The China-centric video sharing platform is expanding with a new international app and an English version of its website – with no identity verification (for now at least)
YouTube’s censorship has become worse than cable TV’s (in the US). I have a feeling that BiliBili will only further normalize the aggressive censorship, like TikTok did.
I mean. This is… Not worse than now, I guess?
Any entity that can take a chunk out of YouTube’s dominance is a good thing.
But I’m not going to celebrate another corp making a shamelessly monetized video site. They’re independent-ish now, yes, but for how long? It’s just a different flavor of attention gaming and enshittification in the long run.
And I’m skeptical they have the muscle to significantly displace YouTube’s iron grip on everything, even with Google tightening the screws.
Yes! We have peertube which is actually cool.
Unfortunately Peertube is going to be… very difficult to scale.
It needs more people to engage and more exposure.
This won’t help PeerTube become mainstream either.
Hosting videos is extremely expensive, thus there is a financial incentive against hosting a PeerTube instance.
Unless PeerTube fixes the incentives, it won’t be sustainable long-term.
It’s more that (as I understand it) the storage requirements increase exponentially relative to the number of users.
how so?
thats good news youtube was mainstream so looong that it becomes to eat itself slowly seeing some competitions maybe lead the long form video market better
I’m all for it, America needs to be reminded of what capitalism actually is.
I just downloaded it. No sign up necessary but it asks for a birthdate. (I just picked June 4 1989 randomly, ofc.)
It uses AI to translate from Chinese to your selected language. The image below shows available languages.
You don’t need to login to upvote videos. However, you not be able to comment or reply. Also, viewing comments is limited.
To create your account, you have to provide your phone number, which is an automatic “not happening” for me.
Once your phone number is “bound”, you can link your Google account for your login. This will make it easier for East-West cooperation in data mining and mass surveillance.
You can also use an email and password of your own choosing.
Overall, I can’t see me actually binding my phone number to make an account.
Anyway, here’s what my feed looked like when I opened the app and skipped account creation/login:
Some AI looking slop, of course.
Of the first dozen or so, only two seemed interesting - the Rick Roll meme history and a Brazilian explaining how to use “lá ele” in conversation. (I speak Brazilian Portuguese so this was actually very cool to see.)
I’ve heard of Billibilli. It’s great for pirated films and TV shows that you can’t get anywhere else.
I don’t really trust it to be much better at respecting privacy than YouTube, but at this point, I’d be surprised if it was any worse, and YouTube has been getting worse for lack of competition for over a decade now
Unless I can make A whole channel dedicated to 1989 Massacre Im not interested.
Cool. If they allow views while using ad-blockers I’m in.
Google is such a bully, I want china to succeed.
Good.
Americans are left with such a terrible, enshittified digital information economy that we must entertain even our enemies for alternatives.
To be fair billibilli in a lot of ways is much worse then YouTube has ever been.
It’s aggressively poor as a platform for history channels. And while foreign politics are fine. Anything Chinese poltic related gets nuked from the platform aggressively.
The app is barely functional, changes for the worse more then YouTube does and basically has no way to support small creators.
It’s in no way a YouTube alternative beyond that it hosts videos.
Why is China your enemy?
I’ll be more specific. The PRC (government) is an enemy to humanity in my view.
Well because they caused a couple million to die due to covid. Not only did they lie by saying the virus wasn’t transmissible to humans, but they then let people fly internationally to spread it to the rest of the world instead of trying to quarantine the outbreak hotspots. Then they got a bunch of CCP dickriders internationally to empty the shelves in their respective western countries of all their medical supplies to ship over to China, who then made deals to sell it to poorer countries only on the condition they make a spectacle about it with big banners saying thank you china. And the US helped by funding gain of function research in the wuhan institute of virology where they kept live bats riddled with diseases and sold the bats to the wet market on the sly when they were done with the research. Millions die because a shitty country’s leaders want to save face instead of saving millions of people from a preventable death. Theres a tonne more shit they do out of the media spotlight, but they do a great job amplifying the dumb shit Trump does instead to distract from their own weasly asymmetric warfare against the west.
Competition.
I think we should be looking for decentralised alternatives not something prone to enshittification.
It’s a really hard problem to solve though. Video hosting is a huge data hog I don’t think small independent instances would be able to keep up with the storage requirements. Especially at the moment considering storages so expensive.
honestly i think it’d be nice to have a full p2p video directory instead. something like peertube but without instances, resembling a torrent tracker like nyaa, aimed generally for educational stuff, entertainment, music, etc. basically youtube but as a torrent tracker, to reduce the storage requirement. you’d be able to seed your favorite media and the fact that people would not want to waste their storage on seeding worthless stuff and the technical hurdle of p2p would keep the mindless slop out.
I like the idea. My only gripe is it’s complexity for the average user. If there was a way to make it super simple. Torrent clients and trackers are way to complecated the average user.
I think you just might be right, which is sad.
it would be cool if i (or any user) could just contribute a part of their storage space / network connection to the video platform. something like “i store this video (that i just watched) for a month sothat others can see it too”.
unfortunately, as i understand it, there’s both technical and legal hurdles.
- technical hurdle: this doesn’t work for mobile, where network traffic is often limited. e.g. if i pay $10 for 50 GB upload/download capacity per month, then i don’t want 49 GB of those to be sucked up by other people’s video watching behavior.
- legal hurdle: what if some of the content is accidentally illegal? then i would be distributing illegal material, which can quickly become a problem for myself … (seeing how it is illegal in many countries to distribute copyrighted material, but not to watch it oneself).
It wouldn’t be worth it anyway. Assuming we’re trying to compete with YouTube you’d want fairly long fairly high quality videos, 25 minute video at 4k (reasonable length and resolution for 2026) would take between 12 and 13 gigabytes of storage, assuming some videos are slightly shorter or slightly low quality maybe 1080p you could personally contribute about four to five videos on your storage plan. At which point you wonder whether or not it’s even worth the effort.
Even one terabyte storage drive wouldn’t store enough videos to really make a competitive product.
The only reason that YouTube can make it work is because they get their storage in bulk and therefore get massive discounts.
This means that even if Google was broken up I can’t see YouTube being a viable standalone product.
Oh boy coyote urine over coyote urine my fave.
They’re going to need to drastically change how the platform looks if they want to succeed. In typical Chinese app fashion the UI is incredibly bloated and overwhelming, not what a Western audience wants at all. They also won’t be able to match YouTube’s CPM so creators won’t bother switching either.
I would prefer it if it wasn’t Chinese because I don’t really trust Chinese companies, but then again I didn’t really trust Google and YouTube super duper needs competition.
