Half a month away from WeChat

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

The Sequence of Events#

On February 8th, at noon, I was having a WeChat voice meeting with my colleagues when suddenly a dialog box popped up, notifying me that my WeChat account had been forcefully logged out. (The timing was perfect, 404, hahaha)

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

I forcefully calmed myself 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 functions are really difficult to use.

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

I felt extremely devastated because at that time I didn't know 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 after reading it all, I came to the following conclusions:

It is indeed permanently banned, the old account is useless, so I need to prepare a new one.
Because there is still a balance in my wallet, I can temporarily log in and retrieve my friends.

At the same time, a friend helped me find a friend who works at WXG and promised to help me.

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 amusing 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 blown up by the client.

I'm not being modest, but how could my personal account of ten years just disappear like that? However, my friend from WXG said that they had already discussed and decided to blow up my account, so I recited two lines of poetry:

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

The First Few Days#

After having a full meal 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 blown up? My condolences, hahaha." Some friends I hadn't contacted in a long time would even chat with me for a bit. 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 might be a scammer." So I started using secret codes with my 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 reads articles for the sake of increasing views, so it was 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, and I still haven't overcome it to this day.

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 something but you are not clear about the execution path, causing you to have no clear expectations of the workload, this vague workload will be like a mountain in the dark night, giving you immense 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 doesn't belong to me.

Yes, even though it's a WeChat account that 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 never spoke.

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

How can I invest time and effort in 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 comfortable using the new WeChat account. When chatting with friends, I always find that the essential emojis are missing, so I can only send: I know that feel bro.jpg

Suddenly, one day, my Reeder updated with a blog post about the differences between WeChat's privacy policy in China and abroad. In the footnotes of the article (praise to the author for including links and footnotes), there was an article about how to register a WeChat account that complies with the GDPR.

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the European Union aims to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, protect the data privacy of all EU citizens, and reshape the way organizations in the region store and process privacy data. This regulation came into effect on May 25, 2018. It includes many provisions, one of which is: if a company operates in the EU, it must provide users with the option to export their data. Violations of the GDPR provisions can result in fines of up to 4% of the organization's global annual turnover or €20 million.

The author of this article is also in my RSS feed list, but I subscribed to him after the article was published, so I hadn't read this guide before.

I followed the instructions in the article and quickly obtained a WeChat account that complies with the GDPR and supports data export!

I was so excited!

That night, I even wrote an email to thank these two bloggers, one of them replied immediately, and the other replied with a long message the next day. I actually felt a sense of "true friendship."

But the next morning, this WeChat account was banned again, with a prompt saying that the registration source was illegal or something like that. I followed the instructions and successfully unblocked it. It's really amazing how many hurdles there are.

This Month#

I'm still procrastinating and haven't started adding friends back from A to Z because I haven't thought it through. I haven't thought about whether I should use the new account or the GDPR-compliant account, and both of them need to be nurtured for a while.

And there are many things happening in work and life, so I don't have much free time, so I continue to put it off.

But I did something else - I created my own independent blog: (which is this blog)

~~anemoi 风神广播 https://anemoi.xyz~~

Migrated to this site

With a custom domain, support for RSS subscriptions, and even a favicon! (I used Sketch to create some shapes that XJB drew)

Feel free to subscribe, all of my articles will be published on my blog first, and the WeChat official account will be delayed by a day (or maybe much longer).

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

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 being semi-detached from WeChat, I actually felt great: I wasn't interrupted by short messages, I didn't read fragmented articles on Moments, and it seemed like there weren't as many group chats that I needed to participate in.

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

Nowadays, smartphones can show the number of app launches and the time spent on each app. If you look at the time you spend on WeChat, you will definitely be shocked.

Marx wrote: "The essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of social relations."

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

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

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 the 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 getting their accounts blown up on February 8th, and I roughly understood the reason for being banned.

Am I an idiot? Is it because I'm not silent about the misfortune of a compatriot that my WeChat account got blown up? And after my WeChat account got blown up, it caused great inconvenience for me, and I bore the cost entirely on my own. 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 got blown up for nothing.

For nothing? Maybe.

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

Finally#

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

2020/02/03 @Beijing