[HN Gopher] Jike: The obscure social media app beloved by China'...
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       Jike: The obscure social media app beloved by China's tech scene
        
       Author : palingvel
       Score  : 147 points
       Date   : 2024-05-16 14:15 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
        
       | saagarjha wrote:
       | So is this like the Chinese Hacker News, or what?
        
         | yorwba wrote:
         | More like Bluesky in the sense that it's a niche app popular
         | among parts of the "tech scene," in particular the un-HN-like
         | parts.
         | 
         | I don't think there's a direct Chinese equivalent to Hacker
         | News, but https://v2ex.com/?tab=all might come closest.
        
           | DeathArrow wrote:
           | >the un-HN-like parts
           | 
           | What do you mean by "un-HN-like parts"?
        
             | imp0cat wrote:
             | The parts that would not use Bluesky I guess.
        
       | throwaway4good wrote:
       | I believe the site is:
       | 
       | http://okjike.com/
       | 
       | (?)
       | 
       | I tried signing up - couldn't get pass the sms verification - I
       | am in some European country.
        
         | 123yawaworht456 wrote:
         | god, even the chinese use that atrocious art style now.
         | 
         | owari da
        
           | imp0cat wrote:
           | Not a fan of Corporate Memphis? ;)
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
           | 
           | But yeah, that was my first thought as well. :(
        
             | oersted wrote:
             | The wiki article says that the term originated in Are.na.
             | 
             | Didn't know about it, looks like a great smolweb concept!
             | 
             | https://www.are.na/
        
         | phantomathkg wrote:
         | Assuming you OK with their privacy statement? https://post-
         | okjike-com.translate.goog/jike-privacy/?_x_tr_s...
        
           | hifromwork wrote:
           | Is there anything offending in there? I've skimmed it and it
           | looks like most privacy statements I've seen recently.
        
         | writeslowly wrote:
         | I made it through with my american phone number. I went through
         | the apple account flow on the app instead of the website
         | though.
        
       | instagraham wrote:
       | Every guild or community should have a high quality discussion
       | forum like hackernews. But assuming you can translate the
       | learnings from Hackernews to another platform, how exactly would
       | you ensure high quality?
        
         | all2 wrote:
         | Buy a clone of dang. Or several.
        
           | baxtr wrote:
           | This might be easier today than before with the help of AI.
        
           | DeathArrow wrote:
           | Get OpenDang from Github and run it locally.
        
             | DenisM wrote:
             | Well, you jest, but what if we could create an LLM that
             | follows dang behavior? He's pretty low-touch on substance
             | and mostly moderates style. An LLM should be able to copy
             | that. If I didn't have to work for a living I might pursue
             | that, that would be a huge benefit to humanity.
        
           | close04 wrote:
           | This is missing the elephant in the room that HN is not _the_
           | (or maybe even _a_ ) money bringer for YCombinator. Were this
           | the golden goose for a publicly traded company, the decision
           | process could quickly shift to "make me money or GTFO".
           | 
           | Being a "benevolent dictator" moderator is the ideal model:
           | you have clear values, a clear strategy, an overview over
           | everything, and the unbridled power to execute. Benevolent
           | dictatorships don't scale the moment you need more than
           | exactly one such benevolent dictator. dang's clone will have
           | all I mentioned above except probably slightly different of
           | everything and now exactly half of the power to execute. And
           | that's where it gets close to impossible to exercise the
           | "correct" and desired level of power to support the
           | individual values, overview, strategy.
           | 
           | When you need 1000 moderators it becomes a crapshoot if the
           | moderation _you_ get is any good. And the community is only
           | as good as the worst mods and users that are allowed in it.
        
             | richardw wrote:
             | I'd say HN has generated them a huge amount of money. It's
             | a massive center of high quality tech discussion and HN
             | posts have priority. Every other investment company would
             | kill to own and run HN.
             | 
             | What's the value? Try set up a competitor and guess at how
             | much it'll cost to get all the seriously top shelf users on
             | there.
        
