Weekly Scroll: A Whole New Internet

Chinese doomscrolls, offensive Japanese videos, and good steppe nomad content

I’m finally done traveling and should be back on a regular schedule this week. As penance for this post being late, this week’s edition of the Weekly Scroll is even more jam-packed than usual. If you’re thinking about jumping in as a paid sub, this is a great one to start with. Enjoy!

The Chinese Doomscroll

I want to share a Substack I found last week that might be my favorite blog on the internet right now.

It’s called Chinese Doomscroll, and the concept of the blog is very simple. The author simply takes the top five trending posts on Weibo (roughly the Chinese Twitter) and translates them into English, along with top comments. That’s basically it.

There’s sometimes some very light commentary or explanations, but not much. It’s just the top Weibo posts, every day. I can’t stop reading it. The Chinese internet is a mystery, a completely different ecosystem with different platforms, different norms of behavior, and strange institutional rules. Their trending topics usually have nothing to do with what our social media culture war is obsessed with - they have an entirely different set of culture war issues to fight about. They have their own celebrity ecosystem, their own obsessions, and they have to dance around the reality of censorship in a totalitarian state.

AI’s first attempt at ‘Chinese Doomscroll’

It’s an open window into a strange, alien landscape with completely different rules from ours. I can’t get enough of it. It’s fascinating to see social media trends and hot-button issues that closely mirror things that happen in the West. It’s equally fascinating to see trends that would never in a million years trend over here. It’s a whole new internet to explore.

I like it so much, that for the first time I’m adding a Substack to my recommendations page, which before today didn’t exist. I’m also recommending my friend Jeff Maurer’s Substack I Might Be Wrong. Jeff is comedy writer who’s equal parts insightful and funny in commenting on politics and culture. Highly recommend you check both of them out.

Hiding Likes

Elon finally did what he’s been threatening to do since he bought Twitter, and the Bird App has hidden likes. You can still see like totals, but you can no longer see every post a user liked just by navigating to their profile.

As a surface level event, this honestly isn’t that interesting. It doesn’t matter that much. But as with most things to do with Elon’s impulsive decisions, there are a few layers to peel back and a few things I can’t resist pointing out.