a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams!

Episode Date: October 12, 2016

From glittery reaction gifs modded by grandparents to rage faces on Reddit, stickers (gifs and other layered images) and emotive “biaoqing” have taken over messaging culture in China and beyond. Stickers are tied to filter culture, too — whether originating in real life as purikura photo sticker booths in Japan or digitally as Snapchat filters. Why are these forms of social communication so popular? Because sometimes you just want to say “I feel totally Nicki Minaj side-eye dot-GIF about this”, and no one can give a side-eye as good as Nicki Minaj can. But it’s not just about isolated expressions, celebrity stickers like Kimoji, or personalized bitmoji; stickers are shaping and codifying the way people talk to each other online in new and multi-layered ways. It’s even connected to mobile livestreaming, a phenomenon that’s taking off in China right now, in the most mundane (food eating streams) to subversive (seductive banana eating streams) ways. And how are all these memes tied to monetization and payments? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, ROFLCon co-founder and human-centered researcher/writer Christina Xu and Connie Chan in conversation with Sonal Chokshi take us on a wild tour of cultural messaging memes and messaging tech in China and beyond.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And today we're building further on our podcast on emoji, talking about stickers, streaming and all sorts of interesting cultural memes in the digital world in China and beyond. And joining us to have that conversation with us, we have Christina Shi, her last name is spelled XU, who is a tech ethnographer and previously has sort of been infamous for helping co-found RaffleCon, which is a conference about internet culture and communities. And then we also have Connie Chan, who is our partner. who covers all things China and who has written a number of pieces on China and has been arguing for a lot of the things that she and others like Christine are observing as a new form of social communication. Why would you make the argument that all of these things together add up to a new form of cultural communication? Maybe we should start by saying, what are stickers? Let's just start there. And we can take it to streaming and everything else. There are graphics that don't denote just an emotion, but oftentimes an action or a phrase. And what I find in Asia is that you can have a long conversation where it's just people sending stickers back

and forth. In the West, we've been so obsessed with emojis for so long, but that is, in my mind, very obviously going to transition to stickers quite soon because you can just convey so much more information in one single sticker versus an emoji. I think that a sticker and emoji and all of these other media is a way to add nuance back in. We used to hear the argument a lot that text-only communication, especially over email or text, really stripped out all of these nuances of communication that you get face-to-face or some people would even argue over the phone, although I disagree. Personally, I find text-based communication better than the phone, and some people think

otherwise, and I think it just is a matter of what you're used to. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with this generation growing up, what they're going to complain about as missing from the context when they're so used to this rapid fire kind of sticker sending mode. I don't necessarily think of it as a new form of cultural communication, but a way to supplement what we already have in a very playful and expressive way. Just to make sure we're all on the same page about the terminology, and especially because in our past podcast on emoji, which listeners who haven't heard it are welcome to go to our website and find it. Defining the taxonomy, so we start with emoticons, which are basically punctuation

marks, which are used to represent figural expressions. Then we have emojis, which like punctuation marks can be put in subject lines and therefore have to go through the Unicode Consortium to be approved and vetted. And then on top of that, we have stickers, which are essentially gifs or images that in Bitmoji is a type of sticker, even though it's called moji as a moji in it, in that they're all just images and they cannot be put in subject lines, for example, but they do convey a lot of meaning. They capture full on phrases. They capture full on sentences. Right. What's interesting is they all have in common this notion of nuance and ambiguity. Connie, you've shared with me that sometimes a single sticker can have like three very different meanings. So for example, like if a sticker is of

one person hugging another person, you can interpret that as a romantic hug. You can interpret it as a friendly hug. It's really up to the sender and receiver to kind of guess what that meaning is. But that's also what makes it so much more personal than just normal text. Christina, you wrote an really fascinating piece for motherboard about China's meme culture, starting with, oh my God, I'm going to butcher this, but a bouching? Or how do I say it? Yeah, biao ching. Clearly, I've met my match. Yeah, so the term is biao ching, and it's usually used as the phrase biao ching ball, which sort of means like bag of biaoching.

And it's people talk about that in the same way that they talk about their reaction gift folders in the States. So it's sort of like the place where you collect all of these custom sticker-like things for your own personal use so that you can react to a wide variety of situations. It's essentially your built-in folder of reactions. Yeah, exactly. Your custom sticker collection. And why is that such a big deal? I mean, is it just sort of like, I mean... Well, there's a sense of pride. Oftentimes they're traded almost like Pokemon cards. So you can throw out a sticker to a conversation. And if it's a really popular one, other folks will save it too and use it in subsequent chats. So there's a sense of pride with having the coolest sticker. How did the mechanics of this work out, though, because you're locked into with stickers, a number of proprietary ecosystems where you have stickers on weeks. You have stickers on Weibo. You have stickers on US apps. You have Bitmoji, which has now been inquired by Snapchat. We have stickers everywhere in these different ecosystems. And one of the arguments that we made about emojis is that because it sort of translates interoperably, you know, unless, of course, like Apple and Twitter have their own proprietary emoji sets, that's not necessarily true of stickers. So how do you smooth this communication across all these different platforms and have

these custom folders? Yeah, well, at least on WeChat, there is this ability to import any image from your photo album on your phone and make it into a sticker. And they have these automatic functions that strip out the background to make it look as close to a sticker format as possible. So you are able to actually import images and graphics from all over the web. So for example, a lot of the lying characters, which include this very popular brown bear called Brown and a cute little white bunny called Connie. A lot of those characters, I've seen people convert those images into WeChat stickers

and actually use it on the WeChat platform. So you can really take an image from anywhere. Oh, is that legal, by the way, though, for them to do that? I don't know about the brown and cony ones, but it's, we chat is sort of designed for, you can have just your own uploaded gifts. So actually, when my cousin had a baby, I made her a little biaoqing of her baby as a present. Oh, like it's literally a folder of like cute little stickers of her baby. Yeah.

