Not terribly interested in this video platform as I also don’t use YouTube. I really hope Google gets broken up and I don’t like them harvesting my data and selling it to the US Government any more than I like companies like Bytedance selling my data to the Chinese Government. I am in the US and think we should have established data privacy and data protection laws long before things got to the point they have gotten too.

Don't fall for the proximity bias, china is decades ahead on surveillance and stepping on personal rights. They act as a hive. They care more for what they believe that are they nationals and may look harmless to us non-chinese... but i do fear them.

In any case, I dont see them pressing a button to launch swarms of AI commanded drones to kill every person on a partially AI generated list that they probably already have in their hands, right now... i leave that dystopia to israel alone.

Yes they could, but it's really a question of their incentives. They could easily use it to manipulate elections, etc. The biggest danger is probably to East Asia where China is trying to claim most of the ocean, using it to copy what US Republicans has been doing with Facebook and Twitter to support attacks on politicians opposing them. See also how Facebook ignored its role in the Myanmar genocide

China makes palantir look like freedom respecting software.

As far as I'm aware, google isn't enacting a genocide... as far as I'm aware

I don't know why but "Google et al" made me laugh

Ah yes, instead of US big brother you give it to offshore Big Brother.

safely offshore in china

Lmao

Weird, the few times I've used it I had no problem with my VPN.

I've avoided that platform so yes if I'm understanding you correctly.

This is one thing I noticed using Chinese social media. There are almost zero discussions of local politics. Foreign politics is fine though

Because YouTube doesn't engage in anything like that ofc.

Depending on the politic

Ye ‘ol Fail Army or whatever the fuck they call that stream of content now

Gamers Nexus started to print their videos on DVDs and Blurays recently

What is the national security concern?

Believe it or not, two separate things can both be bad.

The scale is different. There are tons of videos on social media right now that are thinly veiled instructions on how to destroy flock cameras. Something like that would NOT fly in china.

Thatsthejoke.info

I mean if another competitor rises up, he'll just create an account there too. You're stuck with peertube pretty much

Thing is peertube is still pretty much new and empty. I didn't find much content that I would be interested in or even an interesting community. Although I see its potential as a social platform I don't think it will ever replace YouTube (at least for me) as it wouldn't give creators the financial incentive to use it.

So... what? You're against this becoming more accessible outside of China?

Literally every company is given a domestic advantage in their home country? Subsidies and visibility etc in home turf is not a new concept China has invented for their products.

What is an unfair advantage?

This just means rich individuals decide what people see instead of states. It doesn't result in education.

This isn't a new idea though, it was the "hacker" ethos of the 90s. Most nerds believed in that. But it was wrong because we do need to limit hate speech. Because racist speech is racist recruitment. And we do need to limit the influence of plutocrats and corporations on information.

I also believe neoliberalism is a failed and genocidal ideology that should similarly be banned like advocating for fascism.

Like the other commenter pointed out the other problem is the massive power imbalance. They have billions and they crush us. It doesn't matter if something is right or wrong if billions are spend to hire the smartest sociopaths to craft an ad or PR campaign to emotionally manipulate the masses.

And the truth matters. We have a fundamental human right to reality. Constantly amplifying bullshit for revenue makes the actual flow of important information and ideas impossible.

OK?

I'm missing your point. I started interacting with Chinese people on XHS.

Literally none of what you said is true. Chinese people regularly interact with people of other countries on the global internet. its Literally impossible not to run into Chinese netizens on any major social media site.

You can literally just make an account on Xiaohongshu and chat with normal people in China.

I routinely swap recipes, talk about video games, new tech, swap cleaning tips, chat about restaurant recommendations and fashion. There's a big cultural difference, sure, but Chinese people are, on the whole, incredibly friendly and hospitable and they're curious about breaking down the myths they've heard about America and happy to break down the myths we've heard about China. We think they have a social credit system and they think a dishwasher can afford a huge "villa". Though now that it's opened up a bit they talk about a poverty "kill line" where if you fall below a certain income you are pretty much doomed to die. Which is exaggerated, but has some basis in reality, like most of these myths.

The one thing I think is a huge barrier is that they can't understand why we drink cold water, even in the winter. So many conversations I've had have been about drinking cold water and asking "don't you get dampness???" Honey, I've either never had dampess or I've been damp my whole life so I don't know.

Either way, they're just, like, people. And thanks to the magic of the internet, you can just talk to those people.

2 reasons imo.

1. Chrome inertia. Everyone who’s locked into it from the days it was legitimately faster.
2. Every time it gets mentioned, its supporters like to “no true Scotsman” the original project and suggest their preferred fork instead.

