The China-centric video sharing platform is expanding with a new international app and an English version of its website – with no identity verification (for now at least)
I trust this as much as I trust big American tech platforms.
Considering how much damage Google et al do, I legitimately wonder whether China could even do worse, and I’m not even a tankie.
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.
Flock is selling drones in the US.
and stepping on personal rights.
The racial make-up of the prison population suggests that the lead is not that big.
The US has the largest prison population on the planet but China is the one stepping on people’s rights?
I get that the CCP sucks ass but come on. As far as I’m concerned YouTube needs a serious competitor, it’s not like I’m moving to Shenzhen or something. YouTube is a complete and utter shithole.
You don’t know about their social credit system?
China makes palantir look like freedom respecting software.
I don’t know why but “Google et al” made me laugh
As far as I’m aware, google isn’t enacting a genocide… as far as I’m aware
Maybe not technically “enacting” but certainly supporting/furthering: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/google-reportedly-signs-45-million-contract-with-netanyahu-to-promote-israeli-messaging/ar-AA1LX8Lm
Sure, but Google’s just doing it because it’s profitable, not because they’re hell-bent on annihilating an ethnicity /s
Sure, if you remove the profit motive they wouldn’t provide resources.
Certainly not morally defensible… but also not outright evil either. Just absent any ethical compass.
IBM supplied the computing machines for the Holocaust, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is giving cloud computing to ICE.
That means your awareness needs to be expanded my friend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nimbus
This is a good (but non-exhaustive) list to look through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Gaza_war
Or my definition of enacting.
okay. your awareness of how genocides work also need to be expanded.
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
Sure, but I’d rather have my info safely offshore in China than to give it right to big brother. I also bet far far fewer ads and more fun commercials because you have no idea what they are about. They are currently destoyjng the natural order in printer ink. I support that wholeheartedly. My Epson inks are 90 and the knockoffs are 20 and work just as well. It’s always temporarily beneficial when player 2 enters the market.
*Edit it does not like vpns. That’s a no for me.
Ah yes, instead of US big brother you give it to offshore Big Brother.
But China isn’t going to sell my data to Uncle Sam to help deport my family (who are legal citizens). So there’s that.
Why would you think that?
Who is more of a direct threat to US citizens ? At the moment I would say there’s way more chance ICE will come after you for posting or speaking out or protesting or hell just being you. I can’t remember the last time I worried about China selling me something because that’s what they will use the data for.
I’d say China is the greatest threat to U.S. sovereignty but that’s a discussion no one here seems to want to have. No one seems to think TikTok is an issue apparently.
Edit: it’s been an issue since musical.ly, just so we’re clear
When you’re here, you’re family!
Big Boss
safely offshore in china
Lmao
Weird, the few times I’ve used it I had no problem with my VPN.
I’ll try again when I’m back on my own laptop.
the same as Tik Tok?
I’ve avoided that platform so yes if I’m understanding you correctly.
Political censorship is definitely worse so I‘m not going to bother.
This is one thing I noticed using Chinese social media. There are almost zero discussions of local politics. Foreign politics is fine though
There is no politics in Ba Sing Se.
You get nuked from orbit if you attempt to talk about local politics is why. Like hard.
Depending on the politic
I can’t wait for this to be announced as a threat to national security after creating mild competition for YouTube.
Maybe things change in the future, but right now I see VHS tapes at local thrift shops as being bigger competition to houtube than this.
Ye ‘ol Fail Army or whatever the fuck they call that stream of content now
Probably has a few same videos that still get shown everywhere?
Gamers Nexus started to print their videos on DVDs and Blurays recently
Y’know, free market
BRB, gonna upload something about Tianaamen Square.
They will just remove it
site not found
Great firewall strikes again
Same old shit, different day. Can’t you find anything original? Post something negative about ICE on YouTube or something negative about Israel.
I got perma banned from reddit because of my comment that all the ICE traitors will never get their sign on bonus - which they haven’t - and after this is all over, they will have to go back to sucking immigrant cock behind the dollar store.