That's awesome. And a lot of these messaging apps, they have their own marketplaces. So artists can upload different sticker packs. they can get paid for them, they can receive tips and rewards. And there's a little bit of digital rights management on those sticker packs, but I think on the whole Chinese apps sort of tend towards openness. So they just make it pretty easy to download the actual naked gift file, and then you can do whatever you want with that.

Well, talk to me more about this remix culture. Yeah. So I was focusing on Biao Qing, which I think like there is a very sticker-like element to them, but they're quite different from what we see in like Snapchat or Facebook as stickers, or even line where there's like these custom built sticker sets that all match and they're full of like cute characters. Or like decorations for photos. Yeah, Yal Ching are like a little crappier than that.

Intentionally degraded. Intentionally. They're kind of more like rage faces. If you remember that phenomenon from Reddit a few years ago. So there are these kind of like often very poorly photoshopped celebrity faces put onto in all kinds of contexts. And what I found was that the vast majority of them were actually. static images because it was easier for people to go in and change the caption. The general format would be like a celebrity's face with like kind of an iconic expression. So there's a South

Korean actor who's got this incredible laugh. His face gets photoshopped into all kinds of things almost the same way that we use the sort of like crying but happy emoji. Oh, the face with tears of joy that looks like it's sad but it's actually really happy. Right. To signify that like this thing is so funny, we're crying. So that face gets used in a variety of context, photoshopped onto these little cartoon bodies. And then there's all of these captions that get updated with every new catchphrase. You know, if someone says something really goofy online will become a catchphrase in China. And then all the Bia-Chimmer from the Olympics. Yeah, yeah. So she's a very popular one. Yeah, that's a great example of a recent one. So they're constantly making these new faces and updating the

captions and so like people in particular fandoms. So if you really like a band, you might have a biaoching set that just matches that band or once you start getting into a TV show, you would get a new set. So it's this like... So it's kind of like bit moji, but not with your own face, but with a celebrity's face. Exactly. Or kind of this abstract face that everyone recognizes. And then it has a punchline to it too. So it's not just, you know, a happy birthday and there's a cake there. But there's an actual line that goes with it. There are so many interesting threads to pull on that one. So just starting with first of all, the question of why celebrities? What does that give the person who's doing that? Like, what does it provide them? I kind of think that it, there's this funny interplay,

right, between like, I want to show you that I'm expressing this emotion. And so I'm going to show you this very exaggerated form of the emotion via this celebrity expressing that at sort of the peak. It's the same way we use reaction gifts, right? Where you see people using gifts of like Nikki Minaj giving a side eye, like you can't give a side eye as good as Nikki Minaj can. So you want to express that. It's like a pure form of the emotion. But at the same time, I think those faces and those expressions then become an emotion that you now have, if that makes sense, right? So you're like, oh, I feel totally Nicki Minaj's side eye.gif about this. And so it actually shapes the way people talk to each other in a way. and eventually it becomes codified in a really interesting way.

It just goes to show how genius Kim Kardashian is with her set of Kimoji. Because she's essentially providing people a way to easily do that in the U.S. Yeah. But what's also incredible about it is that I have this sense of a person as a single entity. And then you can now take and literally disproportionately blow up any one element, your eyebrows, your facial expression, your nose, you're sneezing, your mouth, your smile, your laugh, your sadness. and essentially create this mosaic of different graphics that capture all these different elements. And it's a distortion and a form of expression at the same time, which is just incredibly fascinating. It gives a whole new name to the traditional ideas of remixing.

In the early days of digital remixing, we talk a lot about mashups where you'd have an overlay of one image or on top of another. But it really takes things to a new level. I would emphasize, though, the punchline is really critical because oftentimes it's the same image being used across a large, wide range of different reactions. It's that one sentence that goes above the image. Can you give me some examples? We've had some that were really popular, one that was an image pulled out of like a Star Trek still graphic. Yeah, Picard, looking disappointed and face-palming. Yeah, or one of Yao Ming, smiling, looking really happy. There's one of Barack Obama that's really popular. So in the West we have the same thing, I think. It was really popular on sites like Reddit or sites like 90s.

Exactly. Yeah. So in China, there's one of, I'm like fascinating. by which ones become part of the pantheon, you know. So there's one of this American wrestler named Elijah Burke. And that gift was very popular on the American internet, but it really took off as a as a biao ching face in China. And he's kind of like looking at the camera sideways. And that one gets used to caption a bunch of different emotions. Some of it is like kind of challenging.

