#now just learn not to make offensive generalizations about the local ppl too...

[quixoticanarchy]

sdfghjkl Jonathan calling Dracula's vampire ladies ‘awful’ and then immediately clarifying that he's casting no aspersions on women, women are great, Mina is a woman after all

[rigelmejo]

theres a million reasons 2 hate the great firewall, most importantly probably just because its restrictive to everyone inside it’s ability to access info widely, and its an example being set that other countries no doubt consider the more they see it. and im a big fan of libraries, of local communities having lots of options on how to share info, on people getting broad experiences by getting to connect to many different people and their perspectives, which are all kinda... much harder and impossible and certainly hurt rather than supported in such an enviornment. people are people, so they adapt and still do all these very human things. but it sure does suck when the systems in place actively get in the way of it. 

but like on a much smaller more personal thing i just arghh about it - i really hate how it really just top to bottom puts a barrier between mainland chinese people and everyone else. i remember it took ages to make a weibo, and my weibo just barely-got-made and the moment i forget my password it will cease to exist again - just cause weibo like most chinese sites is set up to desperately want to refuse to work if you don’t have a chinese phone number etc. i couldn’t get whatsapp to chat with my chinese friends because of the same issue - it didn’t like my ordinary us number, so it just refused to let me verify. i can only talk to them if they use sites that likely they need vpns for, and that sucks that they should have to use vpns to connect to some ppl they know or people they’d like to meet agh. 

and there’s just a handful of apps/sites we can all use easily to interact, and every so often china just goes ‘nope’ and then blocks their side off so neither side can interact anymore without a vpn on china side and a huge amount of hoops/possibly a vpn/possibly no way at all from an outside location. ao3 used to be a site we could all access and interact on, now its not. i remember when deviantart used to be a site we could all access, then the great firewall decided to block that art site and i lost contact and updates on a ton of people. i love that i CAN get on weibo and at least see updates from some people and message some people, but weibo was so utterly hard to login to that i know i’ll eventually lose access to my account forever just... whenever. i’ve got one language learning app where its chinese made, so thankfully it doesn’t block communication and it doesn’t make hoops for outside people to access - but i’ve heard mixed things about hoops it makes chinese mainlanders go through which sucks. and i know it’ll just secretly block/silence you on there at random if you bring up topics it does not want discussed, and theres not really any way to know except by messaging IN SOME OTHER APP your friends and finding out they haven’t gotten your replies/posts since X day you got blocked by the app unknowingly. although theres no ‘don’t talk about X’ rules on the app, there’s definitely an atmosphere of ‘better to just keep convos light and shallow or else be aware u may disappear and lose contact with all these people you know.’ which is just an annoying atmophere to have... especially since regular user-to-user or app-to-people-abusing the app blocking with notifications of the user being blocked and Why, could be more transparent, and work just as well. Like for a while anything covid related got censored/blocked users at random - despite no rules about it and like 90% of users talking about it since we’re IN a pandemic. And a lot of posts about the random blocking... also got removed/users were blocked. So people just randomly dropped off the app, and surprise surprise people still kept talking about covid. It would have been more effective to just say ‘please avoid topics such as ‘covid’ or specifically ‘covid misinformation like potential medical advice’ (like if there’d been issues with people dangerously recommending to drink poison to ‘cure’) or your post will be removed and you will receive a warning/keyword reason, the second offense you will be blocked from the app.’ Like youtube is NOT great about blocking based on dangerous/inflammatory things either, but with covid it did just demonitize covid-related videos for a similar reason, then publicly stated it would potentially be deleting videos spreading dangerous false-cure information. In the best case scenario, of course china companies also are trying to keep their population safe from dangerous-fake-cures being propagated, so of course they’re trying to handle the same issue every country is dealing with regarding that right now. I just think... it could possibly be easier in some cases for them to do it more transparently, clearly. So that users talking about sensitive topics in not-banned manners understand they’re fine, and so that users know if they bring up such topics they should make clear that its their opinion and they’re NOT trying to spread cure-info if they bring it up (which would help cut down on false-cure opinions getting spread like ‘facts’.) Instead its just random people posting all kinds of things, and some dangerous posts getting blocked while others just... remain cause they aren’t noticed. And then other users not breaking the rules get flagged by algorithms and blocked randomly. Again to be fair... i think chinese companies are doing about the same level of good/bad on this as american ones right now. Youtube and twitter and facebook are all succeeding/sucking to various degrees about this too, mostly in the same ways too. It just... gets annoying to me because its just... another big chunk of the chinese firewall being frustrating. Because it doesn’t just happen with covid. 

You mention religion or government or the us election or liking girls or whatever, and sometimes you/your friends account is just blocked and suddenly you lose contact with everyone and don’t even know right away. I actually like weibo better, because i feel their ‘banning’ actions are more similar to twitters - break rules and ur just blocked, users can block you/you can block users, etc. But there’s also generally clear rules, unless ur someone say the government views as larger and disliked. But for the average person weibo’s just a lot like twitter. The main issue is just it SUPER discourages/makes impossible anyone outside of mainland to use it, and of course most mainlander chinese using it will be finding it equally difficult to ever get access to sites outside of weibo - lots of people use instagram and twitter but they’re using vpns and do it on a rare/infrequent basis. 

So weibo is their main thing to use... like if we were all JUST stuck on twitter as our only social media. Yes we’ve got a LOT of sucky social media outside of china, but we also can easily get to many different ones and go on ones in many countries if we wanted. In contrast, its hard for most anyone not chinese to even register for weibo, you can’t browse if you aren’t a user (so you cant even see what’s going on in the chinese internet sphere), and if you’re from the mainland then you’re equally limited to other sites within that area of access and going to find it very difficult to browse the other sites worldwide. Even though... you know... people are people everywhere. Just because people are limited in access, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like to talk to people from different cultures and share their own perspectives and open their world up more if they could.