To my understanding, most people, even in tech, disregard and look down on Chinese software. For some reason they also have a picture of 10 CCP employees sitting on each dev team, reviewing code before it gets released on GitHub.
There was a conversation with some western dev how they kept saying Chinese devs don’t work with scale like Meta/Google do, so they don’t have experience in it either. That was also an interesting thread to read, because without thinking about anything else, WeChat itself has more than 1B users. I’m not sure if it’s pure ignorance, or just people want to feel better about themselves.
I agree that a good chunk of Chinese apps’ UX is trash though.
It is trash because you're thinking with the mind of a Westerner. These apps are created and optimized for Chinese audiences, and they interact in a different way.
Taobao's shop by image is pretty game changing. Whether or not they were the first to do it, they seem to be the most successful iteration of it.
I feel like Chinese UX flows tend to be more clunky than Western ones but I have a certain liking for high information density apps, and find uncluttered screens sometimes a bit annoying and overly patronising.
I thought bullet chat on Bilibili was a very fun concept that probably doesn't translate quite as well to western media but YouTube has come up with a nifty half way by flashing comments with timestamps under the video
Yeah, totally fair. I guess it’s a very subjective opinion, given I grew up in the west, and was introduced to the iPhone era gradually. Like i went through Internet of 90s, desktop apps, old laptops, PCs and etc., and then eventually landing on daily iPhone usage. I can see how it might be a bit different if you went from most using nothing to Android/iPhone society.
That being said, they still use apps like Chrome, Safari, all the other common apps like ours. So they have both UXs available for them, I guess.
I have not said that Deepseek models are bad. Quite the opposite. I'm impressed by them. I have just questiened that they are just some chinese startup.
No, they absolutely export malware still. All of DJI's apps need to be sideloaded on android because the obfuscated data collection they do is not allowed in Play Store apps[0]. TikTok uses an obfuscated VM to do user tracking[1]. Then there's the malware that the US government has to routinely delete from compromised computers [2][3]
Fair points. I guess, market doesn’t care about software being malware, given both of your examples are the leading products in the world within their own market segments.
Like there are 1.4B people in China, obviously there are bad actors. Writing off an average software as a malware ridden crap is kinda weird. And again, the main users of Chinese software are… mainland Chinese. Whether we like it or not, they have very impressive track record of making it run and scale to humongous users.
Anyways, I think I deviated far from my point and sound like a general China-shill.
tech people are notorious for being ignorant assholes about anything outside of their field of expertise. There are multiple very reputable research showing smart people to be more susceptible to propaganda and brainwashing.
The chinese are great at taking secrets. Chatbots are great places for people to put in secrets. Other people say "we're not going to use your data" - with a Chinese company you're pretty much guaranteed that China mothership is going to have access to it.
The open source model is just the bait to make you think they are sincere and generous - chat.deepseek.com is the real game. Almost no-one is going to run these models - they are just going to post their secrets (https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/4-2-of-workers-have-pasted-c...)
I am not going pretend to know the specifics, but don't the have mandatory Communist Party Committee? Comming from former eastern block country, I assume that they tend to have the final voice.
Are you talking about State-Owned Enterprise? Because yes, those have government tighter oversight and control, but I don't think this company is a SOE, at least from what I can tell.
From the rest, it works the same as in the US. If the government comes with a lawful order for you to do something, you'll do it or be held responsible for ignoring it.
> but I don't think this company is a SOE, at least from what I can tell.
There's no way to really tell. An authoritarian state like China can decide to control this company at any time, if it chooses to, through more direct or indirect means.
It doesn't need to be an authoritarian government. The US government can proclaim a company to be of "national interest" at any time and thus determine what it can export or not, as it has done repeatedly over the last few years.
> From the rest, it works the same as in the US. If the government comes with a lawful order for you to do something, you'll do it or be held responsible for ignoring it.
I’m always amazed when people ignore this. One day it’ll be stories about the CIA or whatever agency demanding data from a big tech company, with gag orders so they legally can’t even tell anyone. The next it’ll be a story about TikTok or DJI being bad because the Chinese government has influenced over them.
I think slight variations of that happens everywhere. Chinese companies have legally required CCP connections, which sounds ominous, but American companies of substantial scale will have ex-government employees, resources allocated for lobbying, and connections to senators. The difference is whether it's codified and imposed or implicitly required for survival.
(not that I support CCP, the requirement do sound ominous to me)
Exactly, in the US the big companies also enter the government complex through board memberships and collaboration with 3 letter agencies, just like in China.
CPC consists of higher management so yeah they have the final voice, just like every other companies.
The antidote for the CCP stuffs, is to alter your mind and accept that the CCP is no longer an ideological party, but a club of social elites. Whether that's a good thing is of course open to debate.
