a separate app and there's no integration between them, they don't speak the same protocol. And I would much rather not have WhatsApp but if I deleted it I'd have to leave a few group chats.

[unclebucknasty]

>does the bird care that it's in a cage?

Yes. Because the bird ultimately has no control over the cage, cannot be assured of the motives of those who do, and knows its true freedom is always subject to the whims of the same.

[BoorishBears]

But again, the average consumer isn't that concerned with those issues, because unlike this imaginary bird, the consumers could leave the cage anytime they wanted in theory. They've accepted a trade of control and privacy, for ease and convenience, and I don't know that it's not a choice they shouldn't make until someone can find a way to balance the two.