Mild Rant

[cashew]

Lofter's censorship is immensely brainless. Apparently, pointing out that being "emotionally hurt" by an athlete who could not play due to injury and seeing this as some kind of personal slight against the fan is immensely stupid behavior is considered "too confrontational".

WTF even? I'm suddenly reminded of why I went off of Lofter. This is getting to be Tumblr's level of stupid "discourse".

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In other news, second day of New Year's is definitely less cool. Also, do not feel like I've had a holiday when I worked through most of it. I would facepalm, but I did this to myself, so...

Comments

[tanithryudo]

Is there a platform in China which isn't censored heavily?

[cashew]

It's not the censorship itself (which is also dumb, but it's a different kind of thing), but rather the way the censorship is run. Like, Weibo definitely seems way, way more OK with people flinging shit at each other (just not at the government, but fandom in-fighting is not really worth their time to censor). Meanwhile, it seems like Lofter wouldn't even allow mildly caustic language, which is a bit prudish and puritanical. (Of course, doesn't stop people from posting art and fanfic on there somehow, I don't really know how those people managed to get around the censors.)

[tanithryudo]

I heard that weibo basically grew out of fandom infighting so that is the majority of its user base, and that's why they don't really censor that stuff. Is that true?

[cashew]

I mean, I have no idea about the rise of Weibo other than it was an attempt to make Chinese Twitter. 🤮 I know that Weibo has been crashing and burning recently, much like Twitter has, so it's filled with a bunch of semi-illiterate people screaming at each other. Also they're bleeding users to Douyin, because micro videos are the thing now, 'cuz people are too lazy to read.

Meanwhile, Lofter had a huge company shake up when the government came down on their heads, and now it's like the most milquetoast place. I don't really understand their censorship stuff, tho', because other than posting pictures, everything I have tried to write has been blocked by the censor. Clearly, opinions and facts are not tolerated on the site. Even linking to a foreign site will get the entry taken down. (All I was trying to do is show a picture of a fucking bike, but scary overseas link is not allowed, I guess.)

[tanithryudo]

Crashing and burning as in the business is doing badly and stock is going down, or as in the user base is going nuts over various controversial/irrelevant topics? I have to admit I stay in a safe corner of weibo where fandom is involved...

And semi-illiterate... I would've thought douyin user base would be even worse, since that is a video based format which doesn't even require one to be literate in the literal sense to post sh*t.

The place I am most familiar with in regards to censorship is jjwxc the creative writing site. I know pretty much a lot of old works that were even a little risque got chapters locked. So that nowadays you're pretty much forced to stick to PG rating.

Anything that takes place Qing Dynasty is either brainless romance or heavily scrutinized and takes real skillz to get past the censors. Stuff that takes place in the Republic era are even harder to find. And stuff in early contemporary China no one bothers to write b/c it definitely won't pass censors.

Any work in a modern setting which involves non-Chinese elements always contains some bashing of JPN, KR, USA...such that I assume that any work which talks about these nations positively have probably been censored which is why I haven't seen any.

=/

[cashew]

Crashing and burning in the business sense. Flaming garbage fire of fandom wankery was just the default state, I think. Of course, it doesn't help that peddling conspiracy theories a huge thing on the platform. And yes, Douyin's straight up illiterate. I guess the semi-illiterate prefers to lecture to the illiterate to feel like they're big wigs or something.

China's intranet is just one giant mess. This is why I VPN onto the actual internet.

I couldn't get much use out of jjwxc. I tried looking for stuff there, but the fandoms I was looking into are really poorly represented and I literally find more Chinese stuff on Ao3 than I can on jjwxc. I really don't understand how Chinese web novels took off when it's censored so heavily and thus everything is just bland paste all the time. Your descriptions do not improve my impression. 😂 It's a shame things are the way they are, but I'll shut up for now in case the VPN is being hacked or something.

[tanithryudo]

AO3 is more for fanfic. I go there for all the R and NC-17 rated Star Rail fics. >.>

jjwxc I go more for original fiction works. But its search function is horrible and has no decent internal rec function. The way I find fics there is that I see stories recommended on other places like douban or weibo, or in the author notes / comments section of other stories I liked, and then look for good stories that way. It's a pain, but there's really no better way to navigate the place.

[cashew]

I shouldn't be surprised that there's Star Rail fic and yet...

Yeah, trying to use the jjwxc search was pretty much impossible. I guess you just have to know the right places to look to find stuff, much like how back in the days of LJ or webrings, when everyone made giant fic rec lists because the fic have been scattered across personal journals and communities. Makes me appreciate Ao3 even more.

(Suddenly flashing back to us reading HP fic at your place during uni. What were we even doing? LOL.)