So don’t talk to me about propaganda and censorship. Western tech companies are just as bad if not worse. Especially Twitter or X or Y or whatever that shit is called, doesn’t know the first thing about free speech. Not that surprising if the owner does a Hitler salute.
Edit: one last thing. How much better is the American TikTok after it was taken over by another right wing company? Yeah, I thought so.
Believe it or not, two separate things can both be bad.
So should an article about a Chinese app not automatically get the ‘Tiananmen square’ response. Or any article about China for that matter. Like a Pavlov reaction.
Should an article about a Chinese app not get a comment about Chinese censorship?
No. It’s highly relevant.
The what response?
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.
Given how China just took all the money away from and sent to prison the CEO of evergrande, I’m starting to trust their apps more than american ones.
The only reason that happened was because that CEO’s decisions lead to massive negative results in China’s real-estate sectors, which in turn cost the Chinese government a lot of money, and THAT is why that criminal actually saw consequences.
Don’t take that as proof that China judges everyone fairly regardless of wealth/status. As long as you keep your crimes to an extent that it doesn’t cause a massive backlash on large swaths of the country, it’s a different ballgame.
As others have said, you’d be wise to distrust both.
As long as you keep your crimes to an extent that it doesn’t cause a massive backlash on large swaths of the country, it’s a different ballgame.
actually that does sound kinda reasonable. what is a crime, if not defined by its negative consequences for the rest of the population?
I am not sure you understood what he meant? Do you know about the abhorrent building practices in China? Tofu dreg? That is how some make money. The consequences are about as bad as it gets. As long as the can sweep it under the carpet nothing happens. Huge backlash would be 100’000s or perhaps 10x more protesting or something else they can not easily silence. That is absolutely not good in any way. Like dumping dangerous waste and only getting in trouble when the kid of the Mayor gets sick.
That’s not what he said. There’s a difference between crimes that can’t easily be traced to you and crimes that trigger outrage against you. China acts against the latter. Much of their consumer rights enforcement is about appeasement, not about actual rights, so you only see big action when there’s scandals about serious harm and people effectively being robbed. And you better not talk about it when it’s “done”.
Also if you are part of the elite family, you are untouchable. the higher up you go without being a protected class, the more chance you will be harvested like a leek.
No one said you have to trust either.
Because the problems aren’t with the businesses like it is in the US.
They are with the government. Which can get much worse since there is no one to govern those.
And in China, the government is in every app. It is by law.
lol, same here
I trust (and distrust) both equally.
That was just a money grab, put the ceo in jail and “Confiscate” the money. russia does it all the time. same shit different country.
Hey, I welcome any serious competition. Youtube has devolved into a much more censored platform than what we used to make fun of the Chinese for. “Unalive”, “grape”, and several topics that are demonetized on sight.
As a gay Uyghur I wonder how this platform is going to work for me?
You will be invited with open arms, mr Cumfart. And then shot, of course. Can’t have any of those pesky gay ass Uyghurs turning our kids gay and Uyghur, now can we?
Ironically I searched for something unrelated and got bombarded with a bunch of BL dramas.
What’s a BL drama?
Bacon lettuce
“boys’ love” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys’_love
Basically gay dramas, supposedly targeted at women.
Boy love drama. The restrictions on homosexual content is overblown, though not entirely fabricated. XHS has plenty of LGBTQ content, for example, domestic and foreign. Not as much as Western social media, to be fair, but also I don’t see people bullying LGBTQ people or creators on XHS.
There’s more restrictions on overt sexuality, straight or gay. Make no mistake, Chinese culture is more conservative in some ways than the West, but it’s not as restrictive as the news makes it out to be.
If you are gay enough and familiar with Russian / Siberian culture you might get a job at miHoYo.
I mean. This is… Not worse than now, I guess?
Any entity that can take a chunk out of YouTube’s dominance is a good thing.
But I’m not going to celebrate another corp making a shamelessly monetized video site. They’re independent-ish now, yes, but for how long? It’s just a different flavor of attention gaming and enshittification in the long run.
And I’m skeptical they have the muscle to significantly displace YouTube’s iron grip on everything, even with Google tightening the screws.
Yes! We have peertube which is actually cool.
