8 ms·

Amid Twitter Chaos, Japanese Illustrators Flock to Weibo

75 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

Lolaccount 3y ago
* moment in movie when the group look up and see the birds migrating * * add ominous movie soundtrack * Twitter (as a useful platform) is over.
- stcroixx 3y ago
  Maybe for you, but for many of us it’s almost as if it was just released. A censored platform was of little use, but now you can see all kinds of ideas there. I know I use it more now.
  - toiletfuneral 3y ago
    [dead]
  - two_handfuls 3y ago
    Twitter is more censored than ever. It just censors different things now. One example: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon-130514911.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon... Another: https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisgender-are-considered-slurs-on-twitter/ https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisg...
  - w0m 3y ago
    > A censored platform was of little use it's still very blatantly 'censored', just with different ideological front shouting about it.
  - curious-im 3y ago
    Mind to share what new ideas that was censored before you find interesting?
    - stcroixx 3y ago
      COVID stands out as a topic.
      - Lolaccount 3y ago
        You've replied to this, but not to anyone mentioning that the platform is still censored, just in new and silly ways (e.g. the Tesla critic who got shafted). Perhaps we're skewed ... you're just skewed in a different way. It's useful to recognise this.
        stcroixx 3y ago
        The only mentions in my replies about current censorship are about a petty beef between Elon and some Tesla critics and one about Elon not wanting cis used on the platform. I'm not a fan of Elon and I wouldn't have done either of these things, but their impact seems inconsequential compared to the number of people affected by censoring a topic like COVID. Seems more like evidence of a spoiled rich baby used to getting his way behaving exactly like I'd expect him to, which I don't think is nearly as threatening as the previous pattern of elected government officials spanning multiple administrations and parties and an entire department of people at Twitter working together (standing meetings!) to spin a yarn for us plebes. Maybe this is the skew you speak of - I tend to judge things from a utilitarian perspective of how many people are impacted.
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    What censorship was bothering you? The censorship against transphobia? Because that's the only thing I'm seeing censored less. Other forms of bigotry are still getting accounts locked, and we're far enough from 2020 now that nobody really seems to be bothering with election denial anymore. Meanwhile, besides its stability issues, there's the new problem that the top replies to every popular tweet are... well, pretty awful, because they're chosen by blue-check instead of popularity. That's a huge downturn in reading enjoyment.
    - stcroixx 3y ago
      I don’t like any censorship, but COVID as a topic was bonkers while it was all propaganda. The problem with a platform you know is censored is that you can never know what is missing - that’s the nature of censorship. Adam Schiff putting his fingers on the scale is something I’m not interested in either.
      - two_handfuls 3y ago
        As far as I know, only COVID misinformation was filtered out on Twitter. The GOP is suing on the basis that they went too far, but the GOP has not been acting in good faith in years.
  - jasonlotito 3y ago
    An interesting thought, considering the barometer which Musk used to measure his commitment to free speech, shows he is not committed to free speech, and "censorship" is still rampant. Literally, using Musk as the context here, Twitter is literally more censored now than it was before.
  - Lolaccount 3y ago
    Cool story, bro ... https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-musk-throttled-tweets-turkey-presidential-election-2023-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-... And the story about the guy criticising Tesla who had their account suspended.
- hersko 3y ago
  Just community notes alone make Twitter a far more useful platform than it was before.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    How are community notes helpful to a fictional illustrator or their followers?
  - rideontime 3y ago
    And they already existed before the purchase.
- RandomTisk 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    Is this about people posting stolen revenge-porn of the President's son again?
  - LexiMax 3y ago
    Whatever idea of free speech that you have in your head, Twitter is not helping, as the site still regularly engages in "censorship" in every sense that the old ownership did.
  - RavingGoat 3y ago
    Revenge porn is not protected under the first amendment. Revenge porn has no place in society much less politics.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      The Biden administration colluded with social media and traditional media platforms to censor anything they branded misinformation. In practice this was anything damaging to their official narratives. This is not about revenge porn.
- LexiMax 3y ago
  Pretty much. It was rather shocking to me that Twitter was so thoroughly broken by rate-limits and the login gate that it was easier to get updates about Twitter on Mastodon than on Twitter itself.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    I was on holidays that week and I didn't even noticed the drama. Is Twitter then doing just fine? Looks like Twitter is just easy to bash nowadays, I'm not that a big user but I see, especially in the OSS / computer related profiles a lot of people putting their Mastodon address in the nickname and yet still tweeting, retweeting, liking in the same compulsory manner as they did before.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Unregistered users can't view user profiles any more. Tweet embedding works again. I would not call that "just fine".