Im gonna be honest, im glad a lot of people don't use ad blockers, or they would come down a lot harder on ad blocking. As it is google is trying their hardest to push their authentication nonsense everywhere to lock us all in to whatever software THEY decide we are authorised to use

Most people on their phones use the default browser, either Chrome or whatever Chromium-based the manufacturer includes. But otherwise it's the browser included with the Facebook app, as some are literally locked into the Facebook-and-Youtube walled garden.

I think being the only browser with a credible stance on ad blockers will help them in the long run.

I use it and I install it on every family and work PC I can but the memory of the bloated Firefox that made so many originally switch to chrome is still there. I want apple to base their browser on Firefox to maybe get some traction back

lots of people don't like the direction the company is heading

What's a BL drama?

I'll be more specific. The PRC (government) is an enemy to humanity in my view.

Well because they caused a couple million to die due to covid. Not only did they lie by saying the virus wasn't transmissible to humans, but they then let people fly internationally to spread it to the rest of the world instead of trying to quarantine the outbreak hotspots. Then they got a bunch of CCP dickriders internationally to empty the shelves in their respective western countries of all their medical supplies to ship over to China, who then made deals to sell it to poorer countries only on the condition they make a spectacle about it with big banners saying thank you china. And the US helped by funding gain of function research in the wuhan institute of virology where they kept live bats riddled with diseases and sold the bats to the wet market on the sly when they were done with the research. Millions die because a shitty country's leaders want to save face instead of saving millions of people from a preventable death. Theres a tonne more shit they do out of the media spotlight, but they do a great job amplifying the dumb shit Trump does instead to distract from their own weasly asymmetric warfare against the west.

Competition.

honestly i think it'd be nice to have a full p2p video directory instead. something like peertube but without instances, resembling a torrent tracker like nyaa, aimed generally for educational stuff, entertainment, music, etc. basically youtube but as a torrent tracker, to reduce the storage requirement. you'd be able to seed your favorite media and the fact that people would not want to waste their storage on seeding worthless stuff and the technical hurdle of p2p would keep the mindless slop out.

I think you just might be right, which is sad.

it would be cool if i (or any user) could just contribute a part of their storage space / network connection to the video platform. something like "i store this video (that i just watched) for a month sothat others can see it too".

unfortunately, as i understand it, there's both technical and legal hurdles.

• technical hurdle: this doesn't work for mobile, where network traffic is often limited. e.g. if i pay $10 for 50 GB upload/download capacity per month, then i don't want 49 GB of those to be sucked up by other people's video watching behavior.
• legal hurdle: what if some of the content is accidentally illegal? then i would be distributing illegal material, which can quickly become a problem for myself ... (seeing how it is illegal in many countries to distribute copyrighted material, but not to watch it oneself).

They ran over children with tanks and it’s a crime to talk about it there.

Yes I will make fun of the Chinese government for not acknowledging their atrocities. Yes I also refuse to shut up about the US government putting Japanese-Americans in camps during WW2, or shooting college kids at Kent state, or putting Mexican kids in cages under the past 3 presidents. Don’t let governments hide the boot they want on our necks

Sincerely? I hope not, or at least it must be an opt-in thing rather than something forcefully imbued into the platform.

Languages that I don't know may pose a language barrier to me, but at the same time there's something magic in getting to recognize (and even trying to spell/write) certain words and symbols once I put myself into trying to figure out what's written and how it's written.

This is how I managed to learn (albeit imperfectly and in a fragmented manner) the ideographs I mentioned earlier, among several other languages, including the so-called "dead languages" such as Sumerian and Akkadian (e.g. whenever I see "𒆤", I know it's "lil" meaning wind/spirit)... And this is how I learned, to give broader examples, what a "bumat" (البومة) is in Arabic and which letters are involved in its writing, or what's the difference between a "búho" and a "mochuelo" and a "lechuza" in Spanish, or what a "fukurou" (フクロウ) is in Japanese, or what a "chouette" is in French, or what an "oehoe" is in Dutch (especially how one was able to enfrighten two Dutch villages years ago, the cute yet fierce "terror-oehoe"), or "Eule" in German, or more symbolic words such as "lila" (לילה) "night" in Hebrew or "Лилит" as the Russian transliteration for Hebrew "לילית"... I was able to learn, or at least memorize, a ton of things across languages... Without AI.

Any kind of automatic translation, especially when AI-powered and fused into the UI, would hardly let me learn a language, because it'd bring the whole thing chewed up and translated, with no means for me to break the sentence down to its constituent words and letters/symbols and how much the surrounding context changes their meanings... not to mention how it ends up wiring our brains to expect the machine to do the reading for us, then we become dependent on machines to do what's essentially part of being a living being (humans and whatnot).

Also, translation often involves nuance, tone, sarcasm, emotions. AIs can be able to do "sentiment analysis" and connect words together in order to derive an assessment, but it'll be devoid of the attempted connection from whoever wrote the text being translated.