         | langsoul-com wrote:
         | A ton of moderators
        
           | snowpid wrote:
           | yes. On military topics r/credibleDefence is its own value
           | but it also heavely moderated.
           | 
           | Good social media needs good moderation.
        
         | DeathArrow wrote:
         | Hacker news is great but it's not a social platform. Hard to
         | follow someone, hard to chat, hard to form groups discussing
         | various topics. It would be nice to have features of hacker
         | news and reddit combined.
        
           | holoduke wrote:
           | No it attracts certain kind of people. Which in result
           | degrade the level of discussions. It is near perfect as it is
           | right now
        
           | Etheryte wrote:
           | HN not having those features is a feature in and of itself.
           | It does one thing and does it well, not having the same
           | features as Reddit is exactly why it's better than Reddit.
        
             | Semaphor wrote:
             | It's also why old reddit is still mostly great, because it
             | also lacks those "features".
        
             | aurareturn wrote:
             | I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit. This turns
             | away the casuals, leaving behind the more hardcore users.
             | 
             | Every subreddit with a large following eventually turns
             | into a complete meme fest with low quality comments and
             | trolls. But the smaller subreddits still offer good value.
        
               | the_duke wrote:
               | Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality
               | in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg:
               | r/askhistorians or r/politics. No idea how the situation
               | is nowadays, I haven't really been on there in years.
               | 
               | But that requires a lot of effort from the moderators.
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | Yes, I've seen some. The aggressive moderation does turn
               | casuals away and caps the growth of the subreddit though.
        
               | colmvp wrote:
               | Aggressive moderation can be very toxic. The /r/toronto
               | and /r/askTO subreddits are modded by essentially the
               | same people. They remove comments/posts without
               | explanation as to what rules were broken, and then when
               | you critique them in the comments surprise, surprise,
               | they remove them too!
        
               | gruez wrote:
               | >Some subreddits managed to maintain pretty high quality
               | in the past, with pretty aggressive moderation. eg: [...]
               | r/politics
               | 
               | not sure if serious.
        
               | bxksnche wrote:
               | To me the No. 1 reason HN is successful is that it
               | doesn't have to monetise its users.
               | 
               | This leads to much stronger alignment of incentives
               | between users and the owners of the platform.
               | 
               | That's not to say it's not valuable to YC. It provides
               | them with very good marketing to a core demographic they
               | are trying to market to.
               | 
               | Kinda like sports teams run by petro states.
               | 
               | For social media platforms it means that HN's existence
               | isn't driven by the need to grow [1], leading to a focus
               | on quality. Hackernews does this using the HN guidelines,
               | which are rigorously enforced.
               | 
               | [1] insert graphic comparing HN growth vs other social
               | media
        
               | vundercind wrote:
               | It does monetize them (us). It's an advertising platform,
               | just one with a very narrow set of clients (companies
               | ycombinator invests in)
               | 
               | What it isn't, is dependent on an _ad marketplace_. It's
               | more like a industry digest published by an investment
               | firm active in that industry.
        
               | eimrine wrote:
               | Something inevitable bad happens to those forums who make
               | exposing pictures easy. Also applicable to IM.
        
               | _spl wrote:
               | HN feels like email groups. Lots of useful discussions
               | but isn't very accessible to a younger audience.
        
               | teitoklien wrote:
               | I'm 21, have been following HN since I was 18, from Asia.
               | 
               | HN is perfectly accessible for younger folks, if you make
               | it more accessible for casual unserious people, you'll
               | start getting more and more casual and unserious
               | conversation.
               | 
               | The UI is a good filter to remove folks who need hipster
               | UI to just use a platform.
               | 
               | HN is fine.
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | There is hipster UI, and there's not handling pagination,
               | having buttons bordering on the unusable on mobile,
               | commenting requiring a new page to be opened, etc.
        