      - darkwater 3y ago
        I just checked out a tweet in an private window. Looks like that works as well just like before.
        zirgs 3y ago
        Unregistered users can't view user profiles. That worked before. This means that apps like fritter don't work any more.
        darkwater 3y ago
        Sorry, misread the "user profile" part, I thought it was the lone linked tweet/thread
    - LexiMax 3y ago
      I was also never that big of a Twitter user, and it's my observation that my former Twitter-using acquaintances bemoan that Twitter's use as a social space has pretty much died. They still use it, but only as a glorified RSS feed. Most of them don't like Mastodon either due to not liking defederation drama, but instead they moved their socializing to Discord and Instagram, with a few chomping at the bit to get into BlueSky. For what it's worth, this is a trend I observed long before Twitter introduced rate-limiting and the login gate, it just made it much worse. Ironically, clicking through on Twitter links other people posted was the one use case I ever visited the site for, and now that that doesn't work I simply rely on the vxtwitter summary or a screenshot.
compiler-guy 3y ago
At the time of this comment there is one other saying that everyone is leaving, and two replies claiming it is more useful. The question is how many of each group are there? I suspect that many more are leaving than joining.
- AraceliHarker 3y ago
  The person mentioned in the article, comori22, is still on Twitter and is not a professional illustrator. The Chinese are only interested in the derivative works of famous IPs that he draws, and he himself is not well-known at all.
  - rideontime 3y ago
    Why the demeaning tone? Fan works have been a Thing on the web for as long as it's existed.
    - washadjeffmad 3y ago
      Because with context, it reads like an Onion article. "Local man changes toothpaste, signalling six more weeks before collapse of empire."
AraceliHarker 3y ago
They created an account on a social networking site called plurk in Taiwan a few years ago because they were upset that Twitter's terms had changed and they would no longer be able to post pornographic illustrations, but in the end they clung to Twitter because there was no guilt to be attached to them, and this time will be no different.
ltadeut 3y ago
> more than a dozen popular Japanese illustrators have opened Weibo accounts in recent days > At least 20 Japanese illustrators have launched profiles on Weibo since Elon Musk announced reading limits for Twitter users on Saturday. You just can't take this article seriously. That's not even a blip in twitter's user base.
- netsharc 3y ago
  And how many followers do these 20 have? Ever heard of the term "network effect"?
  - rvz 3y ago
    Just like 7 months ago, Twitter's network effect was constantly tested and many alternatives have tried to challenge it, but instead its users will still run back to using Twitter again, especially accounts with lots of followers. This alleged 'exodus' will be no different. Even if Twitter goes down, it's users would rather wait for it to get back up than to 'leave' Twitter for something worse. The same is also true with Instagram. Centralized platforms are much stickier with user retention. Significantly smaller sized or federated networks? Not so much. Which is why you always see an initial spike but retention always drops sharply.
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      You know, I don't want to agree with you but I don't think you're wrong either. I personally saw a couple of more notable Twitter personalities briefly engage with Mastodon back during the November wave, then go back to Twitter only to reappear during the latest drama. The lure of follower counts is strong.
    - llm_nerd 3y ago
      "Just like 7 months ago, Twitter's network effect was constantly tested and many alternatives have tried to challenge it, but instead its users will still run back to using Twitter again, especially accounts with lots of followers." Twitter is dramatically less relevant today than it was 7 months ago. Musk can post made-up stats claiming the most engagement ever [1], but across multiple industries the importance of Twitter has completely collapsed. In many cases it isn't being replaced by anything similar. You are absolutely correct that there is a huge amount of stickiness. That's why Elon paid $44B for it. It would take some catastrophic mismanagement to truly kill the site, and Elon seems to be committed to doing that. [1] Which will be intermixed with complaints about the bot problem, DDOS crawling, etc.
m3kw9 3y ago
Who knows how much the follower counts are inflated
Pxtl 3y ago
I've been trying to use Mastodon more, but the fact is it just doesn't have the same kind of traffic that twitter does. It seems to get dominated by earnest, long-form threads... which are nice, but the chaos of twitter was one of its selling points and their absence is loud.
- treyd 3y ago
  If you look at your "federated" feed on most instances it definitely resembles some of the chaotic nature with posts from the entire network. I thing only killer feature is a more controlled way to feed actually active posts into my home feed. Instances already have enough information to do this, it's just a matter of figuring out a good scheme for it.
