People often ask why I don’t publish my articles on WeChat Official Accounts. I usually don’t answer directly. To be honest, I only reluctantly opened a personal WeChat account in the first place, mainly so I could use a mini program and send notifications when I publish something new.
I fully recognize that reading has moved to mobile, and that WeChat Official Accounts are a major gateway for traffic and sharing on mobile in China. Even so, I still prefer writing on a blog. At most, I’ll publish the full article on my blog and use WeChat only as a channel to let people know it’s there.
This is not because I’m stubborn, nostalgic, or trapped by old habits. It’s because I simply do not think WeChat Official Accounts are a good medium for spreading information and supporting real communication.
This is only my personal view. I’m not trying to force it on anyone. I just want to explain why I have no intention of moving my blog onto WeChat.
What I want from publishing
The internet is supposed to be open and shared, not closed. Information spreads best in open systems.
When I write, I want a few basic things:
- my articles to be available through RSS readers;
- my articles to have a long lifespan, so that something written more than a decade ago can still be read;
- my articles to be indexed by search engines;
- my articles to be collected, organized, cited, and placed alongside other people’s writing in ways that complement each other;
- my articles to remain editable, because writing can contain mistakes and often needs updating.
WeChat Official Accounts do not support these needs very well.
I want my writing to be part of an ecosystem. And an ecosystem means integration, not isolation. It should connect with other things instead of insisting on being the center of everything. The same principle exists in open source software: it is not enough to merely open the source code. Good software must interoperate with existing tools, stay compatible, and support mutual integration. That is a core idea of software design. I think writing should work the same way.
The way articles should spread
What matters to me is discoverability. An article should still be findable years later, not flare up for three or four days inside a social circle and then disappear.
Articles I wrote more than ten years ago can still be found today, and they still help newcomers. That only happens because search engines indexed them, because they were reposted and forked elsewhere, because people cited them, annotated them, and kept them circulating.
Even after long periods without updates, many old pieces on my site are still being shared, searched, recommended, and reread. New readers continue to find them. That is the benefit of being searchable, shareable, and republishable.
I also do not want to become unpaid labor for a platform.
On WeChat Official Accounts, influence depends heavily on constant output. You have to keep publishing to accumulate subscribers and maintain attention. But each article has a very short shelf life. Since it is hard to search and hard to retrieve later, the more you write, the faster your older work is buried and forgotten.
That turns writers into servants of the platform rather than letting their ideas exert long-term influence. On social networks, if you want reach, you have to keep pushing: write more, gain more followers, gather more subscribers. In my view, that runs against how valuable information should actually spread.
More importantly, I want my articles and ideas to be discussed. I want people to correct them, criticize them, argue with them, and push them further. Ideally, an article should trigger reflection and debate, because that is how everyone involved grows.
Very often, the article itself is not the most valuable part. The discussion it generates is more valuable. To me, that is the healthiest form of publishing. WeChat Official Accounts, however, artificially restrict or greatly weaken communication and discussion—especially through mechanisms like curated comments. Yes, some discussions are noisy, abusive, or off-topic. Even so, I still believe a wide-open exchange of views brings more benefit than harm.
So to me, the proper path for information is this: it should be searchable, discussable, citable, compilable, expandable, and updatable—not reduced to reposts, likes, followers, subscriptions, and tips.
In other words, I care about the long-term value of an article, not its short-term metrics.
On plagiarism and copyright
Some people think closed platforms have a built-in advantage over open ones because they offer reporting tools and punish plagiarism more easily. I used to be troubled by plagiarism too, and I even resorted to legal means to defend my rights.
But I ran into those issues early enough that I no longer obsess over them.
First, good and valuable writing will always be copied. In a strange way, that is also a form of recognition.
Second, I have never seen anyone build real success purely by copying other people’s articles. At most, they gain a few likes.
Third, when original work gets plagiarized, it often ends up drawing more attention back to the original.
WeChat’s so-called original-content protection only works inside WeChat itself. Outside that platform, it has little power. Since my articles are often reposted across many places, that kind of protection is limited from the start.
These days I do not worry too much if someone copies my work. On one hand, there are small practical ways to protect an article, such as including distinctive markers of your own. On the other hand, when plagiarism happens, there are usually readers who point out where the original came from and criticize the copier.
So the real priority should be the content itself: write better articles, make them searchable, and let them be cited more broadly. That is what gives your work the strongest protection.
And since some people clearly feel the need to repost or reuse my writing anyway, I would rather they do it properly. I am fine with my articles being freely republished for non-commercial use, as long as the author and source are clearly credited.
On making money from writing
If you think writing technical articles on WeChat Official Accounts is a serious way to make money, I think that is probably a misunderstanding. Marketing content can make money. Technical writing usually cannot, at least not easily.
Sure, it is possible to earn a little. But then you often need to insert ads into soft promotional pieces or ride whatever topic is currently hot.
That logic has never appealed to me.
My view is simple: a significant part of a person’s influence comes from independence. The moment I start writing advertorials, I am effectively selling myself.
That is why I do not make money through my articles. I write code, so I earn through my actual skills—consulting, training, and enterprise services for companies. To be frank, those pay much better than writing articles ever would. And more importantly, the kind of writing I do is meant for sharing and spreading ideas, not for monetization.
The point of writing is to share and to influence, not to cash in.
I’ve had experiences that reinforced this belief.
When I was at Amazon, I once told the company I wanted to write a few blog posts about Amazon—its technology and some of its ways of working—as a kind of introduction that might even help my team recruit people. My manager told me something I still remember: the reason my blog had influence was precisely because it was independent. If I started writing company promotion on it, I would be selling that independence away.
Later, when I was at Alibaba, a senior leader wanted me to use my blog and microblog to help market Alibaba Cloud. I declined as politely as I could. The result was that I was judged poorly on team-collaboration values.
That says enough.
As for ads, articles on WeChat Official Accounts are often mixed with sponsored messaging and advertising placement. That style simply is not mine. I do not want the overall tone of the platform to drag down the tone of my own writing. So I prefer to keep some distance.
Put more directly: I do not write to make money, and I do not believe writing is how I should make money. I write to share ideas and to have an impact. I am willing to use social networks as tools, but I do not want to live inside them, and I certainly do not want to be captive to them.