But some of it is, there's like a very common thread to a lot of the biao ching where people just use them to accuse other people of being a poser. So there's like a wide variety of ones where people are just sort of saying in all different ways, like you're being a poser, let's go be posers together, you're posing worked, your posing didn't work, you know. People somehow co-opted it into that use. It took off into that use. And now it's been reinforced over and over again as the poser face, even though that's probably not at all with that star intended or express. Yeah. It's just been appropriated into entirely new ways. Right. You know, it's funny. We talk so much about cultural appropriation in certain directions, and it's kind of funny to see it happening in a different direction sometimes. As we have more of these multi-layered forms of communication, the discussions around cultural appropriation will become even more complex. I think the issue at hand for me is whenever there's a power differential between entities, then that appropriation isn't necessarily appropriate. But I don't know. I mean, there could be all kinds of debates around that.

So even on that point, the sticker phenomenon in Asia is not just being used among friends. It's being used in the workplace. You can send a sticker to your boss. You can send a sticker to a managing director. You can send a sticker to a founder or CEO. You see it in Slack, right? People like posting reaction gifts in Slack. So Slack is professionalizing it the way that it happens in China? Or is it similar or different?

Would you say how the phenomenon is playing out? I think in a lot of ways in China, that was kind of already the case. Like the work-life boundaries seem a lot more porous there. I think it obviously depends on the organization. but in a lot of ways, like, I saw a lot of, you know, people's bosses sending them voice messages on WeChat, you know, and that's the same time. That's very, very common. So that's not even, whereas here we might like think twice about, you know, can your boss text you when you're not at work? In China, that's not even a thing.

Right. But yeah, in the U.S., I think, is where we're seeing the professionalization of a lot of, or these, these memes infiltrate the professional workspaces. And people love it because it's fun. It kind of brings this personal feel to any conversation you have with someone in the workforce. And then so it's a self-reinforcing thing. And as it goes into one work culture, it can just continue to grow. How about generationally? Because I'm comparing, not having been exposed to this firsthand, what you guys describe,

I'm comparing it to WhatsApp and what happens with my cousins and relatives in India. And it's really both funny and ridiculous to see multiple generations from grandparents to parents, to kids, to really young kids, all sharing these gifs. And sorry, Christina, I'm not going to fight with you on the pronunciation. I'm completely agnostic about it. Good, because I demand that you say it with the J. No, but, you know, I see them exchanging these same type of graphics and they change the caption or punchline to your point, Connie. And it's kind of funny to see how differently they do it.

So in the case of my, you know, some of the grandparents, they'll put like Godrothi characters, which is our family's language. Or it'll be like a prayer or sentiment in one. and then like a total shopping sentiment in the other. It's just very, very bizarre map and kind of cool mashup of time as well. Yeah. How does it play out generationally in China? I have an extensive collection of grandma memes, as I call them. What do you tell them?

Grandma memes on WeChat, which is the stuff that my aunties and, you know, my grandma sends over WeChat. And I love them because they're very, they're like, pure and sincere. And they're almost like Hallmark cards. A lot of them are around the holidays. they glitter you know and like you can see like the post

from my space like back in 2004 2005 the sparkling glittering ones like thanks for stopping by and we chat poorly photo manipulated like still images

that they've turned into an animation it looks a little bizarre but it's I find it really endearing but I think what's really remarkable about all of that is in China you really have this kind of

leapfrogging where all the generations are on, not just online in a way that you don't really see here as much, but on the same platform, right? The WeChat is so dominant that literally everyone you know is on it. And so you get all of this interplay of everyone playing in the same ecosystem, but in different spaces within that ecosystem. And they develop all kinds of things on their own that are really fascinating. I know you have a history of studying online communities as well. You referenced rage faces earlier, which were popular on Reddit a few years ago?

Yeah, so Rage Faces were basically, there was a subreddit for Rage Comics, but it was basically like, I don't even know how to really describe them, but I guess like they're the same thing as Biao Ching's. They're taking like specific expressions of celebrities. So there's like a very iconic one of Jackie Chan looking confused. They turn that into like very simple black and white line art. And then it gets used to, they used to like make comics where. you would talk about a situation

as you go through your day and the punchline would kind of be like that expression. And so it became kind of a universal language for emotions, which is really interesting. Because you could create a whole comic where the faces are changing very, very radically every frame,

but you can kind of follow the story of the characters because you understand the emotional journey they're going through. That's fascinating. And it reminds me a lot of why Snapchat filters took off so much in the U.S. because there's sort of this layering, again, this distortion of your face where you can now add on and layer on other people's expressions or some other filter, whether it's a bare nose or whatever it is, to create new forms of expression. How do filters

play out in China? So popular. Filters have been popular long before Snapchat. Filters came about. And the first instances, I think, were actually in the photo booths in Japan. Purikura. How do you spell that? P-U-R-I-K-U-R-A? I think that's right, yeah. Spelling B. Pronciation B, Puriqa. So there were photo boots, and they still exist in Japan right now,

where you would go in and take your photo for a couple minutes. You would run outside right away, because you have a short couple of minutes where you can decorate and punctuate every single photo with graphics like fake bows or put classes on yourself or sparkles. Sparkles, and you can write words well over 10 years ago. And back then, you could already see some of those photo boots

