Half a month away from WeChat

On February 8, 2020, I was forced to abandon the WeChat account I had been using for ten years. In the past month, I have significantly reduced my use of WeChat and have recorded the changes in my mindset and some thoughts.

The Story#

On February 8, at noon, I was having a WeChat voice meeting with my colleagues when a dialog box popped up, informing me that my WeChat account had been forcefully logged out. (It was a 404 moment, haha)

I couldn't help but exclaim, "What the f***," and re-entered my password to log in, only to see the message: "Permanently banned, cannot be unblocked."

I forced myself to calm down and finished the meeting using QQ voice.

I had heard before that WeChat accounts could be permanently banned, but I never thought it would happen to me. In fact, not long ago, I had just organized my contacts, with over 1800 friends, and I had labeled each one, which took a whole 6 hours.

PS: WeChat's contact and labeling features are really difficult to use.

PPS: I never group my Moments posts, I only labeled people for easier searching.

I felt extremely devastated because at that time, I was not clear about the consequences of being banned, such as whether I could recover my account, export my data, or add friends back.

1 Hour Later#

I Googled a lot of information and came to the following conclusions after reading:

It is indeed impossible to unblock the account, the old account is useless, so get ready for a new one.
Because there was still balance in my wallet, I could temporarily log in and retrieve my friends.

At the same time, a friend helped me find a friend who works at WeChat, promising to help me take a look.

In addition, I had to continue working, so I had to use the WeChat account I had registered for my family's dog, I wonder if my colleagues would find it strange to see a dog's profile picture...

2 Hours Later#

I received feedback from my friend that my WeChat account was indeed gone, it was bombed by the first party.

I really can't be modest, how could my personal account of ten years be bombed? But the comrade from WXB said that everyone had already discussed and decided to bomb my account, so later I recited two lines of poetry:

We were born from the same root, why rush to burn each other?

The First Few Days#

After eating and drinking that night, I accepted this fact and registered a new WeChat account.

I informed a few friends of my new WeChat account through Instagram, iMessage, and other channels, and they helped spread the word, so many friends added me back.

This process was actually quite fun. Everyone would laugh and say to me, "Hahaha, did your WeChat get bombed? My condolences, hahaha." Some friends I hadn't contacted in a long time would even chat with me again. It's like when you fell and got injured as a child, everyone came to see you, and when they saw that there was nothing serious, they naturally started teasing you: "Hahaha, you idiot."

I also feel like an idiot. Facepalm.jpg

But the new WeChat account encountered some setbacks. First, because I added too many people in a short period of time, my friends received a prompt saying, "Be careful, the other person may be a scammer." So I started using secret codes with the newly added old friends, which was also quite fun.

Then I re-followed Huang Zheng's WeChat official account, and it was deemed as a black industry that brushes up on reading and got banned again. Sigh, does Huang Zheng's highly informative official account really need to buy followers?

One Week Later#

I exported a list of my old WeChat friends using technical means and planned to start adding them back, from A to Z.

However, at this point, I fell into procrastination, which I still haven't overcome until now.

On the one hand, there are restrictions on adding friends with the new account, and I'm not sure what the threshold is, so I'm being cautious.

On the other hand, there is psychological procrastination. In fact, I have a long history of battling procrastination, and in this process, I realized a truth:

If I keep procrastinating on something, it must be because I haven't thought it through—either I haven't thought through the benefits of doing this thing, or there are potential risks that make me resist it.

This is definitely a wise saying, my friends. Think about it: if something has clear benefits, would you not do it? Or, if you realize the benefits of doing something, but you are not clear about the execution path, which leads to an unclear expectation of the workload, this vague workload will be like a mountain in the dark night, giving you tremendous pressure and making you unable to move forward.

So why am I procrastinating on adding friends back? It's because I realized one thing:

This WeChat account does not belong to me.

Yes, even though it's a WeChat account I registered, tied to my phone number and bank card, and set with a unique password. But, it doesn't really belong to me. It can be taken away at any time because of a chat, a Moments post, or even joining a group where I have never spoken.

And emotionally, this account is also very different from my old account. My old account had all the chat records from the past ten years, the first Moments post in 2013, and all the interactions with friends until now. The new account has nothing, and I just can't feel close to it.

How can I invest time and effort into a WeChat account that doesn't belong to me?

Resisting starting a new life because of too many ties to the past, doesn't this resemble love?

New Discoveries#

So I still haven't opened the spreadsheet full of friends, and I'm not sure if I should use the new account or the GDPR-compliant account from now on, and both of them need to be maintained for a while.

And there are a lot of things happening in work and life, not much free time, so I continue to put it off.

But I did something else—I built my own independent blog: (which is this blog)

~~anemoi 风神广播 https://anemoi.xyz~~

Migrated to this site

With its own domain name, support for RSS subscription, and even a favicon! (I used Sketch to create some shapes and XJB drew them)

Feel free to subscribe, all my articles will be first published on my blog, and the WeChat official account will publish them a day later (or maybe much later).

This website is completely mine, without using any services within the Great Firewall, there is no censorship, article deletion, or account suspension.

If anyone is interested in creating their own independent blog, leave a comment, and I can write a tutorial.

Reflections#

Being banned and the month that followed have made me reflect on a few things.

The Relationship Between People and Tools#

People create tools, and tools, in turn, shape people.

During this month of partially detaching from WeChat, I actually felt great: I was no longer interrupted by short messages, no longer read fragmented articles on public accounts, and it seemed like there weren't as many group chats to participate in.

My time became more complete, with more uninterrupted time, and more time for deep thinking.

Nowadays, smartphones can show the number of times an app is launched and the time spent on it. If you look at the time you spend on WeChat, you will definitely be shocked.

Marx wrote: "The essence of man is not an abstract thing inherent in each individual, in its reality it is the totality of social relations."

To be fair, WeChat has done a great job in maximizing human social relationships, allowing everyone to easily share everything through WeChat.

But on the flip side, when all your social relationships are within the product of a commercial company, and this company never provides clear rules (such as how many friends you can add in a day before getting banned), not to mention that this commercial company also has an even more unclear big first party.

Doesn't it feel a bit like Leviathan?

My response is to start building my own Personal CRM system, specifically a contact database that supports various tags, rollups, and relations, storing friends' WeChat IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information to prevent losing touch.

I even have the idea of turning it into a product, like a mini-program, would anyone use it?

Actually, what difference does it make to have a WeChat account that complies with GDPR? There is still the possibility of being banned.

This is not fundamentally WeChat's problem, but rather the construction of the public opinion environment and the legal society.

Am I Really an Idiot?#

Later on, I saw many people being banned on February 8, and I roughly understood the reason for being banned.

Am I an idiot? Am I to blame for not remaining silent about what happened to a fellow countryman, which led to my WeChat account being banned? And after my account was banned, it caused great inconvenience to me, and I bore all the costs myself. But if we all remain silent, how can things get better?

You might say: Look, it's been a month, and everyone has forgotten about it, your speaking out didn't make things better, your account was banned for nothing.

Was it all for nothing? Maybe.

"I have seen the sea, I can't pretend I haven't."

In Conclusion#

Friends, please wait for me to build up my new WeChat account and slowly add you back, don't worry...

2020/02/03 @Beijing