WeChat's Past and Future: 35 Things Zhang Xiaolong Said in a Four-Hour Speech

How WeChat became WeChat, and what WeChat — now that it has mini programs and Moment Video — wants to become next

After hosting the opening speech three years running, Zhang Xiaolong did not appear in the main hall on the first morning of this year's WeChat Open Class. The heads of several of WeChat's core businesses took turns hosting the January 9 opening-day talks, but the several thousand people in the seats mostly wanted to know where Zhang Xiaolong had gone.

At 7:30 that evening the main hall filled up again — with reporters and WeChat's partners, but more with people who had paid 1,199 yuan out of their own pockets for a ticket. In past years, WeChat Night was a minor side event of Open Class; this year, because Zhang Xiaolong turned up at the last minute, the line to get in snaked back more than a hundred meters. "It's like coming to a concert," someone in the line said.

The hall played Leonard Cohen's In My Secret Life on a loop, and Zhang Xiaolong finally walked out in a white hoodie. Every spotlight turned on him and the crowd cheered. That one moment drew more applause than every other speaker at Open Class had drawn all day, combined.

Zhang Xiaolong rarely gives interviews and speaks in public even more rarely, because he "doesn't like attending events." His reputation as "the father of WeChat," together with a personality of few words, means every speech he gives fills the room. This time he spoke for four straight hours, and thousands of people were still standing below when he finished.

For most of that time he gripped a slide clicker in both hands, but there was not a single slide. His frequent silences suggested the teleprompter in front of him held no script — an outline at most.

The talk wandered. Zhang Xiaolong seemed to say whatever came to mind, and when he lost the thread he simply stood there without speaking. The thousands below sat quietly and waited for him to find it again. But not once in the whole talk did he use an abstract term or concept: no packaging like "business operating system," and none of the technologies that come and go — "AR," "blockchain," "facial recognition." That is unusual.

He started with WeChat's design principles and its history, then worked through nearly every product in exhaustive detail: mini programs, mini games, Moments, official accounts, Top Stories, Moment Video.

WeChat, with its billion users, is too important to ignore. Together with the slowly declining QQ, the two apps take up close to 30% of all the screen time of China's smartphone users.

At a moment when everything is slowing down and nobody knows where the next growth will come from, whatever the man who built WeChat says seems to matter.

The speech ended late at night. Within an hour, Moments was full of quotes from it.

Why WeChat succeeded

WeChat was built for himself

In 2010, the arrival of the American social app Kik Messenger made Zhang Xiaolong realize there was an opening. The opening was not in the Kik product itself. It was that when he first started using a smartphone, he found that neither text messages nor most PC-based products gave him a good way to communicate, so he "wanted to build a communication tool for myself, or for a small number of people."

The same night the idea came to him, he emailed Pony Ma proposing a new social app, and got a yes. He then pulled nine other people out of the team then building the QQ Mail mobile client, and together they spent two months making the first version of WeChat.

A few years later, Kik's founder was telling the world his company would be "the Western WeChat."

WeChat has never run holiday campaigns or splash-screen ads, because those things are bad

Zhang Xiaolong explained all of it as a pursuit of "good products." He cited the ten principles of Dieter Rams — the designer admired by his own idols, Steve Jobs and Jony Ive — to define what makes a product good:

• A good product is inventive; it has to be something new;
• A good product is useful;
• A good product is beautiful;
• A good product is easy to use;
• A good product is understated, not showy;
• A good product is honest;
• A good product lasts; it does not go out of date;
• A good product lets no detail slide;
• It is environmentally friendly and wastes no resources;
• As little design as possible — or, less is more.

"We won't do a lot of things that damage the beauty of the design." The reasoning is simple, and like all simple reasoning it is hard to live by. Beyond Zhang Xiaolong's own stubbornness, having cash-rich Tencent behind him is another important reason he can.

WeChat did no promotion at all when it launched

Zhang Xiaolong believes that if a new product cannot produce a natural growth curve, it should not be promoted. For the first five months the WeChat team watched to see whether the product could pull users in and whether users would pass it around on their own. "If users don't want to, then it doesn't matter how we promote it — it's meaningless."

From WeChat 2.0 on, Zhang Xiaolong saw the user count start to climb slowly. "That's when we knew we could push it."

