Technology

Dumbest shit ever. let me run to the PRC for my entertainment. Like was TikTok really that good? I never used it, other than the time long ago when it was first getting traction and my coworker asked me to get into her 12 yr old daughter's account (super easy BTW) and see what she was doing on there. surprise! nothing but 30 year old men following her and watching her doing dances. I never touched it since.

So one Chinese spying platform is worse than other Chinese spying platforms.

I mean, it's interesting in the sense of something big being really honestly banned in USA.

That seems to have been a part of Russian, Iranian, Turkish etc Internet experience.

But I still want back the days where we'd talk about programs and services, not platforms.

There's a program you can use to communicate to other people, it, of course, communicates to a service, but the protocol is small and already reverse-engineered, and you can use a hex editor to change the hostname or addresses it communicates with, even if hardcoded. Nostalgic ICQ sounds.

Or - there's a service you can use to find pages and files. There are hundreds of such, you can host one yourself. You'll have to dig through a lot of things you don't need and build your queries carefully, but there's no platform playing with your life. Just the Internet, and one of thousands of machines scraping it. Yep, it's big and most things there you don't need.

Or - there's a program you can use to have nice online communities. I didn't even know that Hotline and KDX existed when I was a kid. But if I knew, I would be even happier than it was in fact. No platform. Someone hosts a Hotline server.

There was also such a program that allowed you to navigate hypertext pages leading to other pages leading to other. And there were services which would serve such pages over the Internet to you and many others, and accept changes. People who think today's Web is in anything nicer than that Web - they simply don't remember how it was then. It can't be really felt by looking at archives of old personal pages and such, of course those look weak, they are a specter of the past. You need to go over web rings and read recent updates, by real people for real people, visit guest books and web chats and forums, see that world alive. Unfortunately I also remember how I wanted to be able to make that even more alive - via technical means. Like trying to live in a video game. That was a mistake many people made, apparently, and ruined the real miracle by pursuing that dream.

I'm surprised most didn't go to lemon8, since that is also bytedance it will just be banned too.

Youtube and Instagram tried for years to lure in Tiktok users, and they failed so badly that even with Tiktok potentially getting banned, people would rather switch to a different potentially sketchy Chinese app.

Weirdo

😳😳😳 Westerners not voluntarily giving personal information to the Chinese government for 5 seconds [Challenge Impossible (They caught us)] 😵😵‍💫😧