That said, Bilibili does have an automatic translation for titles and comments, turned on by default. I deliberately turned it off, because I want to see the Chinese ideographs, even though I'm not able to truly understand what I'm reading there. I expect to learn them from context and repetition, from trial and error... And when I get to see one of the ideographs standing out before my vision as something I know, getting to see them and yelling "hey, I know these two symbols, these are baxi 巴西 and together they mean Brazil"... Oh, there's a whole fun to it, a fun that's virtually non-existent when a clanker is doing all the heavy lifting.

Don't get me wrong, I do use translators, I'm not against translators, but I personally prefer using them manually, under my own pace and command while also being able to isolate certain words from surrounding sentences, this way getting to expand my vocabulary a little bit through a research of my own (e.g. looking it up on Wiktionary or other dictionaries out there), because I want to be able to learn something, anything, from it.

[email protected]

How well does GrayJay work? Freetube used to work amazing but it's a tug of war now with google which frequently bans my IP. And it's yt only.

I found this article actually explaining how to bypass this for yt-dlp. But I wonder how far we'll come to have this in a multi source app.

Porn is illegal in China in any form. That's why their social media is 90% softcore porn of girls "testing workout equipment". I'm not even kidding, until you train your algo to ignore this almost all content is softcore porn bait and not even social media. Even e-commerce is just porn now lol

From what I've seen, you can avoid the gore issues by desaturating the gory image or part of the video. The porn thing is true, women will use image stickers, mosaics or other obscuring methods to cover up even small amounts of cleavage, but that doesn't mean there isn't thirst trap content, it just looks a little different.

That just doesn't have a big impact on the content I actually want to see, so I don't really mind it.

hello pet Sue there are no ads

On purpose? Not much.

The bigger concern would be when a criticism of China would be an important facet of a topic that would be covered, and omitting that would detract from the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the content.

Imagine if video hosting platforms couldn't call out any of the stuff Trump does as wrong or incompetent. So so many topics would have to be ignored entirely to avoid offending the administration. Currently China criticism is a little less critical in the moment by comparison, but things shift over time.

eg I used to watch those blokes, serpentza and laowhy86, for a non-china-sponsored-influencer view of China.

is it illegal to not host content critical of China in EU? otherwise local laws are irrelevant.

Private companies are allowed to decline to host at their will. USA nor EU mandate that a platform must host content they don't want to.

In practice, it's possible that China companies operating outside of China won't implement the same restrictions that they do within China. Whatever the Chinese government thinks the importance of maintaining censorship within the borders, it seems probable that the government and companies will be more pragmatic about realities in other nations.

At the time of posting I was chatting with a woman from Guangdong about her recommendations for Samsung phones to buy my partner, so, I don't think so.

I mean in the sense creators use "unalive" and other euphemisms to not get demonetized. For the China market, any reference to a certain honey loving cartoon bear or references to a tranquil celestial place are out

Europe exists with neither of these problems. You can get a credit card if you want but loads of people don't. From a low effort search it actually looks like most people in almost all European countries don't have one. Few exceptions like Norway but even there you have a very significant minority without one.

UK here and I bought a house without ever having a credit card or worrying or knowing what a credit rating is.

fortunately, posting that Donald Trump is a pedophile rapist online doesn't tank your credit score.

try speaking out about China online and see what happens.

personally, I've been harassed enough to know I should never visit China.

So generally, in the PRC, the central government will put out a request or state a problem, and then provinces will attempt to implement a solution independently. If the central government likes the out come of one of the trialed system they might make it national policy.

That’s basically what social credit was. The central government gave a vague cryptic request for potential solutions about low trust in modern society, and a bunch of different provinces implemented various ideas, some via contract to private companies. Some provinces didn’t trial anything, some trialed systems that were basically just credit scores, some trialed a system of ranking “how good of a citizen you are” and gave gift cards and stuff to people who scored high.

Ultimately, the central government choose not to adopt any of them and the various trials were spun down. So, social credit was a lot of things, and thus multiple different ideas of what it was are correct, although a lot of reports on it mixed and matched different parts form different trials to make it sound as bad as possible, and some will just talk about one particularly benign system to make it seem like others are being hysterical. Ether way it wasn’t ever a nation wide thing and is largely defunct now.

It's identical basically

You got the direction of your argument wrong (credit scores are a big problem and proto surveillance state stuff) but no, the social credit system is indeed worse both in terms of what it is used to punish and the means of punishment.

credit score

I’ve heard posting things that are anti-capitalist can reduce it, so be careful what you post!

It really isn't helpful when you just make shit up. Undermines any point you were trying to make.

Haha fair enough

I used to watch hella New Japan events on there

Depends on if you're Chinese abroad because they do try to exert pressure and have what are almost police in other countries