Sticking to the principle of "not disturbing users," WeChat has finally taken action on the Yuanbao red envelope

Author | Huang Yu

On the first withdrawal day of Tencent's Yuanbao Spring Festival 1 billion red envelope event, the sharing link for the Yuanbao red envelope was blocked by its "brother product" WeChat.

On February 4th, many people discovered that the Yuanbao red envelope link could no longer be opened directly in WeChat and could only be accessed by copying it into a browser to continue claiming the red envelope. The redirect link for Yuanbao red envelopes in WeChat displayed "The webpage contains content that induces sharing, following, and other inducement behaviors."

Soon, WeChat officially released an announcement regarding the crackdown on third-party inducement sharing behaviors, stating that it had recently issued a "Notice on Crackdown on Third-Party Violations" to combat excessive marketing and inducement sharing behaviors that have surged around the Spring Festival.

WeChat stated: "In this context, we received user feedback and complaints regarding Yuanbao, indicating that its related Spring Festival marketing activities involved inducing users to frequently share links to WeChat groups through 'completing tasks' and 'claiming red envelopes,' disrupting the platform's ecological order, affecting user experience, and causing harassment to users."

After assessment, WeChat took action against Yuanbao's violation links, restricting them from being opened directly in WeChat. The relevant measures took effect immediately.

This incident means that the direct connection path for Yuanbao red envelopes within the WeChat ecosystem has been cut off. If users want to continue claiming or withdrawing, they must go through cumbersome cross-application operations such as "copying the link and opening it in a browser."

Currently, Yuanbao has also publicly responded to the issue of being blocked by WeChat, stating that it is urgently optimizing and adjusting the sharing mechanism and will launch it as soon as possible to ensure users have a good experience claiming red envelopes.

This kind of "righteousness to eliminate relatives" ban can be seen as a power struggle within a wealthy family.

Not long ago, at a Tencent employee meeting, Ma Huateng had high hopes for the Yuanbao Spring Festival red envelope activity, attempting to recreate the miracle of WeChat Pay sweeping the market with red envelopes 11 years ago.

Since the event began in the early hours of February 1st, Yuanbao red envelopes have indeed demonstrated the strong viral growth capability of Tencent's social ecosystem, helping the Yuanbao APP briefly top the Apple Store's free app rankings, surpassing ByteDance's Doubao.

However, this "viral" expansion based on social relationships quickly hit the compliance red wall within the WeChat ecosystem.

WeChat's ban on Yuanbao red envelopes was directly triggered by its violation of the "WeChat External Link Content Management Specifications" regarding "induced sharing."

According to Yuanbao's rules, for every friend a user invites to claim, the sharer's chances of winning a lottery increase by one.

This design inherently encourages users to forward the red envelope link to every corner of their social networks. In reality, this has evolved into a serious disruption of the WeChat social environment: from warm family groups to serious homeowner groups, the original communication space has been occupied by dense red envelope links, leading to significant user dissatisfaction and even group exits and removals.

Previously, an article from Wall Street Insight titled “From Yuanbao's 1 Billion New Users, See Tencent's User Stance Shift” pointed out that Yuanbao's 1 billion new user activity is Tencent's response to "not easily disturbing users." A compromise in product culture is enough to glimpse Tencent's anxiety in this AI battle.

On February 2nd, The Paper reported that there had already been discussions and responses within Tencent regarding this matter. According to an internal letter from Tencent, it stated: "Today we received a lot of discussions and feedback regarding the Yuanbao Spring Festival red envelope activity and the management regulations for WeChat external links. Our team is closely following up and maintaining close communication with the legal, public relations, and relevant business teams for comprehensive assessment. Thank you all for your attention and thoughts on this, which helps us better evaluate the compliance boundaries and user experience of such activities."

The internal letter also mentioned: "Taking this opportunity, we would like to share our current thoughts and basic stance: The design logic of the Yuanbao Spring Festival red envelope activity is based on 'no threshold for receipt.' Users can directly receive the basic red envelope without completing tasks such as assisting or collecting cards. This is different from the 'induced sharing' model that the platform has consistently opposed. Based on the current mechanism design of this activity, our preliminary judgment is that it is fundamentally different from the malicious marketing activities that the platform aims to combat. The platform has always maintained an open attitude towards truly beneficial activities for users without additional conditions. This rule, in principle, also applies to all third-party software or activities. We will closely monitor the operation of related activities and will listen to user feedback and experiences in a timely manner."

Nevertheless, when an application needs to "interfere" with social relationship chains to achieve growth, it has already positioned itself against the governance of the WeChat ecosystem.

As a national-level social tool, WeChat's core moat lies in the purity of user experience and the unity of rules. If it makes exceptions for its own Yuanbao, the credibility that WeChat has accumulated over the years in governing third-party induced links will be completely lost.

This ban is undoubtedly a heavy blow to Yuanbao's 1 billion red envelope plan.

The invalidation of links has directly raised the participation threshold for users, creating a huge gap in the originally smooth traffic funnel at the WeChat transition point.

A deeper crisis lies in how many genuine users this reliance on red envelope fission can actually leave for Yuanbao.

Many voices on social platforms have pointed out that there is currently serious functional homogenization among large model applications.

Yuanbao has not formed a dimensionality reduction strike against competitors in terms of hard power such as image generation and dialogue. Once the tide of red envelope subsidies recedes, how many people's first choice for AI entry Yuanbao can become remains a huge question mark.

The failure of Yuanbao's red envelope within WeChat also reflects the game between large companies in breaking through business and the bottom line of the ecosystem: even under the same roof, business sprinting must bow to social rules.

If Yuanbao truly wants to recreate the WeChat red envelope moment of the past, it may not only rely on that 1 billion yuan distribution but should consider how to genuinely impress ordinary users who are already tired of "task groups" with product strength beyond that red line of transition