jchw 3y ago
I'm pretty sure far more Japanese illustrators have flocked to Misskey instances, like Misskey.io, actually. I've even seen Crepu come up. Weibo? Not once. Misskey.io has been suffering from downtime and struggling amidst it's massive growth in users. It's now one of the largest instances in the Fediverse I believe.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  For anyone else wondering, Misskey is a Fediverse / ActivityPub project separate from Mastodon. Details: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html#is-this-a-fork-of-mastodon https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html#is-this-a-fork-...
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Yep, far more japanese illustrators are on misskey or pawoo (a mastodon server), in part because pixiv - a popular japanese image hosting site - used to run pawoo and has some integration with it. Nowadays misskey.io may be gaining some more popularity than pawoo, in part due to the interface and in part because pawoo is a bit of a mess in terms of moderation, lots of creeps there openly expressing their illegal sexual interests.
  - jchw 3y ago
    Part of Pawoo's problem is that it has been defederated and blacklisted a lot because of the early prevalence of lolicon and shotacon content on it: I'm pretty sure Pawoo was originally the reason why Mastodon added the ability to block media proxying to a given instance. Misskey for some reason hasn't really experienced as much backlash despite as far as I know having similarly relaxed content restrictions. I don't really know exactly what makes Misskey more popular now: I doubt Japanese users are that concerned about the content moderation on Pawoo, though I could be wrong. It may help that Misskey was developed by a Japanese developer and is prevalently Japanese-first. Misskey does have some neat features, though personally I find the interface to be dizzying and very busy.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
dhfbshfbu4u3 3y ago
I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years now. I’m not a fan of Elon, but I have to admit my experience on the platform is better than it has been in years. For example, muted terms stay muted and the “For you” TL is actually relevant. I think these gains are structural improvements gained by slimming down and removing advertiser-driven garbage. Seems pretty good for a first step but the core problems moderation and curation remain. I’m not sure I see a good path forward on these points given the current posture of the company. That’s probably why exodus events like this one will continue to build over time.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  > removing advertiser-driven garbage. All of the bluecheckmark replies that get sorted to the top of every post are a form of "advertiser" driven garbage. Those garbage tweets are being put in front of you because someone paid $8 /month for it.
  - arcticfox 3y ago
    It's such a funny way to destroy your own business; I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point. I still find it funny enough to not care but it is a comically bad experience.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point Is it OF people replying specifically to military/geopolitical threads (and if so, in ways that at least act relevant or just off-topic spamming?), or is it just their posts getting shoved to the top of the feed because they paid?
      - rg111 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dmix 3y ago
This is like groundhog day on HN of 5yrs+ ago when everyone said FB was going to die because some programmers and millennial were closing their accounts over the poor state of the site/privacy concerns/Zuck hate. Most of the people talking about Mastodon and other alternatives tweeting always seem to keep tweeting though. At least when I deleted my FB account I never went back. I didn't stick around to post on FB about how much I hated FB.
- mrtranscendence 3y ago
  I still use Facebook for the family connections and the pet cat/dog/rabbit accounts I follow, but I'm essentially done with Twitter now. I was already not posting there basically at all, and the rate limiting means I won't be reading it, either. Threads couldn't be released at a better time for Meta.
  - openyourears 3y ago
    [flagged]
- rvz 3y ago
  [flagged]
stevofolife 3y ago
For someone who is not caught up with the timeline of things, can someone explain why this is happening and was there anything recent that Elon or Twitter did that triggered this?
- klodolph 3y ago
  There were massive Twitter outages recently. That said, the article is talking about 20 people who switched from Twitter. That’s not very many.
openyourears 3y ago
[flagged]
- openyourears 3y ago
  [flagged]
zgluck 3y ago
Note that this site is owned by the Chinese government/CCP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Tone Sixth Tone is a state-owned English-language online magazine published by Shanghai United Media Group. ... Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy stated that Sixth Tone has a less staid and "saccharine" tone compared to many other English-language publications from China. She stated, "If webby U.S. media startup Vox were acquired by the Chinese Communist Party, it might resemble Sixth Tone".
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  I'm curious, is there a reason this might be relevant?
  - ninjin 3y ago