not just in Asia, but here in the Bay Area in Japan Town. So you're saying that this meme culture building off on something that actually already existed physically in some ways. The filter culture. The filter culture of like decorating your image and kind of distorting what you're wearing, what you look like, was already very popular through these physical photo boots. And as the photo boots evolved even many, many years ago, they already had the software technology that would either smooth out your skin or make your eyes bigger or do

whatever it was that you wanted to change how you looked. What urge do you think it's tapping into this desire for filters and this reception people have to filters? I mean, I'm just trying to get behind why they've taken off here without having as much pervasiveness of the Burykarabuts. I think it's partially playfulness when you have the dog ears or whatever in Snapchat. Like that's mostly about playfulness. But part of it is also just it's Photoshop culture for your own face. If you're going to post a selfie, it might as well look good. And so as the technology gets more and more advanced for that. It becomes a form of digital makeup that you,

if you're good at filters, it can be almost as good as being good at makeup. Yes. I mean, in that sense, I think that the remix culture has been become more democratized now. Because in the past, you know, if you wanted to remix two things, you had to be proficient in Photoshop or some other tool. And now you have like endless tools online. And as you note, there's automation that happens, like AI that lets people now map it onto the points of your face in the computer vision sense. So there's definitely something that makes it easier. And the beautification side, Connie, you and I swap apps all the time because I'm, like, so obsessed with selfie apps that apply your makeup and do all this other crap.

And it's insane. Like, what's driving that? I mean, part of it is this selfie culture, right? You always want to put your best foot forward. And so these beautification apps are really ugly, though, for the record. Purpose. Yes. But for a lot of people, they want apps where even though they might have a filter that makes them

look ugly, it's almost done as if. you can tell that the person behind it still looks good. Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of these beautification apps, like these one, one click makeup applications. Like, my two. It's May Too. May Too has a whole army of applications. One of them that's in English that's called Makeup Plus, where you can literally with just

one click apply your entire makeup. It don't do your eyebrows, your eyeliner, your eyeshadow, your blush. You can even dye your hair. It'll change your eye color if you want. You can do a face slimming, all kinds of things. And a lot of the new phones, for example, like the Huawei P9, it has. these beautification tools built right into the camera. So you can train it to know a particular face and say, I always want my face slims by this amount.

Well, because your camera on your smartphone is essentially only yours. Yeah, and you're training it to know your face. So that whenever you're taking a photo of yourself, it'll apply the exact same amount of skin smoothing, the exact same amount of face slimming and so forth. And then all your photos look beautiful. I have to ask this because we talked about this as well on our emoji podcast. How do real life social dynamics play out in these apps? One of the things that I've noticed, for example, in India is a lot of women would be really into like face lightning creams, you know, or other sort of things. Is this predominant only among women? Do men use it to you? I'm kind of curious about the demographics and the sociocultural aspects of it. Men definitely use it. But it is majority women, I believe. And there are definitely cultural nuances there. For example, a lot of the Asian apps will make your skin look whiter because whitening of skin is really popular there. But if you look at how it's impacted society, something.

things I'm really fascinated about, for example, include how it plays generationally. And I've heard stories where there's folks now where their parents who are in their 60s or 70s, when they travel, they take so many more selfies because they're happy with how they look. And if you think about those kinds of stories, it's wonderful that these apps are encouraging people to take more images and capture more memories. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, like any technology, they codify, especially consumer-facing technology, they codify the sort of norm that. that we have circulating. I love that some of the apps

will actually make you taller in photos, which as a very tall Asian woman, I don't need. You block the leg section and you stretch it out. Oh, my God. Yeah.

So it's really addressing people's natural, real life. Yeah. In a way that, you know, it reinforces things that aren't always positive, but like Connie said, I think people use it for a variety of different reasons

and in different ways. What are some of the new and unexpected things that are happening only digitally that you never saw online. I mean, in real life. A lot of people make the digital dualism argument that you can't really separate

in real life and digital. And while I agree with a lot of that, the reality is that you can do things in the virtual environment that you can never do in the physical. A perfect example of this is, you know, you can pat an avatar on the head of someone your colleagues with,

but you would probably never do that to them in person. Oh, yeah. Like a lot of the stickers we mentioned earlier are phrases you would not say in person. You would not even write out in text form. Right. But in sticker form, it's more okay. Right, exactly.

