I have not lived very long, but I must concede this was one the most bewildering of weeks I have lived. As some of you may have heard, in light of the approaching ban on TikTok in the US, a lot of users have been searching for alternative platforms and they found just that with yet another Chinse app by the name of "Rednote".
I was unaware of this till it appeared in the search headlines this week. As it turned out it's been a thing for almost a week now. There are Americans by the millions pouring into Rednote, another popular short-video and lifestyle app, and it's taken all of us by quite a surprise. My friends tell me they all have come across huge amounts of freshly posted content from American users, and its all over the internet. For us who have mostly just been following Western trends for some decades it feels highly odd to be all of a sudden placed in the spotlight, and that attention comes rather sweetly but also strangely. This does evoke a bit of interesting thought from me.
First up, I have to say it's all quite hilarious. The conversations I've seen flying about are all worth a good laugh and its mostly harmless interactions between people who try to make sense of each other across the language barrier. It is as if our little segregated corner of the internet suddenly opened up for a bit, though it's more of the other way: the outside world is hurdling itself at us. Our government carries out a strict policy and cyber-censoring and has banned all Western social media sites like Xitter, Facebook, insta, and yada yada with a firewall named, uninterestingly, The Great Firewall, hence you rarely see the Chinese anywhere in your sector. For us it means being scarcely able to interact with anyone who doesn't speak the same tongue and after a while you begin to forget that it is fact the world-wide-web. To access the world outside you have to use a VPN , which requires a bit of money or via other methods that took some IT knowledge most don't possess. So you can imagine how new and fun it is for us, this unforeseen and very sudden opportunity to open our eyes a bit. It been quite a good chance for both us and the US people to drop all prejudices, sit down, and have a good little chat.
Yet the future remains vague. Biden's ban definitely backfired, since it merely led TikTok users to an even more Chinese platform with its database in China, unlike TikTok which I believe had its data stored in the US and is basically an entire separate version of the its domestic counterpart, Douying, used here in China, making is even easier for our government to access user info should they wish to. Can our government access user info? Yes, I'm afraid none can hide from the Big Brother when he wishes to look upon you; but will they? I can't say. As of yet doing so doesn't really bring them much, I think. Another thing is that the Big Brother does not really like it when his people are overly exposed to the outside world, so if this trend continues, Rednote may very well be required to somehow separate all users with Western IP addresses from domestic users. Or perhaps once Trump becomes president he'll just somehow dismiss this whole ban thing and TikTok will just come back and all will go back to the way they were.
So this window will not likely be open very long.
I unfortunately cannot share any first-hand experiences since I do not use any of these apps, and for good reason: I am only just 18 and with some years ahead of me, ADHD, brainrot and cognitive decline caused by over-indulgence in said apps aren't exactly on my bucket list. But here's one I saw:

"Hi, China. I'm an architecture student in Hawaii, and I'm wondering how's the architecture major in China?"
"Bullshit."
"Same here."

As of yet there have been few or none conflicts, and I do hope few occur. We live in odd times, huh.