    If the owner of a news site has a stake or likely interest in inflating the importance of a specific platform, would you trust that their reporting is entirely accurate? The story looks legitimate, but as others have pointed out, maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms? All I can say is that if The Times owned entirely or in part something they reported on, I would not mind having this at least mentioned in the comments as a form of public disclosure. Went digging a bit, and there seem to be at least some state ownership of Weibo through the China Internet Investment Fund [1]. Corporate structure and ownership in the PRC is far outside my area of expertise though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Investment_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Investment_Fund
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      If the facts are accurate and these identified people did in fact migrate to Weibo, does it matter? > maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms? The article isn't at any point making the claim that all users are moving to Weibo. It specifically mentions an identifiable set of artists, and then speaks about their experiences having migrated. That's it Are you claiming those facts or the reporting around them are in some way inaccurate? Frankly, you seem to be looking for controversy where there is none. I'm as concerned about the behaviour of the CCP as anyone (and as an aside, the total disappearance of the Uighur story in the media is extremely concerning to me) but there's a point where it starts to veer into sinophobia.
molticrystal 3y ago
It is like twitter doesn't even want you to read and follow along people's tweets anymore, barring access, moving things out of order... Twitter went from free rss feeds available for every microblog(twitter account) to paywalling access if you'd like to see whats new at a glance on several microblogs at once. Fediverse's mastadon and tootdeck have no problem with allowing to browse and follow along multiple people's accounts and many fediverse instances have rss feeds as well, they have been doing it right for years. The new tweetdeck is an inferior experience with even more frontend bloat, the old tweetdeck even worked on old and lightweight browers. I pretty much haven't visited twitter once since the rate limits, and unless access to tweets change drastically, probably will never come back. While I'm using rssbridges as a stopgap, I'll be migrating to other ways to follow people's work where ever possible. It was nice seeing progress and updates on twitter, and I am hoping more people will move to other methods to post statuses.
- multjoy 3y ago
  I used to use Tweetbot as the official client is and continues to be a dumpster fire. I then switched to Ivory and it is very much like having twitter of old back - a single chronological feed of people I follow without the involvement of any algorithms. I know that the federated bits are there, but they have very little obvious impact on my experience.
kcpm 3y ago
This article reads like an opportunistic advertisement for Weibo, using the Twitter turmoil to say "Come to Weibo and you'll get more followers and also money maybe?". As another user commented, "Sixth Tone" is a state-owned English language media outlet. It reminds me of TikTok where people would join and suddenly 'go viral' with tons of views. Real or not, that mechanism acts to hook new users. On a side note, I've never been able to access content on Weibo at all (including those mentioned in the article). Links go to some looping Sina Visitor System.
zephrx1111 3y ago
I left weibo years ago. If you don’t know what “insult China” means in weibo, you are not a qualified weibo user. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B1%E8%8F%AF#Chinese https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B1%E8%8F%AF#Chinese
fomine3 3y ago
In my experience (Japanese, only have local phone numbers), registering Weibo was really difficult (maybe in 2022 IIRC). They refused registering by error for unknown "security" reason on website and mobile app. It's same for other Chinese services like WeChat. I don't see many Japanese moving for them.
hojinkoh 3y ago
This reads like an advertisement copy, either by their parent company Sina or by CCP (which I guess doesn't really matter). No, I don't know any illustrators migrate to Weibo BECAUSE OF the recent Twitter troubles. The whole Japanese community is still quite reliant on Twitter, and Weibo is a completely different beast. There are indeed some Japanese illustrator getting an Weibo account because: 1) They want to tackle the Chinese market and serve Chinese fans. Getting an Weibo account is a pretty legitimate way to do this, but I don't see they abandoning their original Twitter, Pawoo, Pixiv things; that doesn't make sense. Also... the Chinese market is quite sensitive. Once someone—anyone—finds out something you drew several years ago can remotely be interpreted as insulting China[1], or someone doesn't like what you're doing today in Japan and interprets that as insulting China[2], you're done there. 2) Pirate account opened by Chinese fans, used for storing unlicensed contents of the original illustrators. Although this seems to be against Chinese laws, in practice, the original author/illustrator can't do anything about it. [1] The most famous example must be Winnie the Pooh... [2] https://i.imgur.com/gtZWs47.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gtZWs47.jpg
- numpad0 3y ago
  This actually is happening, though the scale at which this is happening is unclear(read: very well could be overblown and actually trivial). What is alarming, at least to me, is that the motive of users jumping is better freedom of speech offered in Weibo compared to Facebook/Instagram or Twitter - users are fleeing into the last communist regime on Earth, for FREEDOM! There is something completely wrong about current Web.