So, like, I mean, it's very liberating in a certain sense. And it's, again, allowing this sort of uncoupling of your physical presence. What would you say are some of the unexpected or surprising things you've seen people do? I think in general, you know, exactly what Connie said. You see people being a lot more playful and free and informal. My friend Tricia Wong, who's also an ethnographer. Yeah, I know her. She's done this incredible work about elastic selves and how basically Chinese youth.

are sometimes more open with total strangers on the internet than they are with their close friends and family because there aren't consequences there, right? And so they're more willing to like experiment with their identity or they're more willing to share secrets and ask difficult, awkward questions with total, total strangers on the internet. And all of that kind manifests in different cultural ways, I think. You know, for one clear example is that LGBT dating apps are much, much more prevalent digitally than they are in person or like equivalent. services in person. Because of cultural constraints. Yeah, I think because like people may not feel comfortable going to actual gay clubs, but, you know, it's not a big deal to download an app and go on

it and click around, talk to people and things like that. And so from that kind of foundation, you'll see new types of culture get created. Yeah, and through stickers, like what you mentioned earlier, I do think there's moments where even within your close family, you might use stickers to express things you wouldn't normally say to your parents or to your siblings. Like, There are very many, I love you stickers. Yeah. Both online on WeChat on a number of these apps. And it's easier to send that kind of sticker to your mom and dad, whereas you might feel

more awkward or uncomfortable saying it in person. I love that example because just on a personal note, my dad, also Asian, there's a sort of conservatism between fathers and daughters and how you express yourself. You know, I know my dad loves us, but he's not the type to actually say I love you overtly. And the day he learned how to use text messaging, he still doesn't really know how to use stickers, stickers and jokes, but he does now communicate in a completely different way in text and message that he would never communicate in person. Right. And it's probably one of my most gratifying

things to see. And I think that a lot of people take this for granted because they're not necessarily from cultures that are like that where you can sort of see that this actually allows a different kind of behavior because, again, we're making a lot of sweeping generalizations here. But in general, when you think of the U.S., there's a certain openness and freedom of speech that is taken for granted. That's not common in a lot of different cultures. And So it is kind of fascinating, see how these things play out. Yeah, I love looking at how group chats work within families in Asia and how that's completely changed, how people can stay in touch with each other, especially, for example, even in China,

a lot of the parents don't always live in the same city as the kids, even when the kids are young, but also when the kids are older. And using these group chats within WeChat allows people to stay in close touch with each other and give people regular updates and share articles, and people are just so much closer as a result. Yeah. It's kind of nice that you can have this sort of ambient social feeling without, you know, if you're going to call someone, you have to actually have a conversation, you have to have things to say. But what group chat allows you is for, you can just keep sending stickers back and forth to each other. You can never say a thing, but feel like you're in constant contact with people. It's asynchronous. You're not compelled to respond right then and there. It's asymmetric. It's okay if you have like one person who does 50 texts and you only do one back. You don't have to reciprocate in kind and equally. And like you said, It's private, exactly. I do agree with you that I think there's a real fascinating subculture and family group chats to mine here. So, you know, speaking of this idea of people expressing themselves in ways that they would not necessarily in person, one thing that comes to mind is in your recent post on live streaming trends in China economy. And one of the things that's really interesting is quotes from people who they would never actually be public speaking or on camera necessarily in their physical life, but somehow feel liberated to do so.

in live streams. So what's driving the live streaming phenomenon? Well, live streaming is a huge phenomenon in China right now. It really took off. And to be clear, it's public, not private broadcasting. Yes, public broadcasting. And a lot of it took off right after Mirkat was launched in the U.S. in South by Southwest in 2015. And after that, basically a bunch of Chinese developers decided that they could also build their own apps. And what they all found very quickly was that in these mobile live streaming apps, you might run into the issue, which Mirkat did, run into, which is not having enough constant content. What the Chinese developers did was they added digital gifts to these streams. The digital gift is really one way of expressing this

interaction between viewer and broadcaster. And the interaction is the fundamental piece of China mobile live streaming. And it's because there's interaction that these apps can monetize so easily. So for example, if you are a broadcaster and you don't necessarily have musical talent or anything, but you are willing to engage with strangers and just be really conversational, People can start speaking with you and writing you questions, and they might play an online game of truth or dare. They might ask you to do certain things, like write their name on the board or cut your hair or do all kinds of weird, zany things. And in order to encourage you to do that, they'll send you digital gifts. The broadcaster actually receives a financial payout from each of these gifts through this app platform.

And so for a lot of these broadcasters, it's also a way to make money. And that gives them enough incentive to constantly go back to these platforms and just stream very frequently and for very long periods of time. And from the viewer's perspective, they get all kinds of benefits from having the social interaction. And just to be clear, you're saying gifts as in digital stickers. Digital stickers, yes. And those are generally just like the stickers we've been talking about all along. They could be any type of sticker. Yes. Usually it's more of like a graphic of a car or beer or a teddy bear or hearts of flowers.

So an object. It's mostly an image of an object. Way back in the day, you could send digital birthday gifts. So did Zinga and so did the other platform. Actually, that's part of my question. This interaction that you describe, which is a key component that's making mobile live streaming as entertainment take off in China is largely enabled by this culture of gifting digital gifts, which we don't really have in place here.

So what do you think is making the digital gift culture in the first place work? I think it's also partially because it's so. built on top of it's basically like the live streaming apps there are built on top of dating apps more or less right or like they go hand in hand with that and so there's a lot of flirtation and with flirtation the gifts make sense whereas i think our live streaming culture kind of more comes from like games right so we have twitch and that's really the big the first like major player and so you you get a lot of the same phenomenon right it's people willing to do things online and talking with their audience but not not quite the same level of gifting but the gifting i'd say

What Facebook gifting did versus what all these live streaming apps, the main difference is one is instant and it's part of the conversation as opposed to one is kind of I'm watching or I'm admiring you and I'm kind of tipping you and giving you this gift to the side. So it's like interactive right in the moment reminds me of reinforcement learning where you can have like, you know, instant reinforcement like Pavlov's dog. The dog hears the bell of whistle for food. He immediately salivates and there's sort of this instant reaction reinforcement that's happening through these stickers that makes you go. Yeah, it's the instant interaction that makes stickers work. There's like live streaming apps where you can stream concerts of like Korean boy bands, which are huge in China and all over Asia.