               | ineedaj0b wrote:
               | i complained of this but finally bought a larger phone
               | and it fixed most of my complaints. i was using an iphone
               | 4 till last year
        
               | chii wrote:
               | > I think HN is far less accessible than Reddit.
               | 
               | depends on what you mean by accessible - i assume you
               | don't mean accessibility (for blind/disabled people), but
               | ease of access.
               | 
               | HN is way more easily accessed by someone. You are not
               | nagged by a dialog to get you to download the mobile app.
               | HN has way less clutter in their UX (even compared to
               | old.reddit.com). HN has fewer call to action in the UX to
               | do things like submit, vote etc.
        
               | lukas099 wrote:
               | I think they mean that the content is less accessible, as
               | in having less mass appeal
        
               | azemetre wrote:
               | That's not a real issue tho. Like ever imo.
               | 
               | Niche content will yield niche audiences. As long as you
               | have thoughtful consistent interaction between at least
               | two people that is what matters.
        
             | silisili wrote:
             | I think it's better than Reddit because it doesn't allow
             | user moderators. That is the downfall of Reddit, as it
             | ultimately turned it into a site where only certain
             | viewpoints are allowed. Downvoting doesn't even matter,
             | they just ban dissenters anymore. This is apt to happen
             | with any user moderated site.
             | 
             | The other factor is that the mod(s) here are excellent and,
             | and I rarely say this, rather neutral. No, it doesn't mean
             | I agree with them, dang has knocked me in the head a few
             | times over the years, but meaning I get to see both sides
             | of arguments uncensored, so long as respectful and
             | interesting. Really rare experience here, and I fear for
             | the day dang leaves.
        
               | redserk wrote:
               | This isn't a reasonable critique of the unpaid moderation
               | model -- the same model we've had since long before
               | Reddit.
               | 
               | Reddit has had several notable high quality subreddits
               | entirely because of user moderation, and is able to host
               | niche interest communities.
               | 
               | I can't think of a realistic business justification for a
               | paid moderator to curate forums for some of my incredibly
               | niche hobbies. These were formerly hosted on different
               | phpBB boards, which were also moderated by unpaid
               | volunteers. As a bonus, generally one or two of them
               | actually had to pay to host the forum.
        
               | mschuster91 wrote:
               | > I can't think of a realistic business justification for
               | a paid moderator to curate forums for some of my
               | incredibly niche hobbies.
               | 
               | meh. I 'member the old phpBB etc. days... it was decent,
               | but once Metasploit and Shodan entered the scene and you
               | could buy DDoS attacks for cheap on the "darknet", the
               | workload got so much harder for operators. Not staying up
               | to date on patches? Your server got pwned in days if not
               | hours - or in the worst case, you'd get someone trying
               | out their newly discovered 0day, and there were _lots_ of
               | these in phpBBs code base. Some troll and /or pissed off
               | user deciding to spend 10$ on a DDoS attack? You got
               | yourself days of fighting cat-and-mouse to keep your
               | server up. And that's before you got into the legally
               | nasty stuff such as people using your board (or your
               | server) to store warez or CSAM, and before "concerned
               | parent" and anti-sex work troll groups made waves
               | panicking about groomers, prostitution and drugs and got
               | incredibly dumb regulations passed, not to mention the
               | newest batch of anti-terror legislation requiring 24h
               | response time throughout the year.
               | 
               | Moderation essentially became a full day job even for
               | small communities and carried significant legal risk,
               | which led many small boards to close shop because a bit
               | of swag, events and occasional donations didn't cover the
               | expenses by far. Reddit in contrast deals with CSAM, DMCA
               | and DDoS stuff paid for by advertising and VC money, so
               | unless you're a corp sub, you don't need paid mods just
               | to keep the lights on.
               | 
               | > These were formerly hosted on different phpBB boards,
               | which were also moderated by unpaid volunteers. As a
               | bonus, generally one or two of them actually had to pay
               | to host the forum.
               | 
               | Being hosted on a bunch of different boards also meant
               | that the influx of "junk users" was waaaay lower. You had
               | to discover it in the first place, usually by word of
               | mouth, so organized trolls just looking for fights didn't
               | even stumble upon them.
               | 
               | Subreddits in contrast? They get recommended by Reddit
               | these days, right on the frontpage of billions of users.
               | It's on the one side awesome for new niche subreddits,
               | but on the other side it is an insane challenge for the
               | mods of smaller subs to keep up. Once a sub gets
               | recommended to users, work explodes, alone from the
               | countless onlyfans spammers.
        
