The Great Firewall helps China retain digital sovereignty and incentives them to develop their own tech and software instead of relying on Western software that remains in control of the West. It helps avoid digital colonialism, I guess you could say, which there is coincidentally a post about on the front page rn.
Wouldn’t it be possible to make those incentives without putting up barriers?
Idk, maybe? I’m just listing one of the reasons they do so. I’m honestly in no position to say what would be better to do since I do not live in or have any connection to China.
Like let’s say for instance, trying to make a better product?
It’s not good enough to just make another, better product and call it a day. If it were that easy, the Fediverse would be bigger than the proprietary counterparts, and that’s not the case. The Web is dominated and controlled by Western software. To “build a better product” gives you, at best, hope that your product may succeed against Western software and that you’ll be able to have digital sovereignty. Why hope when there are more concrete ways of gaining that sovereignty?
With this reasoning, I can understand why China does what it does, but I won’t comment on if it’s their best course of action because, again, it’s not my place.
individual freedom of choice
Other countries don’t necessarily care about a Western conception of individual freedom. This goes for many countries, not just China.
True…but also I think the tendency is to grow as the others did, it’s just that we are at an early stage. There is no reason to believe this won’t be the standard one day. So our perspective right now is that this is a niche but there was also a time that today’s main players were.
I agree with you that one day the Fediverse may be standard, but why subject ourselves to “may” if we have the ability to be for sure that our software is standard? I also agree that it would take a long time, and that’s a key point. When it comes to securing digital sovereignty, I don’t think a country can afford to wait, lest it ends up losing the best opportunity to seize that sovereignty.
It’s not your place to think critically and give your opinion? Isn’t this a discussion to do that?
I’ll give my opinion on why they may have decided to pursue the avenue they did with the Great Firewall and how effective it’s been for them, but I won’t say whether or not it’s the best course of action or if they could’ve done X thing instead because there’s no way I could know. I’ll have to trust that the well-studied Marxists in the CPC made the best decision they thought possible.
as this is lemmygrad, i’m gonna point out that “individual freedom” is liberalism
freedom of choice
ehhh…
it’s not like there is only a single chinese website and zero others
are users free using software made by corporations like google? absolutely not.
Wouldn’t it be possible to make those incentives without putting up barriers?
does it matter? why shouldn’t they put barriers? the barriers need to be up. back to the “individual freedom” point, “free speech” is a bad thing (yes, you read correctly). china is right to censor their internet. why should the chinese people suffer the same fate as those in the west who are constantly being marketed to, being ingrained with false propaganda, encouraged to develop hatred and prejudice?
That’s great, but then you are limited to Chinese options, hence your choices are being limited. No?
users outside china are limited, too. if a web result cannot breach the first page of google, does not have paid advertising, and is not tossed around by whatever communities you are in, how will you know about it? no matter how good it may be?
the “choice” of websites in many ways is an illusion. like news websites. sure you can choose between le monde, bbc, the guardian, reuters, cnn, foxnews, ap, the intercept, nyt, etc but if they are all using the same sources and giving the same stories (as they so often are), are you really getting a choice?
i also think you may not have a good idea of what the internet in china is like. not all non-chinese websites are banned. and sometimes websites that were banned become unbanned. also china has equivalent counterparts to the “big” sites (like google, youtube, twitter, etc). and they are not limited to one choice there either, though just like in the west some are more popular than others.
I feel this is sidetracking the conversation, that is a conversation on freedom of data and privacy, I’m talking about having the options to choose what is available everywhere - even if those options are from evil corps.
i disagree. this is what i mean by “illusion of freedom”. the large majority of users have no idea they are in fact surrending freedoms when visiting those sites.
china is protecting its citizens from things that could harm them. including things like american corporations data mining. the internet would be better elsewhere if everyone had a similar attitude toward the net.
wikipedia is reactionary. there are reactionaries on mastodon. my suspicion about lemmy is that there is a blanket ban on all .ml sites and not that it has anything to do with lemmygrad.
Like let’s say for instance, trying to make a better product?
By saying that you’re implying that Facebook and Twitter are good products. Which they aren’t for the users because all they do is get users hooked using dark patterns and track their every move across the internet to show them targeted advertisements and sell their data.
I don’t understand how someone can be spending their time on an instance of a federated service meant to provide an alternative to this class of services and then suggest competing against them in the free market of ideas. Get some perspective.
so you claim that Chinese alternatives are free from dark patterns, don’t get people hooked, and don’t track users on the internet? if not, then it’s about who controls people, not using better products.
so you claim that Chinese alternatives are free from dark patterns, don’t get people hooked, and don’t track users on the internet?