WeChat's slogan, "WeChat is a way of life," is deliberately ungrammatical

Proper Chinese calls for the classifier that means "a kind of," which would give "WeChat is a kind of way of life." But that is an ordinary sentence: it does no work as a slogan and nobody remembers it. Using the plain classifier instead, which is grammatically wrong, is WeChat's own way of putting it.

At first WeChat did not let users import their phone contacts, partly out of regard for the carriers

In 2010, Chinese users sent 750.72 billion text messages. Zhang Xiaolong believed WeChat's business would collide directly with the carriers' SMS business, so "we didn't dare take users' phone contacts."

Importing phone contacts was the most direct way to acquire users, he recalled, but in the end they leaned on the QQ contact list instead. And because they "didn't want to become a second QQ," they did not import in bulk; they made users pick friends from the list by hand.

Not letting users import a batch of friends at the start, and not rushing to promote the product before it had proved itself, are the two things Zhang Xiaolong later felt luckiest about.

WeChat freed social relationships from spam texts and spam email, because everything from official accounts to contacts has to be subscribed to by hand

"If we went back to the SMS era, every phone would hold more junk messages than real ones. What's frightening isn't that there's more junk — it's that people would come to think of it as normal," Zhang Xiaolong said.

Even now, offline or online, getting a service almost always costs you your phone number. Every time you type it in, you take on the risk of endless spam-text harassment later. WeChat's subscription model for official accounts shrinks that risk.

"The subscription model keeps users from being harassed or scammed, and it keeps the service under control — messages only go to the people who want them." Zhang Xiaolong recalled that when the idea first came to him, he excitedly messaged Pony Ma about what a powerful mechanism it was. Ma did not get it at first and asked back, "Why wouldn't there be spam?" Zhang Xiaolong replied that users had subscribed on their own initiative, so of course it wasn't spam.

WeChat does not want to increase the time users spend on it

"Over the past two years the industry's goal has become that every app should grab as much of users' time as it can. That goes against my common sense," Zhang Xiaolong said. That each user has only so many hours a day is the lesser point. The main point is that the mission of technology should be to make people more efficient.

"The mission of internet people shouldn't be to get everyone to spend all their time staring at a phone, apart from eating and going to the bathroom."

WeChat passed 1 billion users last August

Less than half an hour before Zhang Xiaolong walked on stage, Alipay also announced that it had passed 1 billion users — timed so closely that it is hard to call it accidental. Alipay's billion, though, are "served jointly by Alipay and its global partners."

WeChat's intake of traffic will hit a ceiling one day too. China has only 1.4 billion people, and that day is already close.

"Fleeing Moments" is fake, but the pressure Moments creates is real

750 million people open Moments every day.

Zhang Xiaolong disclosed a number that had never been public: since launch, the number of people who tap into Moments each day has kept growing, with no sign of leveling off. Today 750 million people open Moments every day, each of them more than a dozen times on average, for a total of 10 billion visits a day.

What prompted him to give out these numbers was the ongoing talk about "fleeing Moments." Data WeChat released showed the average user's contact list had grown 110% compared with three years earlier. Every new contact means more content in Moments. A central premise of the "fleeing Moments" theory is that a Moments feed overloaded with content has become a social burden.

But in Zhang Xiaolong's words, the data proves this so-called "fleeing Moments" is only "an illusion inside the internet industry." That is not what is actually happening.

"Moments may be the most efficient social tool in China. For the next few years people still won't be able to do without it, because nothing more efficient has appeared," Zhang Xiaolong said.

Content in Moments keeps growing, but the time users spend scrolling it hasn't.

As users pile up contacts, the content in Moments should in theory keep growing too. Yet the time each person spends there per day has barely moved: about 30 minutes. "When you have few friends, you read more carefully, more slowly. Once you have more friends, you scroll faster," Zhang Xiaolong said.

Communication is, at bottom, the process of pressing your persona onto the other person. Posting to Moments is building a persona too

Zhang Xiaolong has his own account of where socializing came from: once humans became a group-living animal, primitive socializing appeared. A person's biggest demand inside a community is not to be excluded, so people have to talk to each other. Talk about what? Essentially, they brag, to show the community they are worth something. And to make others take what they say seriously, it needs a touch of exaggeration.

"People feel they have to post wildly exaggerated travel photos to Moments. That's just this old habit carrying on. Nothing more than that. They worry that if they don't post they'll be excluded, so they pick out something exaggerated to put in Moments." Every post you make, then, has been carefully picked and designed, and it always flatters the persona you want.