Unfortunately Peertube is going to be… very difficult to scale.
It needs more people to engage and more exposure.
This won’t help PeerTube become mainstream either.
Hosting videos is extremely expensive, thus there is a financial incentive against hosting a PeerTube instance.
Unless PeerTube fixes the incentives, it won’t be sustainable long-term.
They should do something like Nebula. A subscription maybe in cryptocoins so you still get privacy over your credit card.
It’s more that (as I understand it) the storage requirements increase exponentially relative to the number of users.
how so?
Ah, I was misremembering an aspect - though the requirement is still there that as users join the storage* requirements will increase in the worst case exponentially, it’s not inherent to the ideal system, rather it’s a byproduct of cacheing requirements. At a certain point there will be enough users that popular content being accessed will overwhelm the instance hosting it - this is somewhat fixed by caching popular videos on other instances, but as the network of instances grows the need for cached resources grows with it. There may be ways to get around this, if so I’m simply not familiar enough with the current state of the software to know what those solutions are.
nah i think that the storage requirement grows approximately linear with the number of users, and maybe in the worst case quadratically; but the typical case should be linear.
People in this thread having a normal one, predictably. Like even if (or especially if) you genuinely believe that China is the evil monster you were raised to believe, wouldn’t you be at least a little bit curious to get a window into their online culture? Don’t you want an opportunity for more interaction between Chinese and US/Western netizens?
As an American I’ve been using billibilli for a long long time as I consume a lot of Chinese media.
Billibilli is dog shit, the company is awful, the platform is cancer, and the entire thing makes YouTube and Google look like fucking saints.
Like holy fuck. I do not give one fucking flying piece of shit about china bad america good or any of that nonsense.
The fucking Chinese bullshit that people have to put up with on billibilli is outright nonsense. I just want to watch my fucking silly videos and dramas.
And all that said YouTube is ALSO dog shit with out any saving graces. It’s all fucking awful.
So… what? You’re against this becoming more accessible outside of China?
I’m not the commenter you replied to but I read their view more along these lines. That no large online video provider gives a good experience and while this is more competition for YouTube it’s kind of like comparing two piles of shit - both stink.
Which idk never used it but yeah China has its own brand of suck compared with the West. Still, I agree it’d be good to have more cultural exchange - that’s the sort of thing that over time leads to better relations between nation states and decreases the likelihood of war.
You know the older I get, the lesson of “there are no good guys” really keeps getting hammered home. This is just a reminder of that.
These reactions just seem a little overwrought to me. I’m sure everyone commenting watches plenty of YouTube, but the mere mention of a Chinese platform brings dire warnings and energetic condemnations. Like maybe it does suck, but most people here wouldn’t really know! That’s my point-- that it’s crazy to have such strong opinions about something that you have no experience with.
I get it. There’s a lot of propaganda out there (that goes both ways) about China.
For better or worse they’re going to lead the charge into the 2100s, this is the dawn of the new Chinese century and the USA is busy handing them the reins as we implode our country.
I think China is a little friendlier overall in their foreign relations and while freedom of expression is important I would not say their society as a whole is better or worse than all the rest of the world. It feels like sometimes, from what I’ve heard and seen, China is “more” free in certain aspects compared to the USA (and definitely less free in others)
On the one hand, Chinese companies get an unfair advantage domestically. On the other, I would love to see Google sweat.
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.
How many foreign films are allowed into China per year?
What is an unfair advantage?
Hell ignore that, Google helps to write us trade policies. Do people really think there’s an open free market system in America or Europe for that matter? Look at Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Peasants were kept out but all the tech bro CEOs were there. Y’all are dreaming if you think that things are fair right now. Especially if you don’t think it’s a two-way street.
Being blocked is one I think
I just dislike the traditional framing of things like “unfair” in contexts like this. It’s always been used by dominant powers to destroy any domestic capacity. In this example, if China had never put up any barriers to foreign tech, they would have none of their own at all by now.