No. I meant it’s wrong to assert that it would be a good practice to open up the market for western software companies and try to beat them by making a better product.
To be hinest with you I don’t think blocking access to (for example) Facebook and providing an indigenous alternative to it amounts to restriction in an ethically sensible way. I was going to write a longer reply but I am a bit drunk so I’ll refrain. Let me know what you think about so I can try to explain myself a bit better.
what I meant is that, instead of making access to facebook or twitter harder, educate people and explain to them why these platforms are bad. let people know that GAFAM are basically doing NSA’s work at this point, that they have started to centralize internet and take away people’s freedom, that these platforms see the user as nothing more than an ad-watching animal that has to become addicted to scrolling, stuff like that. if it happens, then people would see these platforms for what they are, and won’t be interested in joining them. this will benefit everyone, people can’t say China is censoring the internet or oppressing its people, Chinses people have a better digital literacy, etc.
the other problem is how the restrictions are applied. for example why is lemmygrad blocked by the firewall? it’s platform made by communists for communists, so I don’t see the ponit in banning it.
the third problem I would say is the Chinese alternatives themselves. I don’t see wechat or tiktok (apparently it has a different version in China) as better alternatives. they still have many features that are undesirable, they’re centralized, privacy-invasive, proprietary, addictive and profit driven, in other words, they become the very thing they swore to destroy.
let’s remember that TikTok is a Chinses app. it has an infinite scroll feature that shows you a tailored set of videos that need an attention span of less than a minute. it’s litterally so addicting that instagram and youtube introduced a similar feature. it also track users.
I’m not blaming China here, this is just the result of centralised proprietary and profit driven social media that do not care for the user and try to maximize the time you spend browsing them.
but when it comes to the last part of my previous comment, tracking users and invading their privacy, well, where should we even begin.
TikTok is actually the foreign app! China uses Douyin, from the same people. I’m not sure how it’s regimented in China as I’ve never used it, it would be interesting to ask someone who knows about this.
But it’s a real criticism that can be made. Certainly we uphold China as socialist, but also see their contradiction with the capitalist world order where they have had to integrate not only the mercantile logic, but everything that comes from it: alienation, new fleeting products on new markets, and thus people spend their evenings infinitely scrolling Tiktok or Douyin after work.
TikTok is actually the foreign app! China uses Douyin, from the same people. I’m not sure how it’s regimented in China as I’ve never used it, it would be interesting to ask someone who knows about this.
oh, I didn’t know. agreed, it would be interesting to see the differences.
But it’s a real criticism that can be made. Certainly we uphold China as socialist, but also see their contradiction with the capitalist world order where they have had to integrate not only the mercantile logic, but everything that comes from it: alienation, new fleeting products on new markets, and thus people spend their evenings infinitely scrolling Tiktok or Douyin after work.
yeah, it’s a shame. the same happens also with free software, for example lemmy and mastodon have infinite scrolling as well. so even when developers are deliberatly trying to give users some control, we still have to deal with the unethical aspects of profit driven systems leaking into our environment. I guess capitalism corrupts anything it sees on spot.
I went to see if Douyin is different, and found this on its wikipedia page:
TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other’s content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available. The two products are similar, but features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people’s face for more videos of them and other features such as buying, booking hotels and making geo-tagged reviews. Since its launch in 2016, TikTok/Douyin rapidly gained popularity in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the United States, Turkey, Russia, and other parts of the world. As of October 2020, TikTok surpassed over 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide.
Some users may find it hard to stop using TikTok. In April 2018, an addiction-reduction feature was added to Douyin. This encouraged users to take a break every 90 minutes. Later in 2018, the feature was rolled out to the TikTok app. TikTok uses some top influencers such as Gabe Erwin, Alan Chikin Chow, James Henry, and Cosette Rinab to encourage viewers to stop using the app and take a break.
Many were also concerned with users’ attention spans with these videos. Users watch short 15-second clips repeatedly and studies say that this could report to a decrease in attention span. This is a concern as many of TikTok’s audience are younger children, whose brains are still developing.
so the only diferences are different servers and environment, and some extra features on Douyin (one of which relies on facial recognition, which means they scan videos for faces and identify them). honestly it seems to be even worse than instagram or youtube :|
By saying that you’re implying that Facebook and Twitter are good products.
No I’m not. I didn’t say that neither I believe in that.
Get some perspective.
Sounds like you are getting touchy.
I’m engaging in a conversation with someone with a different opinion and I’m making questions, wondering if there are other ways of doing things, and looking to get my assumptions challenged instead of imposing them: it’s what I do to get perspective. I’m happy to hear your method though
@muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml hey is something broken on lemmygrad? This user shows up as banned on my end but is able to comment? Thought I’d report if it’s a bug.