               | ineedaj0b wrote:
               | I didn't see good moderation anywhere on reddit. From
               | 2012-2023, nothing close to dang and I'm being generous
               | with my criteria for moderation. Okayish for 'free'
               | perhaps
        
             | gsuuon wrote:
             | I'd actually really love the ability to follow just the
             | 'Show HN's of a particular user, for those who consistently
             | post interesting projects. It would at least lessen the
             | FOMO causing me to check HN a little too often.
        
               | vundercind wrote:
               | I'd at least like to be able to choose colors for
               | posters, and auto-collapse some. There are a few very-
               | active posters who basically never post anything aside
               | from confident but poorly-informed flamebait on a wide
               | range of topics (but "HN nice" enough that they don't get
               | moderated for it, though their threads often get nasty).
               | Making it easier to spot and ignore them would solve
               | _most_ of my problems with HN's comment section.
               | 
               | [edit] and, flip-side, there are some I'd like to easily
               | be able to spot in large threads, because they're
               | consistently good.
        
               | supriyo-biswas wrote:
               | There are a few users like this, but the best way is to
               | bring these to the attention of moderators and leave it
               | at that.
               | 
               | For a list of good commenters, consider using
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598
        
           | informal007 wrote:
           | HN focus on the quality of content and underestimate the
           | concept of user compared to reddit, I think that's why HN
           | don't open the feature to follow, chat between user.
           | 
           | Quality ofcontent is the key of platform.
        
           | nirui wrote:
           | > Hard to follow someone, hard to chat
           | 
           | Maybe that's one reason why you have such great quality time
           | here.
           | 
           | I think the problem about social medias is that people have
           | flaws, and social medias puts a great focus on individual
           | people, exposing their good side as well as flawed side. But,
           | most people are not well-trained to handle such level of
           | influence (including being influenced as well as to influence
           | the others), and don't clearly know the power/stress such
           | influence might hold (one misstep, the whole thing can crash
           | to hell).
           | 
           | Also, people change. One day you believe one thing, then the
           | next day you believe something completely different. But if
           | your follower follows you exactly because you are advocating
           | one belief, wouldn't that in turn encourages you to lock
           | yourself out from all other beliefs (and risk become more
           | extreme in the process)?
           | 
           | Hacker News puts the material itself in the focus of
           | discussion, rather than who posted it. Which in my opinion,
           | is better, at least most the time.
        
             | DenisM wrote:
             | Yes, but... there were a half-dozen people here whose
             | comments I alway enjoyed for the deep and nuanced
             | perspective. I haven't seen them in a few years now, sadly.
             | 
             | Maybe some light-touch people focus would be a nice
             | compromise. Like, highlight the discussion where _my_
             | favorite people participate? That could avoid the bandwagon
             | effect. I dunno, maybe not.
        
               | supriyo-biswas wrote:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17717598
        
             | BiteCode_dev wrote:
             | Indeed, having focus on content instead of people make
             | things much more civil organically.
        
             | washadjeffmad wrote:
             | In truth, I've noticed Reddit refugees here who think
             | they're community cops, and it's distracting enough that
             | it's decreased my enjoyment of discussion.
             | 
             | Because they don't discuss. They downvote to disagree, they
             | don't reply, and they karma farm like that gives them
             | street cred to be miserable. It's like they're not even
             | people outside of their accounts.
        
           | nicolas_t wrote:
           | I wish there was a notification for replies to comments I
           | made. I feel that some conversations could be continued if
           | such a feature existed.
        
             | DenisM wrote:
             | It kinda went the other way - HN has a calming feature that
             | prevents you from quickly replying to a comment on your
             | comment. That was clearly on purpose.
        