Oh, I remember one of them, which was it, Big Boy? Was that one of them? Big Bang. Big Bang. Yeah. So yeah, you could stream a Big Bang concert and what you can do as a fan who's not there is you can give them a certain amount of money and they'll actually like light up a physical candle on the venue for you.

And so you like in some way have like sent your. presence to be at this concert remotely, even though you're not there. And there's like something really nice as a fan of knowing that like in some tiny, tiny, tiny way, you know, the, you're interacting. Yeah. Or can see just a little bit more of like actual physical support from you. I thought that was so smart. But there's another nuance here. Still something different, I think, than game, than even gaming and dating. One of the key points in the piece that we recently posted is about the fact that it's shifting the focus from the outward facing camera to the inward facing camera and what that means. And so it's essentially like selfie live streaming

in a lot of ways. It's an evolution of selfie streaming. So what's happening differently now in that evolution? Like what's that happen out? Again, that goes back to the interaction. It's basically all the broadcasters acting like talk show hosts or acting like reality TV. And it's much less about where they are and what they're looking at and much more about what they're thinking, what they're saying and what they're doing. But what if you have nothing interesting to say because the biggest complaint people had about Twitter in the early days, is that it really optimizes for people who have a lot to share, ideas to share, text. But it's about the interaction.

So, for example, if you sent me a gift, I would say, thank you, Sonal, and I would call out your name. And from that, you would receive gratification alone. And you might ask me a question, the fact that I choose to acknowledge it and answer, you receive more gratification. So the interaction you're saying, it sort of makes up for that asymmetric following that happens. Because in Twitter's case, you know, A, you had this pressure to actually say something. So a lot of people would lurk and not actually communicate and add things. And B, the interaction was more eavesdropping than it was really like sort of participating. You do see a really long tail, right?

Like there are some people who have like hundreds of thousands, millions of followers and some people who are like streaming and no one's watching them. Because there's this whole group of broadcasters that are actually really good at engaging with other folks that didn't have a platform before to kind of really shine. Or a talent. They weren't necessarily dancers or singers. Right. In the same way that YouTube stars couldn't have been talk show hosts. but became very successful YouTube stars because they know a different way of engaging with people.

There's just a whole group of people who can be charismatic and who can engage with other folks and create these games like, okay, let's go play a truth or dare game now. Whoever sends me the most gifts in the next 30 seconds, I'm going to take your question first. See, I think that's a key point because it's about engaging in a different way because when I think of YouTube stars,

I think of cases where they may not have had traditional talents like singing or dancing, but they had talents like makeup artistry, like how to do a makeup tutorial, which is super popular in YouTube, obviously, in my absolute favorite genre to watch on YouTube. But this is literally the case of people who are just literally hanging out on streams,

which is just crazy to me. Think of it as the video format of AOL chat rooms back in the 90s. And so, and if you think of it with that lens, it really helps you understand the psychology behind it. Say, for example, you're a person who doesn't have that many friends. But you go on this platform

and instantly you have a bunch of people who are watching you, you feel popular and you feel more willing to talk to other folks and you feel like you can find a community at any time of the day. Right. And also, I mean, again, not to overly generalize, but, you know, China is a culture, China has a culture where conviviality is like so baked into our needs as Chinese people, right? So if you have to eat dinner by yourself every night, that's just something that you don't grow up doing and it feels wrong. And so at some point, you might, you know, take comfort in eating your dinner alone, but you're watching somebody else also eating their dinner.

It's literally taking and intimacy to a whole new level. I mean, you've made the argument, Connie, that it's like a solve for loneliness. I think that's totally right. I should caveat, just like what Christina is saying, there is a very long tail. You could just be sitting there kind of doing your own thing. So I guess, you know, not every single broadcaster has to be incredibly charismatic. As long as you aren't ignoring your viewers and you still interact with them in some form, I think that's what makes the broadcasters do well.

Christina, tell us a little bit more about what you wrote about on the live streaming of eating behaviors like Yeah, so I wrote a piece on Lucky Peach. I talked to a lot of people in China who are showing me their favorite, you know, I was hoping they would show me like great internet memes, and they were just showing me videos of people eating. And very, very mundane, just literally someone putting food into their mouth. And, you know, a little part of it was this sort of like gastron, the same reason why we watch cooking shows, right? Like you were watching someone eat something really delicious that you wish you were eating. A lot of the people I talked to were younger people who lived far away from their families for work. And they kind of just miss that feeling of like sitting around and talking with people around a table for hours at a time and so I was really moved by a lot of the comments that you would see which were these commenters kind of almost performing familial relationships by being like oh you look tired today are you okay oh my god that's amazing you know is everything okay you shouldn't work so hard and you know sometimes these were people who knew each other but sometimes it was just really this like sense of I want to connect to people in a way.

