lol. lmao even
The only upside for the DNC shitlibs is that it’s as far away from the midterms as possible and USian voters have the political memory of a goldfish
That was even faster than I thought
what’s even the point
“Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations,” [Trump] wrote. “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up. Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars - maybe trillions.”
Hopefully ByteDance doesn’t get strong-armed into 50% US ownership. That would be, like, the most awkward divorced parents situation ever
I don’t know how they can get strong armed, they’re clearly willing to call the USs bluff and get banned. What other leverage is there?
The key here is the joint venture, because it opens up the possibility for a US-China joint venture inside China as well.
Read my comment here in the news mega for how the US can potentially play this game.
If the US says you share your TikTok algorithm with us, and you let Meta inside China and we share some of our AI technology with you and lift the other AI restrictions Biden has put into place, will you take it?
If the US says what if Meta/some US tech companies invest $100 billion into China to help boost your domestic consumption, will you take it?
If the US says, we will cut the Fed rates further in 2025 to help alleviate your local government debt burden, will you take it?
In other words, the stick is mutually assured destruction - if you don’t want to play ball, I’ll make the situation so much worse for both of us. The carrot is you give us some of what we want and we promise not to further our threats, and we both come out of this with our respective PR wins. You have 1.4 billion of people to take care of, think about them.
It’s a classic dilemma of “saving your economy” and “preserving or giving up parts of your sovereignty” for China. There are going to be red lines, and there are going to be compromises. All the tariffs, sanctions and bans set the initial conditions for negotiations that can then be bargained down to a point where both sides are satisfied with.
In these types of stand-offs, the Americans usually win, as they are at any point prepared to inflict massive damage upon their own population solely to hurt their adversary. Sure, the tariffs are going to hurt China’s export-oriented economy, but it’s also going to cause massive price inflation among Americans, which is going to push even more of them into desperate poverty. However the people in Washington who make these decisions don’t have to care about an extra 10 million people being made homeless over 5 years, or 50 million going bankrupt because of the added pressure on their finances (mind the recent articles from various banks about American credit card defaults being at the highest level since 2009-2010).
Even if the slop creators go back to Tiktok, Xiaohongshu is a much better experience. Within a day its algorithm started feeding me pretty much nothing but naturalists excited about plants and camping/hiking. Like Hexbear removing all of reddit’s gamification elements, that’s so much closer to authentic social media. I get much more value comparing native botany with someone in Yunnan than I do from endlessly scrolling a slopified stream of western social media equivalents.
yeah the algorithm is infinitely easier to sway. interacting with content and hitting the “not interested” button feels like it works 50x more efficient than tiktok.
also haven’t seen any ads, or promotional videos that pretend to not be ads. no hearing the same dozen trending audios over and over and over. the memes are funnier, the creative stuff is more creative, the content is more original, and the people are less toxic. + photos in comments. all around a much better experience
Yea, xhs is better than tiktok. Idk why, but I think it is partially because there is no capacity for Americans to make money directly from the app rn. There are more restrictions on that stuff in China anyway, but no way to get paid without a Chinese ID.
Pretty sure you can still do product placement and shit, but I think youd get banned if you aren’t doing it as required.
I don’t mind the algo though. It didn’t take long to push it in a certain direction. I imagine I’ll stop using it soon though, because at the end of the day it’s still just easily palatable slop. Cool seeing the books Chinese nerds are reading though. I’ll likely keep coming back for that lol.
I like how you can modify your algorithm, I can’t read it for **** yet but it’s cool that it’s there!
All I’m getting is communist music, PLA hardbass edits, cosplayers, and occasionally “American friends, is this just propaganda or do you actually have to [pay for ambulances, eat raw unseasoned broccoli for lunch, die in school shootings every week]”
So I guess it’s working pretty well
