Over the last few days, my WeChat has been flooded with people reminiscing about the first post they ever published on the app, which marked its 10-year anniversary this week.
The Moments feature is similar to a social network that lives within the app. Unlike other social networks, which die down over time or have fallen from grace among their original users, Moments has remained relevant.
According to an annual speech delivered by Allen Zhang, the creator of WeChat, there were over one billion users on Moments every day. Despite not being an independent app, Moments is one of China's largest social networks. People use it to record daily musings, promote business, find out what their old colleagues are up to, watch a live concert, and in times of emergency, deliver useful information to those in need.
It's hard to overstate the role this seemingly simple feature plays in WeChat's success, let alone the product philosophy and business logic behind it.
Each of the major features of the app works like a full-on app, but with stripped-down functions.
The messenger went live in 2011. Like Facebook's News Feed, it features a scrolling chain of text, photos, articles and videos shared by a user's contacts.
It is prominently featured on an app in a country with over one billion people. As of last September, there were more than 1.2 billion monthly users of WeChat who use it to chat, read news, watch funny videos, order food, book hospital visits, pay utility bills, and so on.
In recent years, WeChat has built a thriving third-party lite-app ecosystem that is akin to an operating system that runs within the app, potentially challenging mobile app stores and fostering a walled garden. As China targets monopolies in the tech industry, the garden is under increasing pressure to crack.
The other critical factor is that moments has remained in pristine form. Allen Zhang is often praised for keeping Moments posts in chronological order, free from the disruption of algorithms that try to predict which friend a user wants to see.
A user can find one unintrusive ad if they scroll down 10 posts. Thanks to other money-making businesses within WeChat, such as its mobile payments solution, there is less pressure on the networking feature to monetize people's attention.
There are challenges in moments. It is also a curse. The app is used for work on top of social needs and so many users have thousands of contacts on it. Many users don't want to share their stories with a stranger at a networking event.
In order to meet the demand for more privacy, in the year 2017, WeChat began allowing users to hide their Moments feeds or make them visible for a certain period of time. The move didn't go as planned. 200 million users made their feeds visible for three days, according to a speech by Zhang.
As long as WeChat keeps inventing and listening to users, Moments will keep attracting followers.
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