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Gundam and anime replace rampant politics in Japanese Twitter Trends
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ramesh31 4y agoAnd nothing of value was lost.
- syockit 4y agoAu contraire; something of value was gained.
- thot_experiment 4y agoSomething of negative value was lost!
- Natsu 4y agoThis reminds me of how Reddit changed basically overnight years ago to be all about politics.
- 63 4y agoIn Reddit's case, I think it was a result of American culture and media in general changing to be more political. Late night television and Twitter experienced similar changes around that time too.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Late night television ... experienced similar changes around that time too. It's unwatchable now. It used to be kind of OK when Trump was in office, but once he got kicked out they continued with the same formula, so I just tuned out.
- boppo1 4y agoHow did this all happen at once?
- mrslave 4y agoWould you please explain it to those of us who didn't experience this? What was it like before, what changed, and why?
- Jensson 4y agoDo you watch all or popular, or just your subscribed feeds? I like browsing things when not logged on, and reddit certainly turned very political in the all/popular feeds you see by default. Before then they were mostly full of funny pictures, jokes and random rants about life.
- sanjayio 4y agoI’ve experienced the same. Similar to yourself, I like to browser when not logged in and logged in.
- rosnd 4y ago2006 reddit looks pretty political https://web.archive.org/web/20061109051326/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20061109051326/http://reddit.com...
- bart_spoon 4y agoYou picked the day after the elections. Of course it’s political. The difference is that modern Reddit looks like that every day of the year, and old Reddit did not.
- rosnd 4y agoI just tried to pick a date most similar to the present one :) If you dig through the archives, I think you may find that the politicisation of reddit happened earlier than you thought. 2008 reddit already seems like mostly politics to me, which I think happened simply because the audience started trending less nerdy. I propose that politics are simply a very popular topic to discuss, and naturally rise to the top as the group becomes less homogenous.
- geon 4y agoWhen was that change? Do you feel it os still all about politics? I’ve been on reddit since 2008, and I don’t really recognize that.
- Natsu 4y agoIt was far less political in the past, now I visit the front page and it's all politics all the time. Note that I don't log in and I'm just browsing the front page, so it has nothing to do with me selecting subs.
- voidifremoved 4y agoMy recollection is that before subreddits were a thing, Reddit was not that far off how this place is now.
- xdfgh1112 4y agoYou won't notice if you don't use all/popular or frequent extremely large subs.
- throw0101c 4y ago> This reminds me of how Reddit changed basically overnight years ago to be all about politics. Depends on the sub-Reddit. /r/sysadmin and /r/networking are on topic, as is a lot of the personal finance stuff I like helping out in. /r/motorcycles, television, and movies also stay focused as well.
- filoleg 4y agoSince you've mentioned r/motorcycles, let's not forget it's fun brother r/CalamariRaceTeam (one of my personal related favorites). Jokes aside, you are correct that there are still really focused and entirely non-political subreddits out there, and there are many of them. But I don't think that the grandparent comment implied they didnt exist anymore. I think they were talking more about r/all, r/popular, and lots of big non-politics-adjacent-topic subreddits turning very political in a very short period of time (e.g., r/funny and some other default subs)
- uni_rule 4y agoSubjectively, when was the changeover? When subs became a thing? When Ron Paul got popular? When the whole Ellen Pao debacle went down? The 2016 election?
- nlarion 4y agoClearly, the medium is the massage; there are also those who massage the medium
- nateberkopec 4y agoIt's pretty much always been like this. It doesn't resemble at all what tops the Trending charts in America. I've been checking Twitter Trends here in Japan for the last ~3 months, prior to the Musk acquisition, and I've always thought it was fascinating how there's very little political discussion. I don't think this was related to the curation team being axed at all.
- atdrummond 4y agoThis was literally Japanese Twitter users noticing that the trending page no longer featured political news, though.
- noobermin 4y agoTo be honest, I don't see any real sources for this beyond anti-woke types who comment on japanese culture from America. None of the japanese people I follow (who aren't anime types really) are remarking on this at all. All the Musk and twitter drama seems disconnected for them. As another sample, I'm in Singapore, and the trends last night were about the American election, nothing seemed to be that different than before Musk took over.
- midoridensha 4y agoJust living here in Japan, I've noticed that people here rarely talk about politics. Japan doesn't have the political division that America has; the LDP is by far the largest party with the most seats, and it's been like this for a long time. Japanese people do talk politics occasionally, like when Abe was assassinated (that had many people worried about gun crime becoming a problem), but it's nothing like in America, where it's ever-present. They will occasionally talk about foreign politics I've found: many don't like China, for instance (which is understandable, Americans don't either), but domestic politics just aren't a big topic. It doesn't surprise me at all that Japanese Twitter echoes this.
- xdfgh1112 4y agoMostly yeah, but there is the whole ネトウヨ movement and also the extreme left. They hang out all over the internet. Politics is not all encompassing in the UK either, it's mainly an American thing imo.
