As you may know, I’ve been helping my Malaysian friend here and there with his business recently. And the way they do business is, uhh, interesting. The web never enters the picture. The business is about booking something. They don’t have a booking website.
Why not? Because the users don’t know how to use websites. How do you know? Because they themselves don’t know how. So how do you do it? You handle everything through WhatsApp. You pay $1000 a month for a WhatsApp bot that helps handle the bookings. Where do the bookings go? Nowhere. Why should they go anywhere? The staff just copy the booking details from the WhatsApp messages and add them to an Excel spreadsheet.
Okay fine, no website for booking. But surely you need one for marketing? Nope. They do marketing on Facebook, TikTok, and Xiaohongshu. And Xiaohongshu doesn’t allow you to post links. Pretty standard, you think. Because you also can’t post links on Instagram. And links on Facebook and Twitter get downranked. Well, you haven’t seen a real walled garden yet. This one comes with the Great Wall.
Xiaohongshu doesn’t allow any kind of links. No phone numbers. No scannable QR codes in your pictures. No “DM me for links”. You can’t post links/phone numbers/QR codes in DMs either. Not even WeChat accounts. Please pretend other platforms don’t exist.
I guess that’s just how you do business in China. And Singapore and Malaysia aren’t far off. I’m afraid America and Europe aren’t that far off either. Now you say all platforms are owned by evil billionaires. They’re all bad. Yes yes. But also, most people don’t miss the web. Because they never lived on the open web. For them, the internet is 5 apps. A browser is the thing that pops up when you accidentally tap a link.
So who’s still on the open web? I don’t know, dear reader, maybe people like you. These days, very few people still write (or even read) personal blogs, use RSS readers, or use Mastodon or Bluesky. Like, maybe 50 of them. I can’t count.
Never mind, you say. There are only 50 of us. Everyone knows each other, and we’ll be a tightly knit community. Have you seen a 50-people high school class? So this 50-people circle is still shrinking. Red lines are everywhere. Politics, AI, mayonnaise. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Then the circle gets split into smaller circles. Then you see longtime members leaving and going back to Twitter.
Meanwhile my friend’s business is doing well. Who gives a shit about the open web amirite.