Chan: WeChat limits comment visibility to mutual friends to protect privacy
Connie Chan · a16z Podcast | Messaging As the Interface to Everything · Jan 2, 2019 · at 35:24
Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), explains product design decisions in WeChat's 'Moments' social feed that reduce public comparison pressure.
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“So on the moment section when you're posting photos or posting links, they made one decision for functionality that I think is really interesting, which is, if I comment on some photo or anything you posted, only our mutual friends will see my comment, and therefore that takes pressure off you as the person who posted the photo from amassing a lot of comments and likes. Because me, as a person commenting, I might just assume, oh, we don't have that many mutual friends, but you might have a lot of other friends who saw it. So there is much less of this concept of collecting a lot of likes or comments or comparing it to other people, because you can't see how many likes any post actually has.”
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