           | Zandikar wrote:
           | > Hard to follow someone
           | 
           | IMO: Good. The harder it is to shout "look at _ME_ " for
           | clout and profit, the more productive and on topic the
           | discourse tends to be, and the easier it is for moderation to
           | weed out the trolls and off topic/hateful/spammy discussion.
           | The fact that this place isn't about who any one given poster
           | is, but what they have to say, is part of what makes it such
           | a vibrant and valuable and informative place to have
           | discussions.
           | 
           | > hard to form groups discussing various topics
           | 
           | Why is this necessary when various topics tend to get
           | substantial discussion already? Sure, some more than others,
           | but that activity tends to form a rather organic filter
           | without facilitating echo chambers and mob mentality that
           | tends to emerge when you start erecting walled gardens. Sure,
           | that still happens to an extent, but much less than on say
           | reddit or twitter.
           | 
           | I fail to see how making this more like platforms succumbing
           | to the enshittification of the internet is a path to
           | improvement here.
        
         | amadeuspagel wrote:
         | A paid, full-time moderator.
        
         | thinkingtoilet wrote:
         | As others have pointed out, the answer is moderation. High
         | quality, diligent moderation. Reddit is the ultimate proof of
         | this. A highly moderated, focused subreddit can be a wonderful
         | place. A loosely moderated subreddit quickly devolves into
         | memes and lowest common denominator posts, which is totally
         | fine for specific subjects, or even meme-based subreddits for a
         | given topic. If you want quality, you have to invest in it. It
         | doesn't just happen. The good news is that it's self
         | reinforcing. Once you have something good, people start
         | policing themselves and others. This can go overboard of
         | course, but it can be a good a really good thing. I often see
         | comments here along the lines of, "comments like this are not
         | welcome here".
        
           | symlinkk wrote:
           | Moderation kills discussion. Hacker News and 4chan are
           | lightly moderated and that's why they've survived for a
           | decade plus.
        
             | bobthepanda wrote:
             | HN _looks_ lightly moderated but there is a reason why the
             | front page is not full of the latest and greatest political
             | flamewar stuff like all the other media sites.
        
             | krapp wrote:
             | Hacker News is one of the most aggressively moderated
             | forums on the web, what are you talking about?
        
               | ineedaj0b wrote:
               | i think the overton window is quite large for ideas you
               | can discuss on hn unlike reddit. you can go anywhere
               | really but if your bot-ing or selling something you get
               | swatted. also overtly political takes get nuked but it's
               | both sides
        
               | krapp wrote:
               | You can't even make a joke on HN without an entire
               | subthread being created to chastise you for it. Most
               | political stories get flagged by default because they
               | tend to degenerate into flamewars, to say nothing of any
               | subject even tangentially related to race, gender,
               | religion, physics or medicine, when the bigots and cranks
               | come out of their crawlspaces. And plenty of people flag
               | any non "technical" subject because they believe
               | (erroneously) that HN is only for programming, CS and
               | startups.
               | 
               | And God forbid javascript runs on the site hosting TFA,
               | or it's behind a paywall, or it has too much whitespace
               | or uses the wrong font or margins or there's a typo.
               | Because if so, that is now the entire topic of
               | conversation.
               | 
               | Compared to _the entirety_ of Reddit, including all of
               | the topic-specific, well moderated subs? Hacker News is
               | unfortunately a dismal place to discuss most topics.
        
             | xeromal wrote:
             | It really can work both ways. r/askscience is notoriously
             | heavy handed and an incredible sub.
        
             | BiteCode_dev wrote:
             | HN makes it look casual but it has a very active and
             | diligent moderation and a whole automated system to detect
             | spams, self promotion, hateful comments...
             | 
             | The basic design is on purpose, but the backend doesn't
             | match the front.
        