And I think that touches upon a point that's absolutely critical for live streaming apps to work, which is they need tools. So, for example, broadcasters, if there's ever a misbehaving viewer, they can block them permanently. And they also give those rights to their top fans to help police the viewing community. I'm glad you brought that up because my mind immediately went to the trolldom. That typically happens in any open platform. But the difference here, and I have to ask that this is partly a cultural thing due to being located in China, Is there just a lot more clamping down or group monitoring of behavior, like behavior censoring because of the fact that it's expected there?

Is it just that they're better tools? So a lot of these apps, they have teams of hundreds of people who are watching these streams live at the same time. And if they think something's inappropriate, that's happening, they'll stop it immediately. And what about some of the more subversive behaviors I can take place? Because, of course, the Chinese government monitoring these more closely and watching them for subversive behavior.

So the example that comes to mind, this meme of, of women in China seductively eating bananas on live streams, and they got banned, which I think is fabulous and fascinating, the eight, someone thought to do this in the first place, be that it caught on, and then everybody started doing it, and see that the Chinese government has essentially gotten onto it and said, stop. Tell me more about that. I think it shows that because live streaming is becoming so popular, the content is being regulated almost as if it was actual television or if it was a video that was showing on a yoku or tuto or another big video platform with the chinese internet you constantly get this like cat and mouse game and like

everyone knows that that's what it is where people are making things in a very playful way and trying to push the envelope and sort of like willing to try whatever they want until they notice the clamping down happens and then they move somewhere else i often hear narratives about the chinese internet as a very fearful place um and at least experience financially, it doesn't, I mean, if you are an activist, sure, there are, like, clear boundaries. You have to kind of dance around. But as an everyday user, you know, the, there's a lot of roasting, including of the government. There's a lot of playfulness and, and subversiveness. There is a lot of trolling, actually. Trolling is a huge, huge problem. Which is everywhere. As it is everywhere.

But, yeah, I think the difference is that the platforms are just willing to cut down on it. If we think our legal system is behind on this stuff, you know, these things are moving so fast in China. there's no way that they've been able to pass laws fast enough. So the companies have really had to move in to do the work. It reinforces yet another interesting theme that comes up a lot, which is a company is a regulator. When you think about Google banning certain things or the power of Facebook to include or not include things and so on. I mean, all these platforms have become many governments and of themselves. Okay, so then to wrap up, let's talk about some of the technologies behind a lot of this.

We've talked already about leapfrogging. That's a theme that comes up a lot in developing countries where their infrastructure is essentially leapfrogging. they're skipping the PC and going straight to mobile. The second phenomenon, obviously, is connectivity and bandwidth. And there's obviously other technologies like automation and AI and that are enabling these things to take off. Something kind of more mundane that I'd love to talk to both of you guys about is the role of QR codes.

Because Connie, you've written about it in the context of WeChat. And Christina, you actually talk about a funny Tumblr, which you should tell us about. Yeah, there used to be this great joke tumbler called pictures of people scanning QR codes. Dot tumbler.com and you would go there and there were no posts. And that was the whole joke, right? that in the U.S., no one did it. And so when I went to, started going to China a lot, you're like, the joke's on you now.

I know, I was like, they're everywhere. My favorite example, I collect pictures of them. My favorite example is a shop that sold bamboo wares, actually wove one out of bamboo. I was so impressed. They were with an actual QR, physical QR code out of bamboo. Yeah, out of, like, different coloring strips of bamboo. It was, it worked.

I tried it. So what is common all over Asia, not just China. Yeah. I mean, Japan, all kinds of other places. So why did QR codes? because that is a key factor as well, not necessarily only for stickers and communications, but this interactivity between physical and digital and offline and online. Think of it as like a shortcut to doing something, whether it's going to a website or adding someone

as a friend or very soon installing a new application. In that sense, if you think back to when Facebook first launched official pages or when Twitter had official accounts, you would see on commercials and on billboards, follow us at Facebook.com slash XYZ. same thing for their Twitter handle and so forth. So a QR code is kind of like that, except it's a much more efficient way of getting the action done. Yeah.

So one of my hypotheses was that the Internet's infrastructure is in English. URLs are using Roman characters that don't really correspond to Chinese. And so a lot of even large Chinese companies will have URLs that basically look like fxyjjj.com or dot CN slash some other string of pinion, which is the way that you transliterate. Chinese characters into Roman characters, and that's just so counterintuitive for a lot of people that scanning a QR code is way easier, whereas the pitch here was like you can either type in Facebook.com or you can scan this bizarre looking thing. And so for us, there wasn't that much of a value ad, but in China there actually was because remembering these complicated URLs was

bizarre. QR codes were very popular in Asia 10 plus years ago. So I think part of it is also they just got to that solution first. I mean, but it's interesting to me that like we got to the solution here, but we didn't like it, right? It was kind of like up until very recently with Snapchat, I would say, is sort of like one of the first examples of QR codes. Snapchat, Facebook messengers, trying to put it in Google Instant App. So a couple of changes.

