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)
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.
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
i for one welcome our new overlord
I’m all for it, America needs to be reminded of what capitalism actually is.
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 don’t really trust it to be much better at respecting privacy than YouTube
Why would you trust it to be any better at respecting privacy?
That says they don’t trust it.
Basically, spying is one of YouTube’s most egregious problems, and one of the biggest reasons people like me want valid competition for it, and one of the biggest selling points of smaller competition like Peertube and Glomble. I don’t see Bilibili offering that, but just the competition itself might give YouTube the kick up the arse it needs to respect its users.
I’m kidding myself, at this point it feels like YouTube would keep abusing its userbase even if it wasn’t profitable, just for the sheer fun of it, but in an ideal world, this would solve a lot of problems.
Most users don’t care about any of the spying. I’d expect a competitor of similar size to do the same. If there’s any improvement competition could bring, it would be for the creators, giving them a larger slice of the ad revenue that otherwise goes to the owners of the platform. I guess that would mean better quality videos for users. Though, I don’t think allowing anyone to make boatloads of money by getting millions of people to sit around for hours and hours watching videos has been a positive for humanity. Incentivizing creators with more money will just make this worse.
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.
🚚💯 🧑🎓
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.
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.
Tbh, i hope it doesn’t take off since chinese companies are forced to hand their user data to the chinese government
Edit: i am NOT saying that USA services are better, fuck both
Cool. If they allow views while using ad-blockers I’m in.
I’ve been using an account with a translator. They have some unique niche videos I can’t find anywhere else.
Any fun trends? Do things spill over between west and east?
8 trackers from 6 different companies, hard pass.
Isn’t the usual amount hundreds?
they probably mean, 8 trackers loaded in the frontend. hundreds are still possible by selling backend collected data, they just don’t get direct access.
Yes, just what aurora app store detects loaded in the app.
Yes, but none of them are Chinese.
At this point I’d prefer the Chinese government to track me over US companies. The Chinese government won’t let the US government access its databases, whereas Google will.
YouTube just has google firebase analytics (which I also don’t want)
Good.
Americans are left with such a terrible, enshittified digital information economy that we must entertain even our enemies for alternatives.
Why is China your enemy?
I’ll be more specific. The PRC (government) is an enemy to humanity in my view.
Competition.
I would prefer it if it wasn’t Chinese because I don’t really trust Chinese companies, but then again I didn’t really trust Google and YouTube super duper needs competition.
I don’t trust Chinese either, but I trust the US and the 5 eyes mob even less. Chinese for me is on the “not as bad as the US, UK and AUS” list. The reason being that I could not care less what the Chinese platforms gather on me with what little they can gather (which is not much due to how I use the internet as a whole), but the US, due to the relationship they have with me and with my country can actually do some damage.