           | swozey wrote:
           | I really dislike forums nowadays but I'm part of a /r/$car
           | subreddit along with the $carforum.com and there's no
           | comparison between using reddit vs the forum for quality data
           | and not losing things to the ether.
           | 
           | There are so many subreddits where great posts get lost,
           | subreddits that don't allow commenting on old posts, being
           | notified when old posts _are_ updated, things like that.
           | $Carforum has tags I can follow, just so many QOL features
           | that reddit will never implement. You can sort subreddit by
           | top, google search for something specific but all of those
           | QOL improvements forums have lead to such better growing
           | conversations. I guess reddit has flairs now that I think
           | about it but I rarely see that used as a search mechanism.
           | 
           | With that said I absolutely hate having to sign up for
           | forums. If they don't have a google/apple/whatever auth I can
           | use there's a 70%+ chance I'll never make an account. And
           | even then it's a consideration because you never know if
           | after creating an account with an SSO you'll next be asked 20
           | questions, be limited from posting for X amount of time/karma
           | (which does happen on reddit but less frequently IME).
           | 
           | Subreddits need .. sub-sub reddits or something similar.
           | /r/$car/wheels, /r/$car/engine..
           | 
           | Also, as cliche as it is, I have never had a worse experience
           | with moderators than on reddit. I used to be an ircop on
           | efnet and none of us were anywhere near as rude and quick to
           | assume the worst as my reddit experience.
        
             | gpspake wrote:
             | Using a password manager negated the whole signing up thing
             | from me and I actually like it better because I'm signing
             | up with a site specific email and random password instead
             | of using a third party account that they might not support
             | or that I might not use in the future. Mostly I just don't
             | want my major provider identities associated with
             | individual third-party sites. A password manager basically
             | provides the same click to login experience without the
             | side effects of using SSO.
        
               | swozey wrote:
               | Yeah you're not wrong, I use password managers for
               | everything. The forums that require an email sign-up are
               | typically always the ones with the annoying (to me) sign
               | up process where I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of
               | putting my resume information in line by line on a job
               | application that didn't auto-input it. Age, required.
               | Gender, required. Car model and year, required. etc..
               | etc.. etc.. Just got old to me after being on a thousand
               | car forums over my lifetime.
               | 
               | I couldn't tell you how many birthday messages I get from
               | 10-20 year old forums every year.
        
             | ineedaj0b wrote:
             | reddit is lame too. it's facebook for millennials.
             | 
             | facebook: boomers posting cringe rightwing/normie (back in
             | my day we worked hard!) stuff with occasional wholesome
             | bits
             | 
             | reddit: millennials posting cringe leftwing/normie stuff
             | (my dog might be gay, am i the asshole? btw i like ukraine)
             | with occasional wholesome animal photos
        
               | swozey wrote:
               | Instagram is facebook for millennials.
               | 
               | I barely know a single person IRL outside of tech who
               | uses reddit and I'm a millennial. Like, they know about
               | it, and occassionally reference a post on it but they
               | aren't on it anywhere near like my friends on instagram.
               | My millennial friends are on instagram 24/7. I might make
               | a story once a month and as soon as I post it I have 100+
               | people who have looked at it. And I have so many friends
               | who post stories every single day. They're on it non-stop
               | during any idle time.
               | 
               | Reddit has an atrocious new user experience. That's why
               | Digg was so much more popular and reddit was incredibly
               | niche until digg died. I didn't use reddit pre-digg-death
               | because I had _no_ idea how it worked it looked so
               | confusing.
        
             | washadjeffmad wrote:
             | Thanks for contributing to the good days on efnet.
             | 
             | I gave up reddit after (although not because) I was banned
             | for not riding a mod vigilantism hype train. If you're not
             | part of the hive mind, you're really worse than nothing to
             | them.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | Honestly I think subreddits go bad after about 150k no matter
           | what the moderation.
        
             | spoonjim wrote:
             | The scale of the moderation required may need more than
             | volunteer labor.
        
               | mhh__ wrote:
               | Maybe but the population itself becomes retarded past a
               | certain point.
               | 
               | All the really really big subreddits are well moderated,
               | cordial, etc and nonetheless full of complete philistines
               | with no taste.
        
