As some of you may know, I spent over 5 years living in China and used the Steem/Hive blockchain as well as YouTube to create videos about my life in China. As someone that was interested in China content, I was s subscriber of 2 very popular YouTube channels named Laowhy86 and Serpentza whose videos I found informative and entertaining. The two of them also have a channel together named ADVChina which is the both of them riding motorcycles discussing hot topics regarding China.
I came across a tweet that was retweeted by @joythewanderer from laowhy86 (aka "C-Milk") talking about how his YouTube video that was being shared around Reddit about how precisely the COVID-19 virus originated in China got removed off of Reddit. The video can be found here. It was uploaded on April 1st and almost has 1M views already.
Reddit is partially owned by large Chinese investors and we have seen firsthand (Justin Sun) that the moment China gains control of a platform, they enforce methods to increase censorship on said platform. You can read the following Reddit post to learn more:
The crazy thing is that swarms of "Wu Mao" (50 cent army) flood platforms like Twitter, Quora, YouTube, etc. to promote a pro-CCP narrative and spread misinformation. I have come across several of these accounts on Twitter and my own YouTube channel. They especially like to comment on these larger YouTubers that make videos about China and insult them. You can read another article about the Wu Mao Twitter Army in this article: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-china-built-a-twitter-propaganda-machine-then-let-it-loose-on-coronavirus
The amount of propaganda you find on TikTok (DouYin in China) is disgusting. Many foreigners that live in China use DouYin to spread pro-CCP propaganda because it is sooooooo easy to get famous there. Give me 2 weeks on DouYin and I can almost guarantee you that I could become an internet star over there. Basically, when foreigners regurgitate pro-CCP propaganda, many Chinese people feel extremely validated. They feel like they finally got approval from foreigners and respond VERY positively to any non-Chinese people that support the Chinese government. I feel disgusted at all the foreigners that have stooped so low in order to gain a large following/money. People like Bart Baker who had over 10M subscribers on YouTube now only makes videos for a Chinese audience on Chinese social media where he sings Chinese communist songs in English. He is very popular in China now.
Anyways
Laowhy86 actually used to post on the Steem blockchain in 2018. I remember seeing him on there where he would post videos on DTube and DLive (back when DLive was apart of Steem). I remember giving him advice on posting videos at the time because he wasn't earning a lot in rewards.
After following my advice, he earned over $150 on his next post about North Korea. While he continued to post more videos later on and earned some decent rewards here and there, he hasn't posted on this blockchain since May 26, 2018. He powered down the majority of his stake here and hasn't come back.
They have been demonetized for 2 months because the majority of their content has been about the coronavirus lately. I am sure @threespeak would be good for them because I don't know how well the retention will be for them or their fans that sign up here. I have their contact information so I could contact them, but I am tired of the low retention we have. If they left again, that would be a strike 2 on this blockchain from laowhy86.
Regardless, this is just going to show that many of the platforms we love these days are being censored as China gets a stronger grasp on them. Sure, I could say that Hive is the answer to all of this, but we are still not at a point where the majority of people want to stick around here. Creating an account and saving all those passwords is a nuisance and the UIs aren't the best though PeakD and Esteem are actually quite good now. The thing is, most people end up leaving this place when they don't get the rewards/engagement they expected. This has been the trend since the beginning. I am sure we have all gotten other people to signup here and they left shortly after because the experience was subpar.
Now that censorship is becoming more prevalent on these centralizaed platforms, there will definitely be an increase of interest in censorship-resistant platforms, but if the experience is lacklustre, people would rather choose the centralized platforms instead because they are still more entertaining to be on.
Let me know what you guys think in the comments below. Hope you all learned something today!
Hive isn't immune to censorship either.
https://hive.blog/news/@valued-customer/censoring-hive-it-s-happening-right-now
I'll be migrating to Flote and LBRY.
https://flote.app/
https://lbry.tv/
Interesting read.
Btw, do you happen to know why you are constantly being downvoted by spaminator?
I've been blacklisted, its another reason I won't be posting here much any more.
Oh thats weird. What happened?