75 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

* moment in movie when the group look up and see the birds migrating * * add ominous movie soundtrack * Twitter (as a useful platform) is over.

stcroixx 3y ago
Maybe for you, but for many of us it’s almost as if it was just released. A censored platform was of little use, but now you can see all kinds of ideas there. I know I use it more now.
- toiletfuneral 3y ago
  [dead]
- two_handfuls 3y ago
  Twitter is more censored than ever. It just censors different things now. One example: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon-130514911.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon... Another: https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisgender-are-considered-slurs-on-twitter/ https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisg...
- w0m 3y ago
  > A censored platform was of little use it's still very blatantly 'censored', just with different ideological front shouting about it.
- curious-im 3y ago
  Mind to share what new ideas that was censored before you find interesting?
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    COVID stands out as a topic.
    - Lolaccount 3y ago
      You've replied to this, but not to anyone mentioning that the platform is still censored, just in new and silly ways (e.g. the Tesla critic who got shafted). Perhaps we're skewed ... you're just skewed in a different way. It's useful to recognise this.
      - stcroixx 3y ago
        The only mentions in my replies about current censorship are about a petty beef between Elon and some Tesla critics and one about Elon not wanting cis used on the platform. I'm not a fan of Elon and I wouldn't have done either of these things, but their impact seems inconsequential compared to the number of people affected by censoring a topic like COVID. Seems more like evidence of a spoiled rich baby used to getting his way behaving exactly like I'd expect him to, which I don't think is nearly as threatening as the previous pattern of elected government officials spanning multiple administrations and parties and an entire department of people at Twitter working together (standing meetings!) to spin a yarn for us plebes. Maybe this is the skew you speak of - I tend to judge things from a utilitarian perspective of how many people are impacted.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  What censorship was bothering you? The censorship against transphobia? Because that's the only thing I'm seeing censored less. Other forms of bigotry are still getting accounts locked, and we're far enough from 2020 now that nobody really seems to be bothering with election denial anymore. Meanwhile, besides its stability issues, there's the new problem that the top replies to every popular tweet are... well, pretty awful, because they're chosen by blue-check instead of popularity. That's a huge downturn in reading enjoyment.
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    I don’t like any censorship, but COVID as a topic was bonkers while it was all propaganda. The problem with a platform you know is censored is that you can never know what is missing - that’s the nature of censorship. Adam Schiff putting his fingers on the scale is something I’m not interested in either.
    - two_handfuls 3y ago
      As far as I know, only COVID misinformation was filtered out on Twitter. The GOP is suing on the basis that they went too far, but the GOP has not been acting in good faith in years.
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  An interesting thought, considering the barometer which Musk used to measure his commitment to free speech, shows he is not committed to free speech, and "censorship" is still rampant. Literally, using Musk as the context here, Twitter is literally more censored now than it was before.
- Lolaccount 3y ago
  Cool story, bro ... https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-musk-throttled-tweets-turkey-presidential-election-2023-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-... And the story about the guy criticising Tesla who had their account suspended.
hersko 3y ago
Just community notes alone make Twitter a far more useful platform than it was before.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  How are community notes helpful to a fictional illustrator or their followers?
- rideontime 3y ago
  And they already existed before the purchase.
RandomTisk 3y ago
[flagged]
- Pxtl 3y ago
  Is this about people posting stolen revenge-porn of the President's son again?
- LexiMax 3y ago
  Whatever idea of free speech that you have in your head, Twitter is not helping, as the site still regularly engages in "censorship" in every sense that the old ownership did.
- RavingGoat 3y ago
  Revenge porn is not protected under the first amendment. Revenge porn has no place in society much less politics.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    The Biden administration colluded with social media and traditional media platforms to censor anything they branded misinformation. In practice this was anything damaging to their official narratives. This is not about revenge porn.
LexiMax 3y ago
Pretty much. It was rather shocking to me that Twitter was so thoroughly broken by rate-limits and the login gate that it was easier to get updates about Twitter on Mastodon than on Twitter itself.
- darkwater 3y ago
  I was on holidays that week and I didn't even noticed the drama. Is Twitter then doing just fine? Looks like Twitter is just easy to bash nowadays, I'm not that a big user but I see, especially in the OSS / computer related profiles a lot of people putting their Mastodon address in the nickname and yet still tweeting, retweeting, liking in the same compulsory manner as they did before.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Unregistered users can't view user profiles any more. Tweet embedding works again. I would not call that "just fine".
    - darkwater 3y ago
      I just checked out a tweet in an private window. Looks like that works as well just like before.
      - zirgs 3y ago
        Unregistered users can't view user profiles. That worked before. This means that apps like fritter don't work any more.
        darkwater 3y ago
        Sorry, misread the "user profile" part, I thought it was the lone linked tweet/thread
  - LexiMax 3y ago
    I was also never that big of a Twitter user, and it's my observation that my former Twitter-using acquaintances bemoan that Twitter's use as a social space has pretty much died. They still use it, but only as a glorified RSS feed. Most of them don't like Mastodon either due to not liking defederation drama, but instead they moved their socializing to Discord and Instagram, with a few chomping at the bit to get into BlueSky. For what it's worth, this is a trend I observed long before Twitter introduced rate-limiting and the login gate, it just made it much worse. Ironically, clicking through on Twitter links other people posted was the one use case I ever visited the site for, and now that that doesn't work I simply rely on the vxtwitter summary or a screenshot.