I’m seeing the same thing, but I can’t find where the receipt of their ban is, so I can only assume it’s a bug. I should probably see if rebanning them works, if they’re a policy/rule violater.
Edit: Looked everywhere I know to, couldn’t find the receipt of the ban. They don’t seem to be a rule breaker, though they do have a line about the ‘money vote’ in their bio, which is a right-wing concept so I’m on the fence about whether or not they break the no non-communists rule. Regardless, I’m going to let them stay for now, unless people object to my decision.
The Great Firewall helps China retain digital sovereignty and incentives them to develop their own tech and software instead of relying on Western software that remains in control of the West. It helps avoid digital colonialism, I guess you could say, which there is coincidentally a post about on the front page rn.
deleted by creator
Idk, maybe? I’m just listing one of the reasons they do so. I’m honestly in no position to say what would be better to do since I do not live in or have any connection to China.
It’s not good enough to just make another, better product and call it a day. If it were that easy, the Fediverse would be bigger than the proprietary counterparts, and that’s not the case. The Web is dominated and controlled by Western software. To “build a better product” gives you, at best, hope that your product may succeed against Western software and that you’ll be able to have digital sovereignty. Why hope when there are more concrete ways of gaining that sovereignty?
With this reasoning, I can understand why China does what it does, but I won’t comment on if it’s their best course of action because, again, it’s not my place.
Other countries don’t necessarily care about a Western conception of individual freedom. This goes for many countries, not just China.
deleted by creator
I agree with you that one day the Fediverse may be standard, but why subject ourselves to “may” if we have the ability to be for sure that our software is standard? I also agree that it would take a long time, and that’s a key point. When it comes to securing digital sovereignty, I don’t think a country can afford to wait, lest it ends up losing the best opportunity to seize that sovereignty.
I’ll give my opinion on why they may have decided to pursue the avenue they did with the Great Firewall and how effective it’s been for them, but I won’t say whether or not it’s the best course of action or if they could’ve done X thing instead because there’s no way I could know. I’ll have to trust that the well-studied Marxists in the CPC made the best decision they thought possible.
as this is lemmygrad, i’m gonna point out that “individual freedom” is liberalism
ehhh…
it’s not like there is only a single chinese website and zero others
are users free using software made by corporations like google? absolutely not.
does it matter? why shouldn’t they put barriers? the barriers need to be up. back to the “individual freedom” point, “free speech” is a bad thing (yes, you read correctly). china is right to censor their internet. why should the chinese people suffer the same fate as those in the west who are constantly being marketed to, being ingrained with false propaganda, encouraged to develop hatred and prejudice?
deleted by creator
users outside china are limited, too. if a web result cannot breach the first page of google, does not have paid advertising, and is not tossed around by whatever communities you are in, how will you know about it? no matter how good it may be?
the “choice” of websites in many ways is an illusion. like news websites. sure you can choose between le monde, bbc, the guardian, reuters, cnn, foxnews, ap, the intercept, nyt, etc but if they are all using the same sources and giving the same stories (as they so often are), are you really getting a choice?
i also think you may not have a good idea of what the internet in china is like. not all non-chinese websites are banned. and sometimes websites that were banned become unbanned. also china has equivalent counterparts to the “big” sites (like google, youtube, twitter, etc). and they are not limited to one choice there either, though just like in the west some are more popular than others.
i disagree. this is what i mean by “illusion of freedom”. the large majority of users have no idea they are in fact surrending freedoms when visiting those sites.
china is protecting its citizens from things that could harm them. including things like american corporations data mining. the internet would be better elsewhere if everyone had a similar attitude toward the net.
okay, so china is fighting against disinformation. Then why are these blocked
mastodon.social lemmygrad.ml wikipedia.org
wikipedia is reactionary. there are reactionaries on mastodon. my suspicion about lemmy is that there is a blanket ban on all .ml sites and not that it has anything to do with lemmygrad.
If this has to do with reactionaries, why is gab not blocked?
What do you mean “wp is reactionary”?#
https://nitter.eu/BenjaminNorton/status/1227722696684953600
https://medium.com/@kamy1/racist-wikipedia-da005c564d13
deleted by creator
mit.edu (MIT did nothing wrong, General Secretary)
just off the top of my head mit had ties to jeffrey epstein.
holy shit, just checked and yeah lemmygrad is blocked :facepalm:
Also, China needs to stop putting restrictions on games.
deleted by creator
By saying that you’re implying that Facebook and Twitter are good products. Which they aren’t for the users because all they do is get users hooked using dark patterns and track their every move across the internet to show them targeted advertisements and sell their data.
