Easy to say, but hard to do when the people who you genuinely value your relationship with don't use anything else. It's also not intended for "chitchatting about nothing of lasting consequence". It's specifically intended to basically be your entire life. In China you can pay all your bills, manage your bank account, buy plane, train tickets, hotel reservations, donate to charities, rent bikes, shop online, order food, and pretty much everything else you would possibly need to do. In the USA, for its active users it basically is all of social life. Potlucks, random dinner parties, hiking trips, wedding invitations, reading groups, badminton court reservations, even ordering gig economy homemade food, it ALL happens on WeChat, right here in Palo Alto, if you are part of the community that uses it.

I do agree though -- avoid using WeChat at all costs for anything secret. I have multiple WeChat accounts and sent a message from one to the other containing a link to one of my own servers. From the server logs, nobody accessed the link. Sent it again with some "interesting" keywords, and lo and behold, the link was accessed by an IP in China.

And "interesting" keywords were nothing of political significance. More business-wise interesting. I have belief that Tencent is spying on certain conversations beyond what government censorship requires them to do.

> Easy to say, but hard to do when the people who you genuinely value your relationship with don't use anything else.

Honestly most of my friends talk and organize on Facebook. I deleted mine. Things haven't really changed much. I just get texts when something is happening. Your friends are still your friends without whatever technology facilitates your social sphere.

My experience, and many others that I know, is that I don't seem to be majorly affected by a lack of a social media account. So I always get confused when people say that WeChat/Facebook/whatever IS their social life. If you don't like it, just dump it. Your friends will still be your friends. If they don't then I'm not sure you can consider them friends. I mean it is kinda ridiculous notion when you consider how surface level and superficial it is to kill a relationship because you don't use a specific communication medium.

You aren't going to lose your relationships. You aren't going to miss out on events. Your friends will still be your friends.

> Your friends will still be your friends.

While this is true, you still do need to be able to contact them in today's isolated world where we don't run into our friends on a daily basis in public venues. For a vast amount of my friends, WeChat is effectively the only means of communication to organize an in-person meetup. For a certain group of people, it has replaced phones, e-mail, Facebook, and everything else.

Last time I was in the emergency room and needed a friend to bring over something to me? I sent them a message on WeChat from my hospital bed. I didn't have any other means to reach this particular trusted friend. They don't use Facebook, Signal, Telegram, or anything else, they don't check their e-mail frequently, and I don't have their phone number because the only thing we have ever used to make calls is WeChat voice call.

I have other groups of friends who organize real life events (hiking, dinner, etc.) on WeChat. Without WeChat I'd probably be left out of those. Yes, friends will still be friends, but they won't go out of their way to ping you by e-mail for a random hike that everyone else they know would just respond on WeChat for.

I just don't hate WeChat enough to want to completely ban it from my life. The friction of finding alternate communication methods with all the people I'm already friends with is too much to bother; I just grudgingly use WeChat.

Separately, I'm in China from time to time, have both lots of friends and business contacts there, so it's basically 100% a necessity for keeping in touch.

So get their phone number. It sounds like problem solved.

I'm not saying you have to dump WeChat/Facebook/whatever. But I think saying that they are your only way to communicate with people is a bit ridiculous. We all have phones in our pockets. Your friends will use multiple systems. I guarantee that specifically your Chinese friends will, because they already have to operate in two worlds (unless they completely isolate themselves in America).

> have other groups of friends who organize real life events (hiking, dinner, etc.) on WeChat. Without WeChat I'd probably be left out of those.

I promise you that you won't miss out. Your friends are still your friends. They are your friends because you enjoy each other's company, not because you use WeChat. WeChat is a tool, it isn't the relationship. I don't know you, but I'm willing to bet that those friends enjoy your company enough to send you a text message instead of a WeChat message when they want you to be part of an activity. Though I'll admit that it might be bumpy in the start because people forget that you don't use a specific communication platform.

I think this is a case of you don't know what you're missing. That's not a bad thing, but it doesn't mean you're not missing anything.

100% correct.

I just happen to be on both FB and WeChat, because I have friends on both sides of the picture (English-/Chinese-speaking). I tend to have more social interaction with contacts on WeChat but many of them are conversely oblivious to the Facebook world. While they don't know about all your awesome house parties whose invitations appear only on Facebook, there are a whole slew of other awesome house parties happening on WeChat in the Chinese-speaking world of the Bay Area. Yesterday was the Duanwu festival, and my WeChat was flooded with people asking for who/where to buy dumplings from, others organizing parties to make them, yet others organizing camping trips, and you get the idea.

I'm speechless, I had heard there was not much interactions between communities in the US but this is a whole new level.

I'd argue that this is a reason for my original comment. Having friends that break out of the social media world forces you to contact them outside those spheres. Which also means that you're now operating in multiple spheres. It reduces the isolation.

Also, I wouldn't say I'm missing out. I'm in a PhD program with a pretty active department. It is pretty easy to find out what is happening. The only events I missed were when I first started, and I chalk that up to more people not knowing who I was.

Another possible explanation would be a system to combat viral content before it spreads too far (i.e. after a link has been shared a few times). You'd probably need to do a few more experiments to determine what triggers it with certainty. That said, I'm interested what those "interesting" keywords were, exactly.

I also hate using it but it is a requirement to live here. Once I had a one hour software update problem and the feeling of dread was overwhelming.

Sorry, but isn't every messengers try to load links to make fancy previews?

Yes, but not selectively based on keywords, and usually not with an MSIE user agent several hours after the message.