"Since ancient times you've been afraid of being cast out of the community, so you brag, you say exaggerated things to show you matter. Now you see a sunset, you shoot it in the most exaggerated way and post it to Moments, so people think the view you saw was extraordinary. Or you Photoshop yourself into something especially beautiful, to promote your beautiful persona," Zhang Xiaolong said.

The camera icon in the top-right corner of Moments posts a photo rather than text by default because Zhang Xiaolong thinks most people find writing hard.

"I think for most people writing a paragraph is genuinely hard — especially when that paragraph also has to present your persona well. Posting a photo is far easier." Zhang Xiaolong said he has felt this for many years, often typing something out and then not posting it, because the moment he thought about the persona he wanted to project he backed off. "Of course, most people aren't like that. The more you lack something, the more you want to show it."

Why can you only see mutual friends in Moments?

So that everyone you see, and every discussion you join, sits in a state where "everyone knows everyone else, pair by pair." It is not chasing one-on-one conversation; it is chasing conversation among three or more people. It is after a social experience in which "three or more people is richer than a private chat."

The more friends you have, the more pressure you feel about posting to Moments

"When Moments first came out I used to post more than ten photos a day. Now I might post once every few months. A lot of people feel this same pressure about posting that I do," Zhang Xiaolong said.

WeChat added the "visible for three days" setting in Moments to relieve that pressure

More than 100 million people have turned it on.

Given the chance, Zhang Xiaolong would split Moments and the photo album into two separate products

"If time could run backward and I could build Moments again, I'd probably just make the photo album a private space. Moments and your personal album would be completely separate, two different concepts. Not like now, where the same photo can be dug up by other people in your album and also shown as a post in Moments. When we built it, we carelessly mixed the two together," Zhang Xiaolong said.

To push people through that pressure and get them to share their lives bravely, WeChat launched Moment Video.

Moment Video was designed as "the opposite of Moments": true, not pretty

Moment Video was renamed because too many people got the name wrong

Not long after it launched, Moment Video was renamed Video Status. Zhang Xiaolong said the reason was that too many people were calling it "Instant Video" instead — the two names sound almost the same in Chinese — and he found that unacceptable.

A Video Status clip vanishes after 24 hours, also so you won't feel pressure

In the top-right corner of WeChat's Me tab there is a camera icon; tap it and you can record a video. The video is kept for 24 hours and then disappears on its own. Once you record one, a small blue bubble appears at the top right of your avatar on your friends' screens. To watch it, a friend taps your avatar and pulls down.

Zhang Xiaolong explained why Video Status disappears by itself. "WeChat isn't going to keep a video record, and we're not going to build a video album that sits there for other people to look at. Because if we did, you'd only put your three best-looking videos there. That's decorating your persona, not documenting anything."

The design and its logic originated with Snapchat, of course, and plenty of social apps have already copied it.

Why is the Done button on Video Status labeled "That's It"?

"'That's It' means: this video may not look good, but that's it, I'm posting it. That's genuinely true to life. To let you post bravely, we deliberately made it so other people can't see your video right away — they have to tap your avatar and pull down — to reduce the pressure of posting a 'that's it' kind of video."

But once you record a Video Status clip, everyone who is both your friend and a member of a group chat with you sees a blue bubble in the top right of that group. Tap it and they can watch your video.

This reporter went through several of his group chats and found very few blue bubbles, which suggests not many people use the feature. "We know users really don't have this habit yet. But video communication will replace photo communication eventually, because a video carries far more information than a photo," Zhang Xiaolong said, adding that promoting it is not easy, but WeChat is patient.

"I think a good product shouldn't need this much explaining. The fact that I've explained so much means we haven't done well enough." With that, Zhang Xiaolong ended his account of the feature.

Fewer people open links in Moments — they need a new feed

Apart from Video Status, the "Good Read" function inside Top Stories has been the most discussed piece of WeChat lately.

In version 7.0, WeChat turned the "Like" button on official-account articles into "Good Read." Any article you tap "Good Read" on is synced into the "Good Read" category inside Top Stories, where your friends can see it — which amounts to one more feed.

Open Top Stories and you see two categories, "Good Read" and "Featured." The first is social recommendation, the second is machine recommendation.

"We tried machine recommendation for a long time and it didn't work very well," Zhang Xiaolong said. "I don't want machine recommendation to just show users whatever they want to see. Like a user who believes in health supplements, and WeChat keeps pushing them supplement articles. Laziness is a trait everyone shares. Nobody wants to go out and learn something new and rack their brain over it."

