Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson

they/them

Lord, where are you going?

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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: April 22nd, 2025

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  • Just a reminder that Reddit was once difficult for people to understand.

    I honestly don’t believe this at all.

    Snapshat was popularized by a generation that grew up only using apps, and it was designed to be obtuse, mysterious and difficult to learn in comparison to other apps as a feature. It grew regardless.

    To be honest though, I’m a bit disappointed by the other users here. The quality of comments is really poor, both idiotic and adversarial. I’m talking fox news comment section level.

    Yeah so is reddit. The best moderation and engagement in fediverse typically exists in the highly moderated communities that people constantly complain about not respecting their freeze peach and antisocial tendencies.







  • It seems naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a benign protector of the assaulted Chinese citizen. Chinese people are not like stupid children in need of protection, they are smart and strong.

    Yeah it’s equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren’t uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.

    If you read actual comparisons of “censorship regimes” there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to “drink tea” you’re ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.

    You know why it’s “soooo hard” for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It’s because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an “investigation”) doesn’t work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren’t easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn’t is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren’t told explicitly to the “freedom loving people” of America? Meanwhile the agents of “evil Chinese government” don’t need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.

    People in other countries get “dissapeared”, but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are “political prisoners” but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can “honestly label” it’s political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.

    People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it’s processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn’t want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.

    The reality here is that you’re not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that’s how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like “authoritarian” to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of “Are we the baddies?” the reply is a thought terminating cliche of “No we’re all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World”. China doesn’t need to Nuremburg because it’s goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.



  • The self censorship that exists on the Chinese internet is a matter of moderation scale and techniques. It doesn’t exist in the West because Western companies have the incentive to keep you interacting with their products.

    In China moderation is meant to:

    1. Protect the rest of the users from bad behavior
    2. Signal to the bad user that they are engaging in bad behavior.

    Western moderation is meant to:

    1. Protect the rest of users from a bad behavior
    2. Keep bad users engaged in order to drive ad revenues.

    1 and 2 are inherently at tensions with one another. Thus you have the problem where 1 is diluted by 2 leading to a much more limited set of what is considered bad, and an ever changing and political understanding of it based on the whims of the ownership and their relation to the party in power. Facebook changes its moderation policies based on presidential administration.

    2 also leads to non-deterministic systems of gating users into fake interaction or limiting their reach to other similarly bad users.

    Another reason is cultural / social. Praise is often used ironicly in China, they have a very fine line between legitimate praise and what in the West would be considered saccharine or gassing someone up. In China when you overly praise someone it’s read as a criticism of the person for what you’re praising them for. So typically censorship structures do not take into account sentiment unlike in the West esp. because Chinese is more of a figurative language than English. There is a lot of context lost in communicating text only and audio only Chinese due to how the language is constructed. In essence they prefer to police topic not types of speech (e.g. hate speech, criticism, etc).

    The last reason this happens is a lot of the Chinese Internet’s moderation policies are based on the fact that their level of public social acceptability is much more constricted think PG not even PG-13. In that sense the codified language works to create a space where you’re able to have conversations on things that would “rock the boat” without getting everyone hot and bothered. Unlike the Western Internet where social media companies want these clashes to happen because they drive more engagement and thus more revenue.

    For example instead of posting about censorship and getting into an internet pile on where nothing happens and nobody learns anything because they’re talking past each-other why not just post a picture of a river crab wearing 3 watches. Anyone who cares knows what that means and they know that arguing about it online isn’t actually the way to change anything in China. Everyone having a take while barely understanding the thing they have a take on is only beneficial to Western capitalists running internet companies that act as treats. Higher education is affordable in China, you can actually go learn about censorship at an accredited program. Surprisingly because Chinese citizens on average are protected by their government from being wrung dry for all their profit potential by their capitalist class they have time/energy to do these things.












  • CapEVs are almost nowhere on the American tech radar. It’s entirely an industry dominated by China. Ironically the industry started out in the US. Foton America was a subsidiary of Foton. China’s first trials in Shangai in 2006 were done with Foton vehicles made in America. Foton America folded because America was not investing in the tech or public transport. Foton reshored the tech in China and continued development.

    Almost every major European metro is doing a field test. Belgrade installed Chinese Higer busses for a lot of its’ routes. Graz is running 2 lines from an American manufacturer (with no presence in America lmao) called Chariot Motors (how much longer until we see the Foton America story play out again). Paris is running tests with busses made by German manufacturer MAN, but they’re hybrids because Westoids can’t stop relying on fossil fuels “just in case”.

    I fully see China dominating Eastern Europe with these things because the value proposition is so good, Foton and Higer are miles ahead in testing, deployment and development than any other manufacturer. Since China is generally hotter than Europe and America they have a lot more practical experience with keeping the capacitors from overheating which has been a problem for this type of tech esp. ~15 years ago.

    Either way it’s essentially a trolley that doesn’t require continuous lines which is why it’s so hated in the US, ever since GM bought up a bunch of lines and left them to rot.