Lately, every time I open WeChat, I get the same feeling: there are fewer and fewer messages that actually matter, and more and more junk I have to wade through.
Maybe it is the same for a lot of people. Because of work, I have added all kinds of people on WeChat over the years. Only a small portion of them are people I genuinely need to communicate with for projects, collaboration, or day-to-day work. Another small portion are contacts I barely ever talk to, but still cannot delete, because if the need comes up one day, not being able to find them would be inconvenient.
The thing is, many of these contacts share one trait: they are essentially doing sales. So they keep sending messages with admirable persistence. I may not have replied to them for six months, a year, or even longer, but that does not stop them from checking in every now and then, sending updates, pitches, greetings, or whatever else. And it is never just one person doing this. Sometimes I even think they would probably do quite well in content creation, because one of the biggest obstacles in that field is simply not being persistent enough.
Then there are the people added for other practical reasons, such as banking or similar services. Group chats are another part of it. The groups I almost never need to read have long been tucked away into folded chats. For all of these people and groups, I have turned on “Do Not Disturb.”
But once these contacts accumulate, the number is still not small. Muting them means I do not get notifications, but it does not mean they disappear. The moment I open WeChat, they still show up on the first screen. So aside from conversations with friends and the few work contacts I actually talk to frequently, a large part of my WeChat is now occupied by this kind of low-value noise.
The situation became even harder to contain after WeCom and personal WeChat became more closely connected. Once that bridge was built, this style of marketing and communication seemed to spread without much restraint.
Over time, this has created a kind of resistance in me. I do not really like using WeChat to talk to people anymore. Or more precisely, I no longer want to use it for chatting with people I am actually close to. Gradually, WeChat has become more like a work tool to me, something I open only when I need to handle something.
I have also barely posted on Moments in the past few years, and this is one of the reasons. When you post something there, of course you hope someone will see it. But more than that, you hope the people seeing it are people you actually know. Once your Moments feed is filled with unfamiliar faces, loose contacts, and people who have crossed into a part of your life where they do not really belong, the desire to share naturally fades.
So this national-level app that once built its identity around close social connections has long since lost control of the boundaries of everyday life.