WeChat has lots of things hidden behind low impression entrypoints. You can explore them when you want. Its primary features, chat and moments, are dead simple, like WhatsApp. Facebook on the other hand, are mixing lots of stuff into their main feed, making the experience horrible for everyone

Marketing/business side always demand prime real-estate to push 'features' instead of just blending them into the UI. This is extra-apparent on mobile apps but FB did it on their website for years (I haven't seen what it looks like recently).

It's not easy to say no as a designer but the best companies are the ones most capable of keeping things as focused on primary UX flows as possible.

TikTok figured this out by making it all about scrolling a simple page of high-density videos, the entire screen is full of the content you want. No extra tapping or side scrolling needed.

Reddit is another company that missed the boat on what made their website great during their redesign. Making it feel top-heavy JS-wise and sparser instead of simple high-density information like newspaper site with simple links. For ex: the first article on old.reddit.com is 100px from the top and can fit 10 articles within 1000px, while the new one starts at 400px and lists 3-4 posts by 1000px (HN is 55px and 20+ posts).

Let’s ship features! To heck with what users may need or want!

The employees want it, management want it, the owners want it – yes, considering user needs can sometimes be very low down on the list.

That's right, in FBs case user != customer

Instagram is dead simple as well, if you stick to the main feed and just posting photos. I've used instagram without touching any of the stuff discussed in the top-level comment.

Actually those features WeChat wants people to use as new users are pretty intuitive and straightforward. For other functionalities, those are intentionally 'hidden'. Those advanced or experiment features are for those who look for those features or just spreading by friends.

On the contrary, the other big player in China is Alipay, it's pretty much trying to put everything on the first page like Kowloon Walled City - noisy, messy. It just punches everything in your face.

Interestingly, they both serve their purpose, but following different design philosophies. WeChat wants to be a good product, while the Alipay wants to be a portal for every new service around you from Alibaba.

PS: To have an initial impression on how Alipay is not only a payment app, it literally trying to directly covers everything around you, for example:

* Buy everything, or course.

* Pay for electric, gas, and water.

* Riding bikes, bus and metro. Parking, re-fuel, pay your fines.

* Loan, pay credit cards, stocks, insurance, lottery and donations. Or give your child or your spouse some pocket money on monthly basis.

* Also the 'social credit' system you might have heard of.

Scary. I'm going to pay with cash again out of principle (which I stopped doing due to the pandemic).

As an American who had to use WeChat for some stubborn friends...

I think WeChat UI is superior because they organize features in a nice boxed grid.

I can ignore things that I don't care about easily.

It's not a mistake in the short-term, but in the long-term it'll hurt growth. New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?

People will flock in where other people are. Unless Instagram gets a decent competitor, people will just get used to it.

This is the issue that made Facebook to big to fail now.

They got everybody and their mom on it and now even with all the security, tracking and countless competitors, its nearly impossible to get people off it because of this simple fact - its where everybody they know are now.

I don't know. In Facebooks case it might as well be hurting them with younger demographics. When everyones mom is there the younger people just might want to go someplace else.

You don't necessarily care that everyone is at some place, just the group you are interested in keeping up with.

Young people just make secret accounts and don't tell their parents. My younger brother is 15 and reports him and his peers are on both Snapchat and Instagram in addition to the usual suspects like Twitch, Tiktok, and Discord. The main reason I've heard for not using Facebook is largely that it's redundant when Instagram provides most of the same features in a slicker package. A lot of fb features like the event planning and facebook market aren't relevant to them yet.

Well there already is a competitor - TikTok.

As it stands, if I only care about the TikTok/Reels functionality, I'm going with TikTok. It doesn't come with all the extra bloat.

I guess we'll see what happens with the potential Trump ban and Microsoft acquisition though.

If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any potentially malicious components?

> If Microsoft acquires TikTok how would they go about vetting all of the code to remove any malicious components?

Rename it "Skype for Teens". Make no changes to the codebase.

That's more like it, but seriously there aren't a lot of articles written about app acquisition and the process of going through and debugging a massive codebase. If they buy it, no one from Microsoft will ever write a blog talking about how the code was a mess and how their team improved it.

They will grep for and comment out the code that goes like “maliciouslyUploadSecretInfo.*()“

Sorry, but that was a ridiculous question.

Acquiring an app from a Chinese company and slapping the Microsoft branding on it without doing some sort of vetting would be absurd.

What’s absurd is thinking Microsoft doesn’t have anyone who can read source code.

How is it different from acquiring a US app?

According with the new cold war narrative, in this case we have an very evil code that spy people all the time. Forgetting that last time I checked, companies proven by leaked documents to really spy and pass information to the government was Microsoft, Instagram, Facebook and Google.

They're not. "Malicious" in this case means gathering user data and MS wants that data. They're just going to point the information flow to their servers.

My take on this is that a Chinese company can't take a National Security Letter, and Microsoft already has a Room 641A.