compiler-guy 3y ago

At the time of this comment there is one other saying that everyone is leaving, and two replies claiming it is more useful. The question is how many of each group are there? I suspect that many more are leaving than joining.

AraceliHarker 3y ago
The person mentioned in the article, comori22, is still on Twitter and is not a professional illustrator. The Chinese are only interested in the derivative works of famous IPs that he draws, and he himself is not well-known at all.
- rideontime 3y ago
  Why the demeaning tone? Fan works have been a Thing on the web for as long as it's existed.
  - washadjeffmad 3y ago
    Because with context, it reads like an Onion article. "Local man changes toothpaste, signalling six more weeks before collapse of empire."

AraceliHarker 3y ago

They created an account on a social networking site called plurk in Taiwan a few years ago because they were upset that Twitter's terms had changed and they would no longer be able to post pornographic illustrations, but in the end they clung to Twitter because there was no guilt to be attached to them, and this time will be no different.

ltadeut 3y ago

> more than a dozen popular Japanese illustrators have opened Weibo accounts in recent days > At least 20 Japanese illustrators have launched profiles on Weibo since Elon Musk announced reading limits for Twitter users on Saturday. You just can't take this article seriously. That's not even a blip in twitter's user base.

netsharc 3y ago
And how many followers do these 20 have? Ever heard of the term "network effect"?
- rvz 3y ago
  Just like 7 months ago, Twitter's network effect was constantly tested and many alternatives have tried to challenge it, but instead its users will still run back to using Twitter again, especially accounts with lots of followers. This alleged 'exodus' will be no different. Even if Twitter goes down, it's users would rather wait for it to get back up than to 'leave' Twitter for something worse. The same is also true with Instagram. Centralized platforms are much stickier with user retention. Significantly smaller sized or federated networks? Not so much. Which is why you always see an initial spike but retention always drops sharply.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    You know, I don't want to agree with you but I don't think you're wrong either. I personally saw a couple of more notable Twitter personalities briefly engage with Mastodon back during the November wave, then go back to Twitter only to reappear during the latest drama. The lure of follower counts is strong.
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    "Just like 7 months ago, Twitter's network effect was constantly tested and many alternatives have tried to challenge it, but instead its users will still run back to using Twitter again, especially accounts with lots of followers." Twitter is dramatically less relevant today than it was 7 months ago. Musk can post made-up stats claiming the most engagement ever [1], but across multiple industries the importance of Twitter has completely collapsed. In many cases it isn't being replaced by anything similar. You are absolutely correct that there is a huge amount of stickiness. That's why Elon paid $44B for it. It would take some catastrophic mismanagement to truly kill the site, and Elon seems to be committed to doing that. [1] Which will be intermixed with complaints about the bot problem, DDOS crawling, etc.

m3kw9 3y ago

Who knows how much the follower counts are inflated

Pxtl 3y ago

I've been trying to use Mastodon more, but the fact is it just doesn't have the same kind of traffic that twitter does. It seems to get dominated by earnest, long-form threads... which are nice, but the chaos of twitter was one of its selling points and their absence is loud.

treyd 3y ago
If you look at your "federated" feed on most instances it definitely resembles some of the chaotic nature with posts from the entire network. I thing only killer feature is a more controlled way to feed actually active posts into my home feed. Instances already have enough information to do this, it's just a matter of figuring out a good scheme for it.

jchw 3y ago

I'm pretty sure far more Japanese illustrators have flocked to Misskey instances, like Misskey.io, actually. I've even seen Crepu come up. Weibo? Not once. Misskey.io has been suffering from downtime and struggling amidst it's massive growth in users. It's now one of the largest instances in the Fediverse I believe.

