The Attention Revolution: WeChat

Attention overload has become a new kind of modern-day "sub-health."

On average, a person encounters 6,000 to 10,000 ads every day, whether they mean to or not.

That number is twice what it was 20 years ago.

You can see how much money is involved by looking at companies like Tencent, whose ad business has grown from around 200 million to now being worth hundreds of billions.

To protect my attention, I recently made some changes. I started with WeChat, the app I rely on most in daily life.

WeChat brings together chat, official accounts, video accounts, livestreams, music, shopping, games, and even mini-programs—essentially a full mini operating system in one app. But at the beginning, it was only for logging in, adding friends, and sending messages.

Because it is deeply tied to personal relationships and social networks, WeChat has become almost impossible to fully avoid in everyday life. Since that is the case, I decided to take a scalpel to it and make some changes:

First, I unfollowed all official accounts and service accounts, and turned off personalized recommendations and video account recommendations.

Second, I deleted more than 200 friends and left over 40 group chats, then folded the remaining conversations away.

Third, I turned off every feature in the Discover tab, including Moments, video accounts, livestreams, "Top Stories," search, and more.

Fourth, I disabled all services, including credit card payments, phone top-ups, utility bills, travel services, hotels, and homestays.

Fifth, I turned off WeChat's focus notifications, app icon badges, floating notifications, lock screen notifications, sound alerts, and vibration—leaving only incoming calls.

After doing all of this, I got a kind of "lite" version of WeChat. The only regrettable part is that WeChat still doesn't let me turn off the profile sections for status, Moments, Works, Store, Wallet, and stickers.

Of course, this process involved a period of withdrawal. I used to love scrolling through Moments, official accounts, and video accounts. But once the constant stream of messages and information attacks was reduced, I realized that the attention WeChat had stolen from me was coming back. And now I’m already used to it—I don't want to go back.