What I believe is in freedom of the internet. As in everyone should be able to access it and no one should be able to police what is on it. Complete free flow of information. Reddit should exist in the state that it does and lemmy should be there to counter balance it and no nation state should be able to say “no, we only allow one of these”. This doesn’t undermine any existing legal frameworks mind you. For example: distribution of underage pornography is still a crime almost everywhere and those who operate such sites are fair game for prosecution.
I get this may be too radical of an idea for some, but I truly believe education is the key to information literacy, not censorship.
This just means rich individuals decide what people see instead of states. It doesn’t result in education.
No they don’t. If I don’t want to see what Reddit wants me to see, I just switch to Lemmy instead. Reddit cannot ban Lemmy. But if the state had censorship powers, they could ban Lemmy.
I think its the same problem with the press on TV and print form. Rich individuals can buy up all press outlets and control the narrative. Its hard (and restrictive) to broadcast on TV and print. On the internet, at least the freedom to publish and access information has a low barrier to entry. A rich individual may buy one lemmy instance, can they buy them all? Can they buy its successor? The lower barrier and less restrictive nature of the internet (or how it should be) is too fast moving for them to compete imo. All the states need to do is educate people on how to consume media correctly.
A rich individual may buy one lemmy instance, can they buy them all?
Yes, easily. Additionally, they can control the search engines which lead there or not, the commonly used platforms for code sharing so that development is more difficult, and so forth. They have an incredible advantage through economy of scale. The barrier to entry for putting any information on the internet may not be very high, but making it findable and accessible has a very high barrier, and relies on corporate-controlled platforms.
I think the better question is will they be able to buy them all. Buying implies the other party is willing to sell.
Its true that this information will be harder to access if not indexed properly, but word of mouth is a good backup for that. I didn’t find lemmy from google, someone (non corporate entity) posted a link to it somewhere. Now, that ‘somewhere’ may be corporate controlled and ban certain links but I’d argue that will just split the internet into two (a corporate side and “free” side) with little cooperation between them and I don’t think anyone will be able to keep people from either side - as long as the internet remains neutral.
I think its just too hard to completely control information unless you are a nation state (and even then).
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?
You can already get a VPN for ingoing traffic to China and “experience” it.
I’m missing your point. I started interacting with Chinese people on XHS.
It’s not for us to decide that. CCP is literally holding Chinese hostage and even if this platform comes to the west the Chinese will never be allowed to mingle with us.
I think chinese internet is very interesting and wish China would be part of global internet one day but until autocrats change their mind it’s not happening.
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.
What is not true? The great firewall of China doesnt exist? Or that few rebels with vpns that btw are constantly hunted down and ccp even inspects packets now with AI tools I identify vpn looking traffic?
Can’t believe people justify this. You’re either a bot or a useful idiot.
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.
Missing my point entirely that Chinese people literally can’t do that.
Also it’s very hard to get into Chinese internet from the west too with this one exception almost everything is either geo blocked or requires Chinese id/phone number.
I just downloaded it. No sign up necessary but it asks for a birthdate. (I just picked June 4 1989 randomly, ofc.)
It uses AI to translate from Chinese to your selected language. The image below shows available languages.
You don’t need to login to upvote videos. However, you not be able to comment or reply. Also, viewing comments is limited.
To create your account, you have to provide your phone number, which is an automatic “not happening” for me.
Once your phone number is “bound”, you can link your Google account for your login. This will make it easier for East-West cooperation in data mining and mass surveillance.
You can also use an email and password of your own choosing.
Overall, I can’t see me actually binding my phone number to make an account.
Anyway, here’s what my feed looked like when I opened the app and skipped account creation/login:
Some AI looking slop, of course.
Of the first dozen or so, only two seemed interesting - the Rick Roll meme history and a Brazilian explaining how to use “lá ele” in conversation. (I speak Brazilian Portuguese so this was actually very cool to see.)
(I just picked June 4 1989 randomly, ofc.) 🤣
🚚💯 🧑🎓
Have you started uploading Tienenmen Square videos yet?
Gotta have an account for that. So no.
You wouldn’t have an account for long if you did anyways. Billibilli makes the censorship on YouTube look like fucking childs play.
Foreign politics are fine, world history is fine. But anything that remotely touches on modern Chinese history or politics gets nuked from orbit and aggressively attacked.