I don’t understand how someone can be spending their time on an instance of a federated service meant to provide an alternative to this class of services and then suggest competing against them in the free market of ideas. Get some perspective.
so you claim that Chinese alternatives are free from dark patterns, don’t get people hooked, and don’t track users on the internet? if not, then it’s about who controls people, not using better products.
No. I meant it’s wrong to assert that it would be a good practice to open up the market for western software companies and try to beat them by making a better product.
I agree, however, I think it would be better to do this by educating citizens, not by restricting them.
To be hinest with you I don’t think blocking access to (for example) Facebook and providing an indigenous alternative to it amounts to restriction in an ethically sensible way. I was going to write a longer reply but I am a bit drunk so I’ll refrain. Let me know what you think about so I can try to explain myself a bit better.
what I meant is that, instead of making access to facebook or twitter harder, educate people and explain to them why these platforms are bad. let people know that GAFAM are basically doing NSA’s work at this point, that they have started to centralize internet and take away people’s freedom, that these platforms see the user as nothing more than an ad-watching animal that has to become addicted to scrolling, stuff like that. if it happens, then people would see these platforms for what they are, and won’t be interested in joining them. this will benefit everyone, people can’t say China is censoring the internet or oppressing its people, Chinses people have a better digital literacy, etc.
the other problem is how the restrictions are applied. for example why is lemmygrad blocked by the firewall? it’s platform made by communists for communists, so I don’t see the ponit in banning it.
the third problem I would say is the Chinese alternatives themselves. I don’t see wechat or tiktok (apparently it has a different version in China) as better alternatives. they still have many features that are undesirable, they’re centralized, privacy-invasive, proprietary, addictive and profit driven, in other words, they become the very thing they swore to destroy.
Probably not, considering China is fighting against letting people be “no-lives”, that spend all their free time on a computer.
let’s remember that TikTok is a Chinses app. it has an infinite scroll feature that shows you a tailored set of videos that need an attention span of less than a minute. it’s litterally so addicting that instagram and youtube introduced a similar feature. it also track users.
I’m not blaming China here, this is just the result of centralised proprietary and profit driven social media that do not care for the user and try to maximize the time you spend browsing them.
but when it comes to the last part of my previous comment, tracking users and invading their privacy, well, where should we even begin.
TikTok is actually the foreign app! China uses Douyin, from the same people. I’m not sure how it’s regimented in China as I’ve never used it, it would be interesting to ask someone who knows about this.
But it’s a real criticism that can be made. Certainly we uphold China as socialist, but also see their contradiction with the capitalist world order where they have had to integrate not only the mercantile logic, but everything that comes from it: alienation, new fleeting products on new markets, and thus people spend their evenings infinitely scrolling Tiktok or Douyin after work.
oh, I didn’t know. agreed, it would be interesting to see the differences.
yeah, it’s a shame. the same happens also with free software, for example lemmy and mastodon have infinite scrolling as well. so even when developers are deliberatly trying to give users some control, we still have to deal with the unethical aspects of profit driven systems leaking into our environment. I guess capitalism corrupts anything it sees on spot.
I went to see if Douyin is different, and found this on its wikipedia page:
so the only diferences are different servers and environment, and some extra features on Douyin (one of which relies on facial recognition, which means they scan videos for faces and identify them). honestly it seems to be even worse than instagram or youtube :|
deleted by creator
No I’m not. I didn’t say that neither I believe in that.
Sounds like you are getting touchy. I’m engaging in a conversation with someone with a different opinion and I’m making questions, wondering if there are other ways of doing things, and looking to get my assumptions challenged instead of imposing them: it’s what I do to get perspective. I’m happy to hear your method though
@muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml hey is something broken on lemmygrad? This user shows up as banned on my end but is able to comment? Thought I’d report if it’s a bug.
I’m seeing the same thing, but I can’t find where the receipt of their ban is, so I can only assume it’s a bug. I should probably see if rebanning them works, if they’re a policy/rule violater.
Edit: Looked everywhere I know to, couldn’t find the receipt of the ban. They don’t seem to be a rule breaker, though they do have a line about the ‘money vote’ in their bio, which is a right-wing concept so I’m on the fence about whether or not they break the no non-communists rule. Regardless, I’m going to let them stay for now, unless people object to my decision.
Their ban shows up in the main modlog (from the front page) 5 months ago, but just says “troll”
ah thanks, that’s good enough to reban them, i reckon.
from my end (I’m a lemmy.ml user) this post is shown to be on !china@lemmy.ml , not on lemmygrad, I’m confused now.
Could be a bug, I’ll try re-banning.