NelsonMinar 3y ago
For anyone else wondering, Misskey is a Fediverse / ActivityPub project separate from Mastodon. Details: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html#is-this-a-fork-of-mastodon https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/misskey.html#is-this-a-fork-...
dotnet00 3y ago
Yep, far more japanese illustrators are on misskey or pawoo (a mastodon server), in part because pixiv - a popular japanese image hosting site - used to run pawoo and has some integration with it. Nowadays misskey.io may be gaining some more popularity than pawoo, in part due to the interface and in part because pawoo is a bit of a mess in terms of moderation, lots of creeps there openly expressing their illegal sexual interests.
- jchw 3y ago
  Part of Pawoo's problem is that it has been defederated and blacklisted a lot because of the early prevalence of lolicon and shotacon content on it: I'm pretty sure Pawoo was originally the reason why Mastodon added the ability to block media proxying to a given instance. Misskey for some reason hasn't really experienced as much backlash despite as far as I know having similarly relaxed content restrictions. I don't really know exactly what makes Misskey more popular now: I doubt Japanese users are that concerned about the content moderation on Pawoo, though I could be wrong. It may help that Misskey was developed by a Japanese developer and is prevalently Japanese-first. Misskey does have some neat features, though personally I find the interface to be dizzying and very busy.
  - dotnet00 3y ago

dhfbshfbu4u3 3y ago

I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years now. I’m not a fan of Elon, but I have to admit my experience on the platform is better than it has been in years. For example, muted terms stay muted and the “For you” TL is actually relevant. I think these gains are structural improvements gained by slimming down and removing advertiser-driven garbage. Seems pretty good for a first step but the core problems moderation and curation remain. I’m not sure I see a good path forward on these points given the current posture of the company. That’s probably why exodus events like this one will continue to build over time.

bluefishinit 3y ago
> removing advertiser-driven garbage. All of the bluecheckmark replies that get sorted to the top of every post are a form of "advertiser" driven garbage. Those garbage tweets are being put in front of you because someone paid $8 /month for it.
- arcticfox 3y ago
  It's such a funny way to destroy your own business; I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point. I still find it funny enough to not care but it is a comically bad experience.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point Is it OF people replying specifically to military/geopolitical threads (and if so, in ways that at least act relevant or just off-topic spamming?), or is it just their posts getting shoved to the top of the feed because they paid?
    - rg111 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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dmix 3y ago

This is like groundhog day on HN of 5yrs+ ago when everyone said FB was going to die because some programmers and millennial were closing their accounts over the poor state of the site/privacy concerns/Zuck hate. Most of the people talking about Mastodon and other alternatives tweeting always seem to keep tweeting though. At least when I deleted my FB account I never went back. I didn't stick around to post on FB about how much I hated FB.

mrtranscendence 3y ago
I still use Facebook for the family connections and the pet cat/dog/rabbit accounts I follow, but I'm essentially done with Twitter now. I was already not posting there basically at all, and the rate limiting means I won't be reading it, either. Threads couldn't be released at a better time for Meta.
- openyourears 3y ago
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rvz 3y ago
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stevofolife 3y ago

For someone who is not caught up with the timeline of things, can someone explain why this is happening and was there anything recent that Elon or Twitter did that triggered this?

klodolph 3y ago
There were massive Twitter outages recently. That said, the article is talking about 20 people who switched from Twitter. That’s not very many.

openyourears 3y ago

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openyourears 3y ago
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zgluck 3y ago

Note that this site is owned by the Chinese government/CCP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Tone Sixth Tone is a state-owned English-language online magazine published by Shanghai United Media Group. ... Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy stated that Sixth Tone has a less staid and "saccharine" tone compared to many other English-language publications from China. She stated, "If webby U.S. media startup Vox were acquired by the Chinese Communist Party, it might resemble Sixth Tone".

