You can put $5 in a red envelope and set it to disburse equally, so each friend gets $1. Say you have a chat group with five pals. But it also encourages users to send money to groups in randomized amounts. Like many other payment apps, WeChat allows its users to send Packets of predetermined amounts to each other, either individually or in groups. That was when I started to understand the competitive, gambling-like thrill of Red Packets.
I felt ridiculously excited, like I’d won way more than part of a penny. It also said my friend Julian had opened one too, that we had taken 11 seconds to do so, and that I had opened mine first. I tapped on it, and a full-screen message announced that I had received 0.03 yuan-a fraction of a cent. A few days later, a Red Packet icon appeared in a chat stream I had going with friends back in China. I was in Beijing for the last weekend of the show’s run, and can happily say all those red envelopes seemed to pay off. The producer would also send red envelopes as a reward to the cast and crew for their hard work. To me it sounded bizarre, the equivalent of your boss tossing a fistful of change at your cubicle. Mike said whenever people weren’t checking their messages enough, the producer would send a red envelope to the group, and everyone would go crazy. It’s a feature WeChat introduced in 2014 to exchange money electronically, based on the age-old Chinese custom of giving red envelopes filled with money at weddings, holidays, and special occasions. Things got really weird, though, when Mike started mentioning the Red Packets. When an app popularized in part through the exchange of horse-dance GIFs and cartoon anthropomorphic dumplings becomes the default platform for work communication, you’re going to have a sticker problem. In a country of 710 million internet users, Tencent, the Shenzhen-based goliath that owns WeChat, reports that as of September, the app has 768 million active users-up 35 percent over the same period last year. But it turned out that in China, where relatively few people use email, almost everyone uses WeChat.
Up until then, I had thought of WeChat as a social messaging app, like Facebook crossed with WhatsApp.
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