Reading the linked site and some of the discussion, I highly recommend finding your nearest Chinese friend or person and getting authorized on Wechat. Its a whole parallel other internet! Kinda similar to how a private set of Facebook pages are otherwise inaccessible with an account, except in a parellel reality where people use them for all business and have no other internet presence.
Yes, as a user another government gets to read your posts, but I mean yet another.
To get on, I literally just knocked on a few doors in San Francisco and got authorized, so many people here can too. You could probably do it at a park.
Note: Hong Kong citizens cannot do it for US citizens even I was trying. Has to be a mainland Chinese person.
As a wechat user(I made my account during a study abroad in China) I think one of the most interesting feature is the mini programs. They're basically javascript applets within wechat with their own API that do whatever an html5 website can do, but specifically integrated with the platform making account registration and payments more frictionless than even "login with facebook"/Apple Pay. For example you may have heard of their bike share(Mobike), uber equivalent(Didi), and grubhub equivalent(ele.me). For Chinese users, these are not simply separate phone apps, but actually accessible within WeChat so they never even have to tab out.
Weibo is a heavily censored and manipulated platform. The CCP uses it to track dissidents abroad.
Do not install or operate on any trusted device. Do not connect to your home network. Do not store personal details on your weibo device. Do not ever send sensitive information or talk to real contacts on Weibo.
As you know, it is not possible to separate corporate China from government China due to the structure of that system so no analogy exactly works, but our day to day experience is exceedingly similar as we rely on heavily censored and manipulated private platforms. Although we retain options to express ideas, there is not enough saturation of other people to view those ideas except to participate on heavily censored platforms and risk complete deplatforming. Its an almost daily topic here, for example.
So the user experience on a Chinese service is simply not different enough for me to treat it differently.
I'm someone who is heavily critical of Facebook and Twitter.
However there is a world of difference between sloppily shutting down vaccine or election misinformation, and actively censoring a Tennis star reporting a sexual assault by a politiburo member.
There is a world of difference between taking down shit talking politicians twitter profiles, and actively censoring the genocide of an ethnic minority.
Ads that slurp up personal data are bad. Threatening political dissidents abroad directly is incomparable.
To say "well they are all the same bad" is to be willfully blind to the basic facts.
> To say "well they are all the same bad" is to be willfully blind to the basic facts.
Haha I’m not saying that, I’m saying it has nothing to do with my participation in those platforms because I know what to expect and my lack of participation changes nothing.
My words are the user experience is not different enough.
For everyone else, check out that great robust example of a web outside of browsers.
The settings will be in English and there are pages and chat rooms you can find. It is mostly Mandarin though. If you are in any particular niche you might be able to follow since the memes and reactions are familiar. You can also chat with other people in English if they know it, some of your friends probably already uploaded your contact info there so when you make an account you’ll be connected with them even if you dont share access to your contacts - just like how Facebook and most other social apps work.
Yes, as a user another government gets to read your posts, but I mean yet another.
To get on, I literally just knocked on a few doors in San Francisco and got authorized, so many people here can too. You could probably do it at a park.
Note: Hong Kong citizens cannot do it for US citizens even I was trying. Has to be a mainland Chinese person.