         | throwaway22032 wrote:
         | Elitism.
         | 
         | You need to keep the quality of discussion high. That means
         | prioritising individuals with critical thinking skills over
         | emotional hot takes.
         | 
         | I disagree with political opinions on here a lot of the time,
         | but the individuals expressing them are usually at least able
         | to articulate logically why they make sense from their vantage
         | point.
         | 
         | By contrast, somewhere like Reddit is obviously made up of far
         | less inquisitive individuals on average which makes everything
         | a "hot take", often using buzzwords.
        
       | langsoul-com wrote:
       | Hard to really say what it is beyond a social media platform like
       | the rest.
       | 
       | Article spends more time describing how it's like a tech utopia
       | than actually saying wtf is happening
        
       | DeathArrow wrote:
       | >Unlike most platforms today, Jike does not use in-app ads to
       | lure users or algorithms to push content, but encourages active
       | engagement through carefully curated topics and in-depth
       | discussions across the app.
       | 
       | That's something I would like to take a part in. Unfortunately I
       | don't know Mandarin.
        
         | malfist wrote:
         | These things are always true while they're trying to gain their
         | foot in the door. First comes ad free, then comes users, then
         | comes ads
        
           | IncreasePosts wrote:
           | Maybe companies will start selling the data to AI training
           | operations, and won't need to resort to ads to keep free
           | services running.
        
       | sverhagen wrote:
       | Amazing that a popular site can be shut down for a year, and then
       | come back on top after that, without getting its lunch eaten by
       | new competitors that use that whole year to catch up to them.
        
         | informal007 wrote:
         | This kind of forum is hard to develop from zero, and it's don't
         | have much financial potiential, the roi is low for new
         | competitors. I think that's why there is not new competitors
         | during this year.
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | Asking Google about this site results only in insistent repeats
       | of "Did you mean 'joke'"?
        
         | hifromwork wrote:
         | Maybe try looking for Ji Ke . But I have good results by just
         | googling "jikeapp".
        
       | chaosprint wrote:
       | Most people still use WeChat, even for tech news reading. You
       | have everything inside WeChat, which is like an OS. Some young
       | people also use Hupu(a basketball app and forum but you can also
       | discuss other topics).
        
         | yu3zhou4 wrote:
         | I have WeChat as a EU user, but I can't post for some reason.
         | In Douyin and Weibo it's even worse - I'm unable to create an
         | account. Do you know how to overcome it? I rent Hong Kong
         | number, but it's not enough to create accounts on those
         | platforms.
        
           | WhyNotHugo wrote:
           | On iOS, if you download Alipay from the Dutch app store it's
           | a different program than the Alipay from the Chinese app
           | store. A lot of features require that you download Alipay
           | with a Chinese Apple account. I suspect the same applies to
           | WeChat (I wish I remembered better).
           | 
           | IIRC, you also need to validate a Chinese phone number for
           | some features. None of it is intuitive.
        
       | gpt10o wrote:
       | If I'm not mistaken, the largest podcast app in China is also
       | made by this company.
        
         | humanlity wrote:
         | ye, xiaoyuzhoufm
        
       | deadbabe wrote:
       | What's to stop a bunch of westerners from invading this app and
       | just posting on it in English?
        
         | jtwaleson wrote:
         | Why would they choose to do so?
        
         | pjc50 wrote:
         | They'd get banned like any other spammers?
        
           | deadbabe wrote:
           | It's not spam
        
         | amadeuspagel wrote:
         | What's to stop a bunch of chinese from invading Hacker News and
         | just posting on it in Chinese?
        
           | elric wrote:
           | If it weren't such an insanely difficult language to learn,
           | it might be interesting to be part of Chinese tech
           | discussions.
        
             | imp0cat wrote:
             | The alphabet may be hard, but grammar is (supposedly) quite
             | easy, compared to eg. Japanese.
        
       | nneonneo wrote:
       | FWIW, Hacker News itself appears to be blocked by the Great
       | Firewall. Techies, of course, will have no problems getting
       | through, but I'm genuinely confused as to why it's banned in the
       | first place...
        
         | slim wrote:
         | subversive narratives under control of foreign power
        
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