It’s a big reason why if you use Chinese apps for any length of time the one oddly absent thing from all of them is chinese politics.
It’s extremely hard to over state just how aggressive billiblli can be about this.
Good. Seriously - enough with YouTube’s vs censorship and making predators like Jake Paul and mr beast into millionaires
Edit: Ugh… checked on bilibili and noticed he also has a channel there. The guy is like a parasite to humanity
Thank you for pointing out that shitnugget, its enough for me to know that i never will use bilis platform out of sheer principle
I mean if another competitor rises up, he’ll just create an account there too. You’re stuck with peertube pretty much
Bilibili isn’t going to be any better about censorship. It just has a slightly different list of forbidden topics.
I’m all for it, America needs to be reminded of what capitalism actually is.
Knowing our govt, Google will lobby them to ban BiliBili so they can enjoy classic american protectionism. Can’t make it in a free market so just ban / tariff the competition to hell.
I’m all for letting America make itself irelevent.
what would the equivalent action under communism be?
What?
you know, way how america interferes with competition kind of reminds me of communism. Of course not exactly the same, but the what is allowed and what is not works in kind of similar way. The rich elite are even the “communist party” that runs things.
the way i imagine it:
- as long as it’s american companies running everything, it’s “fair” and “free market”.
- as long as some company from abroad manages to do things better and more efficient, and american companies come under pressure, we’ll suddenly erect trade barriers and market hurdles to “protect american values”, “for our national security” or sth else. i’ve seen this soo many times. people who “just follow the rules” as long as the rules benefit them. as soon as the same rules start biting them in their own ass, suddenly for some reason they say that we need to change the rules.
Kinda like the EV situation in Europe (especially germany). European car makers benefited from cheap chinese labor force for centuries now while their executives, sitting in china, saw in real time how china started working on EV cars and thought nothing about it, riding high on their hubris since “no one could ever outpace them”. And now that china outpaced them the european coalition quickly released enormous tariffs on chinese EV imports to “secure the european car market” and “save themselves from the sheer wave of cheap (and nowadays also way better) EV cars.” When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
I’ve heard of Billibilli. It’s great for pirated films and TV shows that you can’t get anywhere else.
I don’t really trust it to be much better at respecting privacy than YouTube, but at this point, I’d be surprised if it was any worse, and YouTube has been getting worse for lack of competition for over a decade now
I feel like we’re entering a world where you have competing surveillance states, and citizens from either would be behooved to use technology from the other. For the simple fact that these two states don’t cooperate, using the other sides technology is inherently safer. They have far fewer manners of or financial interests in fucking you.
Yeah. At this point as an American I’m way less worried about in the Chinese government tracking me than I am with the US government. The Chinese government is evil, but I don’t live in China.
Yes but never forget they aren’t above building profiles on people and selling them. The US government regularly buys these sort of data packages as a loophole to bypass constitutional protections against search and seizures.
Yep, this is why my security cameras are all from Chinese companies. Though I guess the NSA still owns the Wifi lol
I suspect like most things in China, as long as you aren’t Picking quarrels and provoking trouble you will be able to slag off the US all you want. But don’t you dare criticize the CCP, because apparently that hurts the feelings of all the people and they already suffer enough under Xinnie the pooh’s iron dick
How many unskippable ads before I can watch a 3-minute video?
If it’s less than 2, I’m sold!
I just started a video and it didn’t play an ad right away.
Its 1, but the video is 2 hours 39 minutes long. It’s just “HEAD ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD!” on repeat.
I’m pet Sue there are no ads. At least in China, not sure about the international version.
hello pet Sue there are no ads
YouTube’s censorship has become worse than cable TV’s (in the US). I have a feeling that BiliBili will only further normalize the aggressive censorship, like TikTok did.
thats good news youtube was mainstream so looong that it becomes to eat itself slowly seeing some competitions maybe lead the long form video market better
Happy for the competition, sad that it came from a place that will probably censor things even harder.
Okay peertube, now’s your time to shine! Become the default for the Fediverse by stepping in during this power struggle