Chinese Celebrity Blogger Han Han Talks Weibo, WeChat, and Why User Numbers Are Bullshit

It’s been quite a while since we talked about Han Han. The Chinese writer/blogger/race car driver has long been known as one of China’s most popular — and most daring — web celebs, but he has been comparatively quiet over the past year.

Late yesterday, he broke his silence on to share a short post on his blog in which he discusses his impressions of Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat. It’s a pretty interesting post, so we’ve translated select sections of it below for you to enjoy (links added by us, though).

On Weibo Followers:

Personally I think weibo follower numbers are just a way of fooling both yourself and others. I won’t comment on other people, but among my followers [he has more than 11 million], there are definitely plenty of zombies, and weird and inactive followers. In short, there’s definitely some water content [i.e., padding in the numbers].

[…] The way some internet companies count things, this short essay is already 300,000 words long. If Weibo lasts long enough, I look forward to the day when the first V user has more followers than there are Chinese internet users, or even more followers than the world’s total population.

On Weibo Culture:

Weibo definitely has its advantages; it makes it harder to hide news stories, makes speech more free, and in some very specific moments it’s the only thing you can use. But at the same time, it also makes us deceive ourselves; if you say some sentence or some line is taken from your post and retweeted thousands of times, you feel like everyone on the street is passing along your now-famous saying […] and even the cacti in the Taklamakan desert are talking about it.

[…] The state of things on weibo is actually a lot like Chinese society, one in a thousand people has a little bit of an identity and the ability to speak out, four out of a thousand people are just trying to promote themselves, and the other 990 are just grass people. When the wind blows dirt across grass, optimistic grass believes it is the wind and pessimistic grass believes it is the sand. As for the last five people, they’re out pretending to be the one-in-a-thousand [who can actually make an impact with their posts].

On WeChat Culture:

Now it’s much more likely that [I will] open WeChat instead of Weibo. My circle of friends is getting more and more active, and a lot of the people around me who would fit into the group of 990 people [mentioned above] can find more of a feeling that they actually exist in their friend circles on WeChat. At least on WeChat their posts will be seen by the people who should see them, and it won’t be like being ignored and overlooked with zero reposts and zero comments on Weibo.

On Tencent and Microblogging Also-Rans: