As the TikTok ban approaches, US users have downloaded RedNote en masse - another Chinese video-focused privacy invasion app. There’s a sensational Bluesky thread describing it. It’s not even a straight up replacement for TikTok:
Please be aware, RedNote is in Mandarin. All servers are in China. It's a female dominated social media platform, sort of a cross between Pinterest and TikTok, that's mostly used by Chinese folks to get restaurant recs and beauty tips.
— Erica Wilkinson (@everywhereerica.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Some fascinating highlights:
And if you had any doubt as to how tangled things are becoming:
And you're going to have a hard time manufacturing consent for aggressive action against China when 170 million American TikTok Refugees are mutuals with half of the RedNote netizens.
This is absoLUTELY going to have diplomatic ramifications.
— Erica Wilkinson (@everywhereerica.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
This is culture wars bundled with social moving fast bundled with the rate of change turning entire groups’ expectations into roadkill.
South Korea and Ukraine are “enhancing cooperation” after North Korea deployed 3,000 troops to Russian training grounds, and will exchange intelligence and expertise.
The world is getting so weirdly tangled.
Any time now we’re going to run into a political multi-ball pinball situation, where you have events ricocheting from bumper to bumper in a chaotic way that gains enough momentum to just keep going by itself.
I’m sure there is some sort of country-equivalent to Dunbar’s number, that is much lower than the one for people given the much added complexity.
If so, soon we are going to run into a level where our monkey brains just can’t process the required levels of intentionality.
Things will start looking random even for those who need to make decisions at state level, even if they have an entire intelligence apparatus at their service, because it becomes harder to assign a probability value to a potential outcome (or trace it back to a cause).
It feels like everything is getting more porous.
I wrote at one point that our brains weren’t web scale, and they definitely are not going to be able to cope with whatever dynamics this engenders.
While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered:
I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […]
They don’t have to - they only need one person they trust (or are willing to take at face value for a test) to create a feed, or to add a feed to a starter pack.
But more importantly, I realized, any customization someone can do, thoughtful or not, is an improvement. It introduces some delta on the perspective, even while they are within a group, instead of putting them into the monoculture dictated by which news items are more clickbaity and likely to bring ad revenue.
It is the same way with genetics: even small mutations can help diversify the perspective gene pool.
There are two gigantic issues with social media as we have it now.
Like it or not, we have monkey brains. They did not evolve to deal with the scale of information (and misinformation) that they are being exposed to. The monkey brain sees that something has 15,000 re-tweets, and assumes that one of those 15k other monkeys viewed it and vetted it.
The other is that people are getting a firehose of content into a single mental context.
We do not intend to enforce any sort of identity verification or unique identities in distributed[C]. We do not think encouraging people to doxx themselves is a good idea.
This goes beyond concerns about privacy, though. We believe that having multiple personas, which you can use depending on the context you are in, is healthy.
This raises concerns regarding disinformation. If the platform is uncensorable, and we do not plan to enforce identity, how will this not become a cesspool of fake news?