The WeChat Puzzle

After three months, WeChat has finally dropped a genuinely new version — 7.0.9. For years now, WeChat’s update cadence has been every one to two months, with most minor versions carrying the vague descriptions “optimized for the latest iPhone/iOS” or “resolved some known issues.” Features like the Mini Programs ecosystem, Mini Games, third-party app integrations, and group chat improvements have all crept in at a barely perceptible pace. So much so that if you ask someone to recall what WeChat looked like after 2016, they’d only vaguely remember “three-day Moments visibility,” “subscription feed,” “like vs. awesome vs. seen,” “Mini Programs,” “Time Capsule video,” and — with this latest update — “sticker battles in Moments comments.”

Given all that, this update, a month later than usual, feels especially precious.

Back when Zhang Xiaolong was treating Out of Control and The Crowd as his bibles, 100 million users dreamed of being WeChat’s product manager, 80 million were grateful for WeChat’s restraint with ads, and 50 million were waiting for the next update. Inside this massive whirlpool of praise and scorn, another 30 million users were on their knees begging to change their ridiculously dumb WeChat IDs — with the caveat, of course, that it couldn’t be a one-time-only option. Ten million were eagerly awaiting iOS dark mode — with the caveat, of course, that it couldn’t be QQ’s half-baked version. And at least one million were keeping their eyes peeled for the next super app to dethrone WeChat — with the caveat, of course, that it couldn’t be another Tencent product.

Here’s my take: WeChat is beginning to show its age — though this is by no means a eulogy. Much like Ip Man 4, where the cancer-stricken master could still school other martial artists and power-hungry rivals — WeChat’s aging isn’t about its core. It’s the surface. It seems to be on a downward slope. It seems dangerously close to falling from its pedestal. It seems less like the untouchable master — less like the formless, technique-less Zen swordsman — than we once imagined.

Ever since WeChat 6.7.3 introduced “create your own sticker,” and arguably ever since the Sticker Shop was built, what I’ve felt is a lack of restraint. That kind of restraint isn’t the same as nostalgia, and it certainly has nothing to do with attitude or character. But flip the coin: sustaining DAU always requires fresh tricks to keep users engaged. As the nation’s #1 app, why should WeChat always be dead-serious? Remember the “Sky Invaders” mini-game craze back in the day? That was a hit with both critics and the masses.

Powerhouses like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have all stuck with emoji. Sure, plenty of people explain this as “foreigners don’t get sticker culture” or “they don’t understand the nuance.” But given that the entire internet is an import, we still have things to learn from them.

We can’t blindly worship everything foreign, of course. Stickers have become our expressive symbols, but in China — and honestly, even globally — their fatal flaws are glaringly obvious. And this is likely why WeChat went from a full rollout of “sticker replies in Moments” to A/B testing, to shutting it down entirely.

First: porn. Stickers are primarily in GIF format, and WeChat allows GIF uploads up to a whopping 20MB. A short porn clip? Totally doable. Allowing porn GIFs in private chats could reluctantly be chalked up to flirting or questionable taste — because that’s user privacy. But putting them in the comments section? That’s a distribution problem, because your mutual friends — the third, fourth, fifth parties — see them too. Until WeChat has the ability or the legal authority to moderate user-posted stickers, this problem has no solution. A headline like “China’s National Super-App Caught in Porn Scandal” is unacceptable to anyone.

Second: politics. Leader memes — need I say more? Extend that to celebrity mockery GIFs, or original sticker creations using classmates and colleagues as source material. If these show up in the subject’s own social circle, not everyone can brush off the implied portrait rights violation with a grin like Yao Ming. If taken seriously, WeChat could face litigation risk.

Third: server load. Previously, a comment section was a few characters, a few dozen characters, plus some emoji. Now it’s carrying files hundreds of times larger. I’m not questioning WeChat’s engineering prowess, but before rolling out a feature — before pushing it to the entire user base — nobody can predict just how popular it’ll be, or what the server capacity costs will look like after stabilization.

Fourth: the sticker-battle context. Under what circumstances does a sticker battle actually get triggered? What kind of relationship should exist between the participants? Is bringing in third-party observers inappropriate? What problem does sticker battling actually solve? On these questions, WeChat hasn’t thought clearly.

From a data-driven operations perspective, WeChat hopes Moments stickers will boost engagement — increase stickiness, comments, and interactions. That’s perfectly fair.

From a product experience perspective, the feature inevitably degraded the experience for users with a “clean” aesthetic, giving off the vibe of an internet forum or Baidu Tieba. Of course, WeChat can always say they can’t please everyone.

From a social culture perspective, stickers can’t increase social intimacy — because whatever kind of friends we are, that’s still what we are. You and I won’t grow closer because of a few stickers, while an awkward or inappropriate sticker could actually push us further apart. As I said earlier: stickers belong in one-on-one and group chat input boxes, not in the comment section.

Stickers don’t represent social culture. They’re just the bucket of popcorn sitting between the seats while you watch the movie. What deserves emphasis — what better represents internet social culture, and Chinese social culture — are things like “politeness, humor, non-violence, and efficiency.”

Stickers, admittedly, cover a vast emotional range — they can be satire, exasperation, self-deprecation, irony; they can be absurdist, quietly provocative, nonsensical, or utterly indescribable. But at the end of the day, they’re still just chat expressions — tiny bubbles in the ocean of text. You can’t communicate using only chat expressions.

A quick detour down memory lane. The earliest emoticons appeared in 1881, in the American satirical magazine PUCK. In that issue, PUCK wrote: “We wish it to be distinctly understood that the letter-press department of this paper is not going to be trampled on by any of the walking matches that have been so popular of late.”

In 1982, computer science professor Scott Fahlman posted :-) and :-( on a university BBS, suggesting they be used to distinguish between posts that were meant humorously and those that were serious discussions.

Japan, too, got there before us when it comes to chat culture and nuance. The world-famous emoji was created by Shigetaka Kurita — and before that, pagers were an absolute craze among Japanese middle schoolers in 1995. To inject new emotional color into the millions of messages teenagers were sending daily, and to make those messages cute, NTT Docomo decided to add a heart symbol to its radio pager system.

At the crossroads of the letter era and the electronic wave, could anything be more romantic than seeing a heart symbol on a pager? Unintentionally, NTT “encouraged” middle schoolers to fall in love. That, too, is arguably a kind of cultural depth.

We all know the deal. In the “Chinese-style internet market” of 2011–2015, users were tricked in, money was bluster, traffic was bought, pies were drawn in the sky, and paying — paying was impossible. Utterly impossible. Back then, the Great Firewall was truth, and pigs could fly. But come 2018 and 2019, the ceiling appeared. Growing the user base got impossibly hard. Customer acquisition costs went through the roof. What to do? No easy answer. Survival of the fittest. Traffic is in the grip of the giants, creativity has been copied to exhaustion, regulation is everywhere, and every app looks the same with its “youth mode.” As for the news apps, the worst off of all — the top three “diamond-grade ad slots” on the homepage have been commandeered for political loyalty displays.

Under these battle conditions, WeChat must, on one hand, cling to its #1 spot in both DAU and time-spent, and on the other, stay vigilant against the perennial usurpers with unabated ambitions. Being #1 has never been easy; social is the reflection and the hard-wired need of complex human nature. How do you understand the pain points of a billion individuals? How do you please, educate, retain, and delight them? In the age of the Great Firewall, this is what I see as the WeChat Puzzle.