On machine-recommended articles, no company in the industry is more famous than Toutiao. The criticism of its recommendation system has never let up, and its growth has never stalled either.

As Zhang Xiaolong sees it, the social system humans evolved is really "a complex system with error correction built in." "If you go astray, someone will pull you back."

"I've always believed that getting information through social recommendation is the most human way to do it. In real life, most of our information comes from the people around us." After "Good Read" launched, he said, its numbers grew faster than the earlier machine recommendations in Top Stories had — a clear sign that users were more interested in it.

The read rate for articles shared in Moments really is falling

Zhang Xiaolong explained that as a person accumulates friends and the content in their Moments grows, they tend to skip the articles and look instead at photos from their friends' actual lives. They are not really willing to break off from Moments, spend a few minutes reading an article, and then come back.

"Users need a fixed, relatively long stretch of time before they'll settle down and complete an act of reading. At that point a separate entry point with a stronger reading atmosphere becomes more necessary for them." That, Zhang Xiaolong said, is what produced Top Stories.

"Good Read" is kept apart from Moments

If ten of your friends share the same article to Moments, you see ten posts. That is unnecessary. "Good Read" saves the space. The system is still fairly crude, and it will be improved.

Zhang Xiaolong isn't worried that "Good Read" will lead people to block friends whose tastes differ from their own.

For two reasons. First, "you're reluctant to block people or sort them into groups."

Second, even if you don't want to see what someone likes, you still pay attention to what they are looking at. So most people keep the connection rather than cut it. "Especially for a product like WeChat, where the web of relationships keeps getting bigger and more complicated, this becomes a very good window onto every layer of society — what they're watching, what they're thinking," Zhang Xiaolong said.

Why did Zhang Xiaolong say, "I don't know what a feed is"?

The line came at last year's Open Class. This year he explained that saying it did not mean he failed to understand what people meant; he just doesn't like sticking labels on things. "We don't think about what a feed is — the Newsfeed as Facebook defines it — we think about a reasonable way to present information."

In fact WeChat has been adding more feeds for official-account articles. From the redesign of the subscription-account inbox to the changes in Top Stories, feeds will create more ad slots for WeChat. But Zhang Xiaolong did not go further into feeds, and he did not mention the advertising a new feed might bring.

The official-accounts app did not achieve what it set out to do.

WeChat released a standalone app for official accounts. It carried high hopes before launch; afterward people found it was only a tool for publishing articles to an account.

Zhang Xiaolong said the app was released to get more people writing. "It's just that we didn't manage it — the app didn't bring more people in. But that's still the direction we're going."

Mini programs will keep going, and he says he isn't in a hurry

The mission of mini programs is to let creators show their value and be rewarded for it, not to distribute traffic

If the point were only to use mini programs as a vehicle for a traffic business, Zhang Xiaolong says he is not optimistic about that at all. "Things that are good for you and not for anyone else usually don't last."

"Just because WeChat has traffic doesn't mean we have to hand it out."

He admitted WeChat has favored companies Tencent invested in

A Quest Mobile report showed that in 2018, companies in the Tencent family made up 28% of the top 100 mini programs. Last summer Pinduoduo, the e-commerce company Tencent holds a stake in, used mini programs to run aggressive share-baiting campaigns inside WeChat — to this day plenty of people recoil at the words "help me knock the price down" — and yet the WeChat team did not kill its links the way it usually would.

Zhang Xiaolong never named Pinduoduo in his speech; he only promised obliquely that this would not happen again. "Even a company Tencent invested in should follow the platform's rules like everyone else," he said. "I know that in the past everyone felt the platform seemed to tilt toward the companies it had invested in. All I can say is that maybe we haven't done well enough. I trust our team will put more people and resources into this from now on, so we can treat every company alike, including the ones we've invested in."

Right now, typing a product name into WeChat's search still turns up only goods from JD.com, the e-commerce company Tencent invested in. E-commerce mini programs get no chance to appear on the search page at all. If WeChat keeps Zhang Xiaolong's promise and opens up search across mini-program content, e-commerce mini programs may finally get a chance to compete with Tencent's own e-commerce.

Mini programs have three important things to do in 2019.

The first is stronger search. Offline, people enter by scanning a code; online, through social sharing and search. "Search should be one of the main traffic sources for mini programs." Zhang Xiaolong believes mini-program content should be findable through a single search engine — that is what separates it from apps, which are "islands of information."