- Ambolia 4y agoThis kind of news always makes me wonder, what kind of world would we live in if all propaganda was turned off for 4 weeks. We may find out some day if a bad enough solar flare hits the Earth and fries enough electronic equipment.
- SllX 4y agoSo, the Twitter curation team was curating at least Japanese Twitter to be more political? Kind of makes me wonder what American Twitter is going to look like once our regularly scheduled post-election meltdown is over; but if true, $44B to turn Twitter into a smoking hole in the ground might just be the best $44B ever spent.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoThis is what makes it so dangerous for almost all major social media platforms to be controlled by the U.S. This is digital imperialism, American ideas and values are inconspicuously spread through memes (in the original sense of the term) and foreign children, teenagers and young adults are raised on them. Any nation that wants to retain control over their culture and values should have social media sovereignty.
- peacefulhat 4y agoJapan's fault for not making much of anything to replace 2channel.
- ehnto 4y agoAmerican politics has basically become common conversation in Australia in the last 6 years, to the point where you often see people chatting as if it is their own politics. I wouldn't be surprised if some Aussies truly believe we have republicans and democrats here or even remotely the same policy landscape.
- kkoncevicius 4y agoSame in Lithuania. We even had a "Black Lives Matter" rally here, when things were happening in USA. Media reported on it, mostly Lithuanian teens showed up, some skipped school to attend. I don't think there was a single black person. They even had some signs against police brutality, when in Lithuania most of incidents happen not by police but to police.
- 4y ago
- glogla 4y agoThe latest Gundam series (Witch from Mercury) that borrows heavily from Revolutionary Girl Utena is rather new and interesting take on the franchise, while keeping its signature bleskness and being pretty funny at the same time.
- norwalkbear 4y agoIronically Elon's buying of Twitter has increased transparency into Twitter. What a timeline!
- dirtyid 4y agoFolks knock on CCP's overzealous suppression of political news for political serenity, but it some virtues: >Japanese users have compared this list to previous days where almost all trending topics were political in nature. The user who posted the list called the new trends “peaceful” and joked about how the curation team must have spend their time “sorting out topics like this every day”. I've argued TikTok/Douyin's success is pushing peaceful content - stuff that survives the crucibles of PRC censorship - which unsurprisingly has mass appeal vs polarizing fringe shit fests. Obviously not all platforms should moderate like this, and hopefully not twitter, but it has it's "enjoyers".
- didibus 4y agoI feel this really needs fact checking. I'm also confused, why, in Japan, would a Twitter curation team curate for more political topics, and not for anime ? And what's this Moments feature, some way to make sure local news posts would get seen? I don't know, seems we have very little information to go by, and I'm not sure if there's anything to make of this or not.
- jansan 4y agoThis Tweet is seen as a smoking gun. The author describes herself as "feminist and reporter" https://nitter.it/i_tkst/status/1589187616846798848 https://nitter.it/i_tkst/status/1589187616846798848 English translation: "I'm pretty sure Twitter's news feed isn't updated. We, the media, have been following the steps of creating a moment for our own article → contacting the Twitter curation team → reviewing it or not picking it, but I wonder if this work will make sense for a while."
- didibus 4y agoSo it looks like this was just a normal feature: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-create-a-twitter-moment https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-create-a-tw... These are not regular tweets, it was a feature specifically to allow reporting of news. It looks like Moments were a curated list of recommendations by topic but specifically around news. With topics being "Media, Pop Culture, Music, Travel, Politics, and more." Assuming it's true something did change and affect the trending trends, could it be if Moments stopped happening, news just stop showing up, and people just stopped discussing the news?
- nudpiedo 4y ago- political agenda - hidden paid trending topics And already there has been a (partial) elimination of quite a few bot networks: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590612193590259712 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590612193590259712
- causi 4y agoOutrage drives engagement.
- jansan 4y agoI think this is the reddit post that started it all and got reposted everywhere. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/yorypr/very_interesting_thing_going_on_jp_twitter/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/yorypr/very... And here is a discussion in Japanese from November 6 on Twitter. https://nitter.it/you629/status/1589379389841879040 https://nitter.it/you629/status/1589379389841879040
- nudpiedo 4y ago#PoliticalRage Could it be that thanks to Elon we are going to see beyond Truman's Show? What if people only wanted to be happy with their lives and comment their favourite series? Politicians were the nobility/aristocracy, journalist were the ecclesiastic class, etc. They will never forgive Elon for that, he needs to become the antichrist. He needs to be destroyed by the system, otherwise what will happen to western partitocraties? P.D. I wish to be out of the Truman Show too, cannot even picture a society less divided and more focused on its own wellbeing
- OisinMoran 4y agoFunny to see this crop up—I've had my explore location set to Japan for the past few years and would strongly recommend it. I hated the explore tab, but don't speak a word of Japanese so it's a great way to avoid news. As such the actual content does even matter so I didn't notice the change mentioned in the article.
- yellow_lead 4y agoThere's no curation in Taiwan. Since coming here I only see "Taiwan" and #<random Chinese City> + "girl" trending. The latter is selling adult pictures or content or scams.