So, I mean, I definitely see there's something in what you're saying about the friction and amount of barriers to entry to be able to quickly and engage with the QR code versus a text URL given the cultural language differences. And then there's also that messaging is taking off because you're now communicating in this mobile platform and that really enables this online to offline snappiness that you couldn't do before. QR codes are used to enable services as well. So for example, you can go to a cafe and you can scan a QR code and then get internet access. And then in return, you are following that cafe's official account and they can therefore ping you with coupons or things afterwards. But it can trigger things beyond going to a site or beyond adding a particular person.

So in that sense, it's a replacement for email because currently what we would do here is you go to a coffee shop. You'd sign up for get the Wi-Fi and maybe drop your name and a pen and paper on the countertop to sign up for their weekly updates or whatever coupons they might give you. Is another cultural element here that email is not as popular and widely used? Email is not as popular. I mean, I think one of the other things that is a major contributing factor is that we didn't really ever get to a point in the U.S. until maybe recently where everyone knew exactly how to scan a QR code on their phones here. I think most people still don't. Most people still don't.

We don't have apps that have QR codes built into them, you know, that that wasn't really a thing until very, very recently. Whereas in China, because everyone has WeChat, many people have Weibo, many people have these other apps. It was like, basically you knew that your phone had a QR code scanner in it. You knew how to use it. The cafe example that Connie talked about, it's enabled because. everyone is on WeChat and right so like you're not just like giving someone your email is like a very loose point of contact but it's it's almost as if Facebook or our operating system and you could just use which QR codes within that context to create these direct connections right

whereas here I still have to download a separate multiple separate QR readers because not all of them work exactly and QR code to URL like QR code going to a random website is actually not as compelling or interesting as a QR code two, we are now friends. And even on the friending component of WeChat, if we're in a group setting at a party, for example, rather than me having to scan 10 people's QR codes, we can all just open a different area of adding contacts, press down our buttons, and then everyone's names will show up and we can add each other almost instantly. So they're pushing the envelope on QR codes. Well, speaking of envelope and no pun intended, because you mentioned in a very different

sense. Let's talk briefly about red envelopes. I mean, that's something that started as a natural cultural meme where you would have Chinese New Year's red envelopes and paper red envelopes with money in them. Both of you have talked about how they've become a thing to make messaging apps like Ali Pay and whatnot really take off. The big thing there is they turned it into this game where if I'm sending a red envelope to a group of people, there's kind of this lottery mechanism where you can assign random amounts of money to the people who are collecting it. And you can also say if I'm sending a red envelope to 10 people, that only three people are eligible to receive it. So there's this race to kind of claim one of the three envelopes.

And this game mechanic has become so popular in China that it's used for not just the Chinese New York holiday, but for all kinds of moments. For example, you're joining a new group chat or you just joined a new company and say there's a group of employees. You might send a red envelope to a big group of people and kind of this is my welcome gift to everyone. But what I really love about it is that all mobile payments are kind of referred to as red envelopes. So, like, I've purchased very, like, large purchases using the red envelope feature in WeChat. And what I really love about it, I think in addition to the gaming part, which is, like, really brilliantly designed, there's also, like, a shaking part, right? Like, depending on what type of red envelope it is, some of them require you to, like, shake the phone really hard. You have to shake at the TV sometimes to collect the red envelope.

Right. It makes a sound, and you see everyone doing it. I have like all these vines of traffic cops all ignoring their jobs and shaking their phones. You can hear the really distinctive sound. But what I think is so brilliant about it is it took something that here, you know, we kind of had to onboard people on and are still onboarding people on, which is mobile payments, peer-to-peer mobile payments. And there they just so brilliantly kind of grafted it onto this cultural phenomenon that already exists. It was immediately legible to people. Exactly. Like, we know what that is and we know how to use it.

And now this thing that would have seemed very alien and unsafe. And actually, somebody at Weech had told me that when they tried rolling out mobile payments between people and stores, people were very distrustful of, you know, why would I send you my payment information on my cell phone that seems so hackable? As soon as they repackaged it as the Hong Bao, the red envelope phenomenon, people were like, oh, that's a thing I have to do with my family. And so the onboarding over that Chinese New Year was just. just ridiculous. It's literally pigbacking or as you're saying, grafted onto an existing cultural meme. The part that I find most fascinating about this is the network effects component of it, because we don't have an equivalent like that in the U.S., really, that's sort of universal, that everyone does automatically. And so there's a lot of tricks that platforms have to use

in order to bootstrap these network effects. You have to find all these growth hacks, as people say, in the jargon. And in China, they're sort of a built-in cultural meme. Around the world, there are more of these existing cultural memes that people can sort of piggyback on. The red envelopes is a massive enabler for payment information and for group chats. But even aside from that, WeChat also did have hacks. There was a period of time where if you were hailing a taxi, a DD car through WeChat, it was discounted. So they definitely invested in kind of hacking that growth as well. You're saying it's not just an accident.

So it's actually a combination of what you're saying together. That they grafted it on to an existing meme, but they also had to intentionally, which is what we talk about when we talk about network effects. They have to intentionally do a number of things in order to continue growing and making that network essentially revolve. Well, you guys, I think we can talk for hours about a cultural tour of memes in China, but that's all we have time for. Thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Thank you. Thank you.