- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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)
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Google is such a bully, I want china to succeed.
Oh boy coyote urine over coyote urine my fave.
Won’t last. Youtube offers financial incentives and originally when Youtube got big it had lax as fuck censorship which is what gained it’s initial popularity. Unless China is going to be entirely lax in the same way, there is no incentive for people to move over.
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.
I’ve been using a VPN to watch stuff there for years
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
They’re going to need to drastically change how the platform looks if they want to succeed. In typical Chinese app fashion the UI is incredibly bloated and overwhelming, not what a Western audience wants at all. They also won’t be able to match YouTube’s CPM so creators won’t bother switching either.
I’m all for it, America needs to be reminded of what capitalism actually is.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
How do you do that? I would love to be able to avoid YouTube. I could go without the entertainment part of it, sure. But no more tutorials would already be a big pain. And then there are the news sites with embedded videos. Even the state uses it.
YouTube has single handedly almost nullified my degoogling project
At this point it should be claimed by the state and turned into a public utility…
If I have a project, I often prefer to read up on how to accomplish the task, such as going to blog posts or getting to the source documentation. If that is not possible, I use yewtu.be (it can be slow to load just FYI). There is also PeerTube, but it doesn’t have as much content. Lastly, there is FreeTube, which is built on YouTubes API and gives them revenue in some way, but doesn’t have ads. It doesn’t allow Google to learn your behavior or target you for ads. I also use a VPN (with DNS protection enabled) when loading anything. If you’re degoogling (as I and many have done), one other item I hear people say they have difficulty dropping is Google Maps. I know you didn’t ask about it, but just to add, other options exist, such as Open Street Maps (OSM), Organic Maps, CoMaps, Magic Earth (I think may be built on Google Maps API, but not entirely sure), and Kagi (I’m fairly sure it uses Apple Maps and Google Maps API). Also, I have just started looking into FlockHopper, but I’m not sure what it is built on, I think OSM and MapBox (not sure if I have that right), but I’m not sure. Also MapQuest still exists.
Youtube is about the last Alphabet service I knowingly use (except when someone shares a google doc).
I thought you meant no Youtube at all. I use Freetube and Newpipe almost exclusively.
Peertube too, when the instance I use to follow channels works (the two previous ones closed). It’s a pain to subscribe to stuff. Maybe with RSS feeds…edit: I’ve been subscribed to Kagi for a while too, maybe going two years. Love it. Wish it was cheaper
I really liked Qwant maps, a good use of OSM, but the idiots closed it…
I meant to say, not directly use their services for video and definitely aim to give them less identifiable information. Like Invidious’s Yewtu.be (https://yewtu.be/) scrapes YouTube and is not reliant on their API (but does give IP addresses to YouTube, hence the use of a VPN), but FreeTube uses YouTube’s API by default I think, but can use Invidious’s scrapping API (https://docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/privacy/). PeerTube is not reliant on YouTube at all and can be a good alternative even though it may have fewer videos (since you use that, then you’ve basically degoogled in that case). Maybe once a month or less I will watch a video from any of those services, so I don’t ever subscribe to any channels. I prefer to read documentation rather over watching videos when possible. To me that is in the spirit of degoogling. Same as I don’t avoid every website that has some script of Google under the hood. But I do block their trackers by activating “No Google” (https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google) from time to time if it doesn’t break a website (some website I need to access for work might not load if I have that on) and DuckDuckGo onionized on Tor mostly. I also need to use AlpaFold for work, but fortunately we have an instance that doesn’t go to Google’s servers. They created the protein folding technology and the instance and scripts had to be downloaded at some point from their servers. Degoogling is a fairly complex today. I have been reading more and more about digital cooperativism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative) and even though something may be open source, as expected, companies can still profit off of it. From the sounds of it, when it comes to cooperativism, no one person controls everything or profits. You may know more about this any how. All that said, giving people more digital privacy and protection is not a technological issue, but more of social issue. Hopefully people get more informed and interested in their digital rights in the future and society moves away from the likes of Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple (and OpenAI) at large.
Kagi switched Apple maps for Mapbox
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
I don’t know why but “Google et al” made me laugh
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.
Are you really sure? Oh wait, you’re from .ml you probably actually believe it.
Not absolutely sure… but I’ll take “Probably wouldn’t” over “Definitely already does.”
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.
Because YouTube doesn’t engage in anything like that ofc.
Are you seriously insinuating that the level of censorship on YouTube is anywhere close to Chinese platforms? A quick look on both websites would give you that answer very quickly.
YouTube has rapidly censoring more and more by way of demonetization and language policing.
And had to revert much of that after a ton of complaints
Depending on the politic
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
Meet the new boss
Worst then the old bossCool. If they allow views while using ad-blockers I’m in.
