Eh, not in the way that the propagandists and subsequent memes describe it, but I get the impression it affects more of the basics of daily life than the Chinese system.

From what I’ve seen, you can avoid the gore issues by desaturating the gory image or part of the video. The porn thing is true, women will use image stickers, mosaics or other obscuring methods to cover up even small amounts of cleavage, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t thirst trap content, it just looks a little different.

That just doesn’t have a big impact on the content I actually want to see, so I don’t really mind it.

Oh or the NPC streams? Those are weird, yo.

You can literally just make an account on Xiaohongshu and chat with normal people in China.

I routinely swap recipes, talk about video games, new tech, swap cleaning tips, chat about restaurant recommendations and fashion. There’s a big cultural difference, sure, but Chinese people are, on the whole, incredibly friendly and hospitable and they’re curious about breaking down the myths they’ve heard about America and happy to break down the myths we’ve heard about China. We think they have a social credit system and they think a dishwasher can afford a huge “villa”. Though now that it’s opened up a bit they talk about a poverty “kill line” where if you fall below a certain income you are pretty much doomed to die. Which is exaggerated, but has some basis in reality, like most of these myths.

The one thing I think is a huge barrier is that they can’t understand why we drink cold water, even in the winter. So many conversations I’ve had have been about drinking cold water and asking “don’t you get dampness???” Honey, I’ve either never had dampess or I’ve been damp my whole life so I don’t know.

Either way, they’re just, like, people. And thanks to the magic of the internet, you can just talk to those people.

The social credit system thing was largely just US propaganda. It was tested it one city and abandoned. China has a credit score system just like most major economies, but from what I understand, the US system has far more restrictions on citizen’s actions based on the credit system than China does. Theirs only impacts lending, ours can impact housing and employment (though I think this practice is on the out and banned in many states).

At the time of posting I was chatting with a woman from Guangdong about her recommendations for Samsung phones to buy my partner, so, I don’t think so.

This is one thing I noticed using Chinese social media. There are almost zero discussions of local politics. Foreign politics is fine though

Boy love drama. The restrictions on homosexual content is overblown, though not entirely fabricated. XHS has plenty of LGBTQ content, for example, domestic and foreign. Not as much as Western social media, to be fair, but also I don’t see people bullying LGBTQ people or creators on XHS.

There’s more restrictions on overt sexuality, straight or gay. Make no mistake, Chinese culture is more conservative in some ways than the West, but it’s not as restrictive as the news makes it out to be.

Seems like a natural next step. XHS works well as a social media app across countries and has opened up China to average US citizens and vice versa. I’ve had a lot of good genuine conversations with people, they’ve managed to cultivate a good culture on the app.

As YouTube continues to enshittify, maybe there’s an opportunity for another app with an already large user base to take its crown.

Yah thats part of the real answer here. The $6 rotisserie chicken at Costco is sold at a loss to bring in customers and the store makes profits off their other items.

The Costco rotisserie chicken is phenomenal, though. Tastes better than other chickens, too. I make it into chicken salads frequently, after the bf claims the wings

Pretty sure the Klingons fill the role of the Clans fairly well.