TikTok is "malicious" only because a Chinese company partially owns it. That's literally it and it's just like any other social media company otherwise.

What malicious components?

And how do you define malicious? Every social media contains malicious components, do you mean something different? I don't think TikTok is anymore malicious then Instagram.

Malicious as in doing things outside the scope of what Microsoft wants done.

Anyone else think Facebook launching this might stop Microsoft from buying TikTok now? Depending upon how much money they need, I think Microsoft not having any past social media presence might scare them taking on Facebook as a competitor.

> New users will find Instagram confusing and why signup and download an app for 3 different things when you only want one of them?

At a certain scale, a person doesn't make this decision... their friends make it for them.

You're comparing apples to oranges here. WeChat is a "superapp" platform for doing distinct things: chat, payments, ticket bookings, etc. Instagram's features, on the other hand, are all purely social networking.

Nah, I think the comparison was apt. IG's features are not purely social networking. The 'TV' portion is an attempt to create a youtube/video alternative. The video chat can replace phone/video messaging. The 'shop' feature is an e-commerce gateway.

I wouldn't say the UX challenges get any easier as you grow from social networking "super app" to generalized "super app." If anything, it would become more challenging, and the top comment would make more sense as to how it appears intuitive.

On the topic of social, though, WeChat has private messaging and broadcasting, location sharing, a social feed of friends' updates, and public accounts that can push feeds to subscribers [1]. Mediums include text, voice, photo, video, and location, all shared through a variety of types of feeds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

We used to call "super apps" portals. Mistaken valuations of their stickiness generally led to the first cratering of internet company values.

AOL and Yahoo eventually died because there were individual sites that did the individual parts that they had better, and then they became less than the sum of their parts. Similar to how massive industrial conglomerates in America fell apart, or department stores when specialized fashion retailers became a thing.

East Asia is just a lot more friendly to conglomerate structures in general. Korea has Naver and there's Yahoo Japan.

TikTok however is the opposite of WeChat where the interface is dead simple and intuitive.

What is Reels immitating here?

The Chinese version of TikTok douyin is also a hybrid of games, shopping, live streams a messenger and instant apps. The ui is far less important than having a captive user base

Douyin is a mix of lots of things but you barely realize that. It has one main surface - the feed. IG on the other hand, feels like several unrelated things stitched together

It is not part of the core UX.

TikTok or Doubin, just swipe up/down would be enough for 90% of your input

Doesn't douyin also have a very different demographic than TikTok though? I think their audience is much older in China.

Facebook is in the slow process of finally dying. Their ownership of Instagram is sustaining them for the time being, but they are now desperate to steal some market share away from Reddit, TikTok, and WeChat. Facebook is far more desperate than they're letting on publicly. They have already been on the decline for multiple years; the competition is now finally speeding that process up dramatically.

When was the last time you truly cared about anything Facebook-related? A few Twitch streamers switching to their platform? The only reason anyone is streaming on Facebook right now is because they were offered multi-million contracts, or because Facebook is currently paying out "autoplay while scrolling through feeds" as view counts (ie. advertising payouts based on PPV instead of PPC/PPA); when that stops, those streamers will lose everything. Facebook has inflated its viewership numbers by cheating via a "loss leader" tactic, but with nothing else recuperating the losses, which only leads to financial collapse.

tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.

Are you referring to Facebook as a company or Facebook - the product? I do think the Facebook product itself is dying. But their other ventures like IG, WhatsApp etc are doing very well.

>tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.

Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.

Wechat is in no way a competitor to Messenger or WhatsApp.

To me WeChat has more in common with the old AOL or Yahoo web portals in a 2020 wrapping.

I can’t use snap chat but apparently it’s very popular!

I'm not sure if I'm just turning into an old man prematurely or what, but "social" sites and apps usually turn too confusing for me to use around their second or third iteration.

Facebook c. 2010 was too confusing for me, so I bounced off (from descriptions of what it was like a couple years before that, I think I'd have enjoyed it then).

Twitter's been too confusing for me to understand for years, I can barely follow what's going on when reading it, let alone use it (I've tried within the last couple years, and never got the hang of it). Used to be easy for me to read & use but the interface and interaction options don't make sense to me anymore.

I didn't even figure out that Instagram was supposed to primarily be a social site/service, despite repeatedly being exposed to it, until some time after the Facebook acquisition.

The "genius" of Instagram is that it's social media as advertising where people are mostly advertising photos of themselves.

This of course makes it very easy to actually insert advertising in as well, because the ads look less conspicuous given the identical layout to a normal photo post (as opposed to say, Facebook, where an ad looks very different from a text status)

Yep I agree. I find FB the easiest of them all but I had to log off b/c of the politics. I'd rather be ignorant.

You're are not any more ignorant for avoiding political content on Facebook, it is a bunch of strawman echo chamber trash.

I think out of all of them, Twitter is the most complicated. Their comment threads itself are super complex. Plus the character limit forcing people to post in multiple threads makes it worse.

UI wise, Snapchat is the worst.