List of Social Media Platforms I've Used

Reddit

If you used it, you know what it is like.

Still a healthy and successful platform with huge amount of non-spam texts, valuable for lots of purposes.

Dcard

It's fun and showed me how speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages can talk like people with open minds and healthy values.

See also Xiaohongshu comparison.

China's Self-Censoring Copy-Pasting Mobile-App-Only Platforms

Tieba

Reddit clone with extremely poor usability.

I used this when I was 13-15 years old, I joined because my then gf was on it and our school had a sub on it.

I also use it to improve my speed cubing skills by learning the resources copied from the other side of the GFW on the cubing sub.

Zhihu

Quora clone. This is the only one out of 3 Chinese platforms here that's "readable" on the web (without using the mobile app).

I used this a lot when I was 17-19 years old, to look for resources and guides. And stories, of course.

It's been going downhill since then, and now it's just a platform for reading (paid) romance novels, not for any non-low-effort answers.

I sometimes wonder that the life of the human censors' is like.

Xiaohongshu

I started using it when my then-gf told me how she learned about tips for the 21-day mandatory qurantine (later extended to 21-weeks, in celebration of 2.2-year anniversary of COVID.) before we boarded the flight to China in March 2022.

It's addictive. It keeps recommending what I might be interested in, and can be a time sink.

Issues:

• Too much ads: 1/2 accounts are ads or for-profit / online business accounts.
• Users generally hold values that are not compatible with the modern or free world. Girls pride themselves for selling for a good price for marriage. Gold diggers. Assessing partners using a list of numbers and names. Love of dictatorship. Hyper-sensitivity to different opinions (which leads to tense exchanges)
• Extreme self-censorship: Due to backward and facist values, people cannot use languages properly, and resort to pinyin-abbreviations and emojis to refer to body parts, and they use "cooking" to refer to "sex", which confuses even some native speakers that are not used to this kind of insanity.

Since it's the only usable search engine in China, I still use it to look up info, but for other purposes, I find Dcard holds much more open and healthy discussions, and people on Dcard do not get angry easily just because someone expresses different opinions.

Owned by Meta

Instagram

I've stopped posting, because like counts give me anxiety, and I don't want that. It's easier to post on my website without a comment section or like buttons, intentionally.

Facebook

Meh.

Meetup

https://sm.teddysc.me

Better than Eventbrite for sure. I did find some great communinities and fun things to do there.

Twitter

For political and informational contents, and fun videos and memes.

Sometimes I also follow cybersec / llm / python folks.

I also read tweets from famous people after their scandals here.

BTW, the name X is dumb.

Discord

It'd be much better if the desktop app starts within 30 seconds, and if it doesn't have the 100 servers limit.

The open sources alternatives for Discord haven't gain too much adoptions, but I hope they do, without compromising the values.

Slack

Slack is absolute garbage, people are better off using JIRA or ServiceNow.

It shares some traits with WorkDay, the most hated job application system in the world, where you must get a new account for every company / community.

Telegram

Loved by Chinese communities with Internet access. Huge groups. Fast, capable and free (as in free beer).

Decentralized

IRC

Old. Loved by tech folks.

I think everyone should at least try it once, so that they can learn not to post a wall of text in a chat somewhere else (and use a pastebin instead).

Channels I frequented:

• tilde.town
• archlinux, archlinuxcn (connected to matrix and telegram via bridges)
• certain technologies

Matrix

A modern take on IRC?

You can access them on Element (Riot), or the browser.

Mastodon

I have accounts on some famous instances, the .social one and the cybersec one.

I like the idea but I don't think people are going to switch off Twitter.

Honorable Mentions

• PTT
• The Hub (not on clear web)