this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
179 points (90.9% liked)
Technology
60489 readers
5072 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not even to go for a TikTok clone, it's more to do with the avoidance of Meta products because they're following Twitter and allowing toxicity and constantly pushing ads and influencers and MAGA. Someone decided hey it would be funny if we just installed an actual Chinese app just out of spite since we're effectively getting censored anyway so getting censored on a chinese app to blow it all up would be funny. It was supposed to be a meme.
Turns out the chinese people on there were mostly excited to get so much attention and an opportunity to talk with americans. Loads of kids there practicing their english, and people felt so welcomed they're trying to learn the language and everything's subtitled in chinese+english because they want to communicate back and make their content accessible to them out of respect. There's plenty of content there to teach chinese to the newcomers too. Bunch decided to stay because it's just pretty nice since the lack of politics and "sensitive" topics it's a very positive and welcoming platform for once.
The whole thing is a completely accidental cultural exchange on a massive scale, and a very rare case where americans and chinese people kind of can talk directly like that. Both sides gets to peek at the other's lifestyle and bond over common things instead of hating on eachother. They aren't learning chinese to use the app, they're learning it to communicate and exchange with the people. The chinese government seems unconcerned and welcoming as an extra fuck you to the US.
The algorithm is surprisingly not really biased nor pushing propaganda. It's happily suggesting me openly queer content (with a lack of hate comments and americans being called out for their hateful comments), they have gun content, they have a car scene, they have their thirst traps (with respectful comments), it's really not all that different than us and not the propaganda machine the US is so concerned about. It kind of leans more left than TikTok if anything, which makes the ban even more questionable.