Hacker News Reader

Comment by _23sd | Hacker News Reader

I could see this being really bad for the site. A lot of Japanese illustrators were already treating it as an afterthought compared to X/Twitter, and if the new terms actively make Pixiv worse for artists in the rest of the world then its importance could decline even further.

View on HN

The change of making it harder or shutting off access just pushes people to reroute their behavior, moving large segments of the market into non-transparent (and non-taxable) crypto, further expanding the use of VPNs, and decentralizing the means of publishing and posting materials.

The side effects of prohibitions are about as predictable as these moral crusades.

People have said for decades that governments can't control Internet content because people will help each other circumvent the restrictions by technical means. I've found that very inspiring and have personally tried to join in.

But I notice (maybe especially on this day of the TikTok ban) that lots of people at least sometimes sympathize with the idea that the governments have good reasons to restrict information. And not that many people anywhere have ever used censorship circumvention technologies.

So you might say "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers" or something, but the cultural will and momentum to work around Internet-balkanizing measures is ... not that massive and not that universal.

I don't mean to say that people working around geographic blocking doesn't happen ... it does to some noticeable extent at least for licensed streaming, for gambling, and for porn. But I guess significant majorities typically say "oh well!" and accept restrictions as the new normal.

Yeah, the TikTok ban isn't about restricting content for US users, it's about restricting the data vacuum that is the PRC. TikTok has already been banned for Govmnt employees for years. And, for good reason.

Sometimes, we have to remind ourselves that our government is not the bad guy. The bad guys are the bad guys; and those bad guys aren't often bad to their own kind.

It's pretty obvious the tiktok ban was due to the Israel-Palestine conflict and thus is about restricting US users. It literally got passed in the same bill as Israel funding too.

I actually hadn't heard this theory until I read it on Wikipedia about an hour before your reply. I don't think the "same bill as Israel funding" is enough to make this obvious without other context, though: after all, that same bill includes military funding for Taiwan and Ukraine, too, and combining them was largely a parliamentary tactic to make it harder for legislators to oppose portions of the combined bill, not an acknowledgement that they all dealt with exactly the same subject.

(You might still be right, I just don't think it's "pretty obvious".)

Same bill as Israel funding is not my argument, it's just something to note. If you dig into this, you will find lots of public statements or comments made by ADL and related organizations about tiktok's influence on gen z opinions of the conflict, since tiktok doesn't ban pro palestine content or videos of civilian killings by IDF like all of the other big social networks do. Couple of weeks later, the ban is introduced and few weeks later the bill is passed. This is as pretty obvious as it can possibly be.

No. The Tiktok ban is because the PRC is using it to track US (and other country's') citizens. This is fundamentally no different than what Facebook has been doing for years, but China doesn't have a free market, so every piece of data is available to the PRC intelligence.

This should not be a surprise, but you folks are idiots who think only The Big Bad United States are (somehow) the only ones interested in spying.

Well it's certainly at the whims of a network-effect, that's part of the reason alcohol prohibition was so insanely ineffective. There was more people who wanted alcohol than the ban could possibly handle.

I'd posit that indoor smoking bans wouldn't have been effective whatsoever if they were implemented in the 1970's rather than the 2000s, just for the simple fact that 40% of the population were smokers compared to around 20% when those bans came into effect. Additionally, the impact to smokers was that you needed to go outside to smoke, which is a pretty reasonable behavioral modification.

There's probably some really solid sociology based studies around where this prohibition effectiveness essentially falls apart.

> A lot of Japanese illustrators were already treating it as an afterthought compared to X/Twitter

Citation needed.

Most Japanese illustrators do not care about the US/EU, and many of them even hate gaijins. If you haven't noticed, anti-Americanism is very strong on the Japanese internet.

Not sure what you're on about, it has nothing to do with being anti-American or not. Twitter is where everyone in Japanese creative industries posts about their work (unlike the West that didn't change when Musk bought the site), it's where the Japanese audience is, and it doesn't hurt that the global audience is there too.

But sure, if you want examples of this trend try searching Pixiv by title for stuff like "twitterまとめ" [1], " or "Xまとめ" [2], meaning a usually monthly compilation of illustrations that were posted to Twitter first. And that doesn't even get into the artists that stopped using Pixiv completely because they got bored of it or their account was banned.

[1] https://www.pixiv.net/en/tags/twitterまとめ/artworks?mode=safe&... (apparently these links don't capture the fact that it's a title search and not a tag search, you have to be logged in and set it manually)

[2] https://www.pixiv.net/en/tags/Xまとめ/artworks?mode=safe&s_mode...

Well, they still multipost on Twitter, but AFAICT it's getting unpopular these days. Tough I agree that Pixiv is not as popular as its old days too.

By "anti-Americanism", I'm insisting that a good number of Japanese anime artists see the ban as a beneficial feature, not a disadvantage. They would see this as an automated "Sorry, Japanese Only" filter.

I think the anti-Americanism among artists only relates to not wanting to deal with hypocritical American policies on nudity and their tendency to impose their views on everyone.

They're very likely perfectly fine with Americans and foreigners in general seeing and sharing work without trying to change the culture of the site (which is fair and something more communities need to start expecting, there's an increasingly popular idea that various hobbies have been ruined by uninvested "tourists" that come into the community, force it to change to accomodate them, then leave after the original audience has been alienated).

I don't know. Maybe I've spent too much time on the worst part of the Japanese internet. Not about Pixiv, but the kicking out of Dlsite by Mastercard caused so much anger among them.

The social divide is getting really worrying these days.

That's actually exactly the incident I was thinking of, my interpretation of the reaction to it was everyone being frustrated at American companies forcing their beliefs on everyone again, rather than being happy that American consumers were having it harder. It could also just be that my little circle is a niche within a niche though.

unpopular these days

Compared to what? Line, or do you have something else in mind?

I don't think there's an outstandingly popular one. Multiposting to get as many audiences as possible is norm these days. Sites like DMM, Fantia or Skeb are strong, but I don't think any of them get the particular traction.

Besides, LINE is extremely unpopular among otaku in Japan (yes, racism).

This is rude, but I think the reason its unpopular is otaku often have no friends. Even then, I have found plenty of open chats with otaku. There is exactly one person I know who refuses to use LINE for being owned by Naver. I think the most common reason is not having friends. Racism is probably the next reason.

Proprietary and without e2ee is why I refuse to use it.

I think it depends on which slice of the Japanese internet. The こどおじ who discuss politics all day match your description. Other people, not so much. The statement about not caring about US/EU is true, however. I think most of HN is unaware that many Japanese sites take one step further and block all non-Japanese traffic.

Fair enough, but I assume the ben diagram of the anime fans and the こどおじ are largely overlapping.

I think they'll be fine, the main audience is still Japanese, and for now bypassing this is just a matter of changing an account setting (and Pixiv has required an account for NSFW for as long as I have known of it).

Every site I know of in recent memory that has banned adult content, pretty much lost all their users. Not that there aren't a million sites for that kind of content already. They'll just find another site to post their doujins.

What I don't understand is how X hasn't pulled out the hammer like other western sites have. It seems weird to me that a Japanese site who is barely in the public eye would capitulate before X who has been under a lens since musk got on board.

In the recent happenings I saw plenty of illustrators get bounced back to X by moderators of fledgling platforms.

Musk saved X from basically being woke North Korea 2.0 where no debate was possible, and he’s waging his own war against government censorship in countries like Brazil and Australia (heroically and at a loss to himself IMO). I don’t think he will capitulate that easily. Musk is bad on some things (labor rights) but on free speech he’s done a lot of good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com