On the first day of Open Class, Du Jiahui, assistant general manager of the basic-services department of WeChat's Open Platform, also said WeChat would open up content search for mini programs. In the past, searching "dress" turned up only mini programs with "dress" in the account name. In the future, WeChat will find users the mini programs that actually sell dresses or have published something about dresses.

The second is a proper review system, so users can rate things. Zhang Xiaolong gave an example: when you want to buy regional specialties inside WeChat, a mini program a friend has rated well will feel more trustworthy, and you will be readier to order.

For e-commerce mini programs, WeChat has always lacked anyone to act as official guarantor. At the moment the guarantees are all provided by third-party service firms such as Youzan. Chen Hao, the product lead for WeChat mini programs, told QDaily that WeChat's forthcoming "user satisfaction system" will weed out poor mini programs to a degree and protect the overall quality of service. But WeChat has no plan to become the official guarantor for e-commerce mini programs itself, and it welcomes more firms like Youzan to take that role on.

The third is solving the problem of getting users back to a mini program. Zhang Xiaolong said it is out of the question to let mini programs push notifications, because every company has a motive to harass users and you cannot count on them to restrain themselves. So WeChat designed a form of alert unique to mini programs: vibration.

The vibration alert in WeChat 7.0 was built for mini programs too.

Many people assumed it was a "special alert" for close friends, Zhang Xiaolong said, but that is not what it is for. He wants it to support the offline service scenarios of mini programs. "The scenario I want is: I'm standing in a line somewhere, I don't need to follow any official account, I don't need to open any mini program — I just scan a QR code and get a vibrating alert about where the queue has got to," he said. "This is the lightest possible action. You scan a code purely to get one alert."

Zhang Xiaolong said the feature works online too — you could authorize a news mini program to buzz you when something big happens. But it was clearly built mainly for offline. Zhang Xiaolong is still trying to build the offline mini-program ecosystem into what he imagined back in 2016, even though offline is no longer where mini programs matter most.

A few days earlier, Alipay's mini-program team told QDaily that the main scenario they have mapped out for mini programs is also offline. The two will certainly fight over it. Online traffic keeps getting more expensive and conversion rates are not very satisfying. Running offline is the shared fate of both super-giants.

Why does WeChat insist on doing mini programs?

Because Zhang Xiaolong thinks it is inevitable. Apps still have to be downloaded and installed, and the web experience is too poor.

"We have enough patience to grow it slowly. Having been through it with official accounts, we don't want a crowd of opportunists treating it as a traffic windfall to abuse right out of the gate," Zhang Xiaolong said.

Mini programs are the biggest challenge of Zhang Xiaolong's career

"I think mini programs are the biggest challenge for us, or for me personally in my career. Because we had never before announced something before we'd built it. We did it that way to put pressure on myself and on the team: this is something we have no choice about, and we have to pull it off," Zhang Xiaolong said.

WeCom will verify employees and turn their WeChat accounts into service windows for their companies

WeCom will work to make every employee of a company a window onto that company's services.

"In real life we'd rather have a person help us with something than open an app or a mini program, because a person is more flexible and the service is more attentive." Zhang Xiaolong described a scenario:

If an employee at a car dealership adds you on WeCom, you can treat that person as your own mini program. Open the chat with them and you see the dealership's service menu beneath the conversation, and you can use the services right there. It is a bit like the menu under an official account, except that you can also talk to the person directly and get a timely reply.

During Chinese New Year, WeCom users can apply for custom red-envelope covers.

"Sending a red envelope is increasingly becoming a naked cash transaction — you're just sending money, stripped of the emotional side," Zhang Xiaolong said. These days it seems the bigger the sum inside, the more thoughtful the envelope looks, and that is wrong. WeChat wants to keep the feeling behind the act of giving one. In the future, WeChat will also let users add custom stickers to red envelopes.

WeChat's future, same as its past

What does WeChat do next?

WeChat is about to face the new challenges of its next eight years. The new challenge will not come from competitors; it will come from users. We have to face the new demands users generate.

"Whatever happens, we'll always be like the WeChat of the past: build the best tools, and let the people who create value show that value. However far we go, I don't think we'll go too far off course."

"Thank you all for finishing this piece of performance art with me. Thank you," Zhang Xiaolong said at the end.

Cover image: Tencent