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
I'm curious, is there a reason this might be relevant?
- ninjin 3y ago
  If the owner of a news site has a stake or likely interest in inflating the importance of a specific platform, would you trust that their reporting is entirely accurate? The story looks legitimate, but as others have pointed out, maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms? All I can say is that if The Times owned entirely or in part something they reported on, I would not mind having this at least mentioned in the comments as a form of public disclosure. Went digging a bit, and there seem to be at least some state ownership of Weibo through the China Internet Investment Fund [1]. Corporate structure and ownership in the PRC is far outside my area of expertise though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Investment_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Investment_Fund
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    If the facts are accurate and these identified people did in fact migrate to Weibo, does it matter? > maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms? The article isn't at any point making the claim that all users are moving to Weibo. It specifically mentions an identifiable set of artists, and then speaks about their experiences having migrated. That's it Are you claiming those facts or the reporting around them are in some way inaccurate? Frankly, you seem to be looking for controversy where there is none. I'm as concerned about the behaviour of the CCP as anyone (and as an aside, the total disappearance of the Uighur story in the media is extremely concerning to me) but there's a point where it starts to veer into sinophobia.

molticrystal 3y ago

It is like twitter doesn't even want you to read and follow along people's tweets anymore, barring access, moving things out of order... Twitter went from free rss feeds available for every microblog(twitter account) to paywalling access if you'd like to see whats new at a glance on several microblogs at once. Fediverse's mastadon and tootdeck have no problem with allowing to browse and follow along multiple people's accounts and many fediverse instances have rss feeds as well, they have been doing it right for years. The new tweetdeck is an inferior experience with even more frontend bloat, the old tweetdeck even worked on old and lightweight browers. I pretty much haven't visited twitter once since the rate limits, and unless access to tweets change drastically, probably will never come back. While I'm using rssbridges as a stopgap, I'll be migrating to other ways to follow people's work where ever possible. It was nice seeing progress and updates on twitter, and I am hoping more people will move to other methods to post statuses.

multjoy 3y ago
I used to use Tweetbot as the official client is and continues to be a dumpster fire. I then switched to Ivory and it is very much like having twitter of old back - a single chronological feed of people I follow without the involvement of any algorithms. I know that the federated bits are there, but they have very little obvious impact on my experience.

kcpm 3y ago

This article reads like an opportunistic advertisement for Weibo, using the Twitter turmoil to say "Come to Weibo and you'll get more followers and also money maybe?". As another user commented, "Sixth Tone" is a state-owned English language media outlet. It reminds me of TikTok where people would join and suddenly 'go viral' with tons of views. Real or not, that mechanism acts to hook new users. On a side note, I've never been able to access content on Weibo at all (including those mentioned in the article). Links go to some looping Sina Visitor System.

zephrx1111 3y ago

I left weibo years ago. If you don’t know what “insult China” means in weibo, you are not a qualified weibo user. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B1%E8%8F%AF#Chinese https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B1%E8%8F%AF#Chinese

fomine3 3y ago

In my experience (Japanese, only have local phone numbers), registering Weibo was really difficult (maybe in 2022 IIRC). They refused registering by error for unknown "security" reason on website and mobile app. It's same for other Chinese services like WeChat. I don't see many Japanese moving for them.

hojinkoh 3y ago

This reads like an advertisement copy, either by their parent company Sina or by CCP (which I guess doesn't really matter). No, I don't know any illustrators migrate to Weibo BECAUSE OF the recent Twitter troubles. The whole Japanese community is still quite reliant on Twitter, and Weibo is a completely different beast. There are indeed some Japanese illustrator getting an Weibo account because: 1) They want to tackle the Chinese market and serve Chinese fans. Getting an Weibo account is a pretty legitimate way to do this, but I don't see they abandoning their original Twitter, Pawoo, Pixiv things; that doesn't make sense. Also... the Chinese market is quite sensitive. Once someone—anyone—finds out something you drew several years ago can remotely be interpreted as insulting China[1], or someone doesn't like what you're doing today in Japan and interprets that as insulting China[2], you're done there. 2) Pirate account opened by Chinese fans, used for storing unlicensed contents of the original illustrators. Although this seems to be against Chinese laws, in practice, the original author/illustrator can't do anything about it. [1] The most famous example must be Winnie the Pooh... [2] https://i.imgur.com/gtZWs47.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gtZWs47.jpg

numpad0 3y ago
This actually is happening, though the scale at which this is happening is unclear(read: very well could be overblown and actually trivial). What is alarming, at least to me, is that the motive of users jumping is better freedom of speech offered in Weibo compared to Facebook/Instagram or Twitter - users are fleeing into the last communist regime on Earth, for FREEDOM! There is something completely wrong about current Web.