this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Better than YT (of course), but they're still a commercial corporation and bound to enshittify. PeerTube FTW.
Do we have any examples of Chinese tech enshittification yet? If there are no examples I'm not willing to agree with "bound to enshittify". Chinese companies are not the same as western companies when every single one of them above a certain size has a CPC branch within it, this by itself makes them all organisationally different and we can't say for certain they'll follow the same outcomes.
It's not exactly a secret that China's Social Sciences are lagging behind their Engineering projects. There's a lot of attempts to manipulate users to buy more, you download AliExpress and they let you play minigames to earn sales coupons for such a small discount, which is not really a discount it's just a useless time waster to obviously get you addicted to the app. The people who made these design choices obviously know what they're doing and I hope they suffer consequences for what they've done.
Don't get me wrong, this is not like exclusively super bad stuff or like significantly worse than what Western Capital does, but it's still harmful practices.
The only one that worked on me is when you used to get ranks on AliExpress. The fake discounts are just annoying, just show me the price I'm going to pay.
Ok, that's fair, enshittification is perhaps the wrong term here because it describes a process inherent to capitalism specifically. However, Chinese tech companies have been doing some bad stuff more generally. Perhaps not as bad as western counterparts, but still. Just from ones I personally encountered: TikTok is extremely addictive, wechat is a privacy nightmare, DJI is very anti-consumer requiring activation via an Android app and account for its cameras. Xiaomi is its own can of worms: HyperOS has ads baked-in to it, and as far as I could tell requires a Xiaomi account to change the ringtone on your own phone (WTF?); the robot vacuums require an account and a cloud connection to work; etc.
Hell, even bilibili is already full of ads if you visit it without an adblocker.
Don't forget that Xiaomi makes it hell to unlock the bootloader: you have to make an account to request unlocking it and then wait some unspecified amount of time, and you can only do this once per year
Oh yeah I forgot about that part.
When I bought my last phone, I unlocked the bootloader, was on my way to flash a new ROM when during checking all the functionality was working (as one should) I realized the camera was fucked. So I had to get it replaced (unfortunately no warranty repair option in the store where I bought it), and then couldn't unlock the bootloader for like half a year :/
Yikes, fortunately I never had stubborn phones like that. My last phone was a Sony that I vaguely miss for its gigantic screen (and the fact that it was free for me 😸), and thankfully it was easy to unlock
Yep, comes with a fair bit of bloatware installed. That said, my Xiaomi only cost me about 150 quid and it's lasted about 5 years so far.
AliExpress added Israeli age verification
And Bilibili keeps asking me to install the app which YouTube doesn't.
Wait what on? I've never been asked for my identification
I think it's just on sex toys and some fetish stuff now. But for a while it was on knifes too.
Might be regional too
Buying shit on alibaba or temu can be a nightmare with false advertising and dark patterns. I feel like it's gotten worse.
I think enshittification applies mainly to tech products that are usually free services that make their money from data or ads rather than just a shopping market? Not saying it hasn't gotten worse but seems like a different thing?
Yeah you're probably right. I was using it in the sense that everything gets worse under capitalism.
BambuLab
Was it ever not shit? Them being shady about the Bambu studio licensing isn't new exactly.
If you count being forced to be sold to a western country to operate in that country like happened with tiktok as enshittification so you have this one.(I actually don't even know if they got worse since I never used)
Definitely counts as enshittification, tiktok is considerably worse now. But it's notable that it's the sale of the company OUT of China that results in it. Would be quite interesting to see if this happens with anything that's sold in future internally in China. I'm not even sure if such a sale would be accepted or go through, what barriers would happen internally with the structure etc.
Have you tried buying anything from temu in the past couple years? It was terrible. Now it's terrible, but written in all caps.
Sure but that's just a storefront, not a tech product provided to people for free while being monetised with ads/data.
Does Tencent count?
It's a company rather than a specific tech product? It's like saying "does microsoft count?" isn't it? Which specific Tencent product are we talking about?
If I said Microsoft did enshification, it would be pretty self evident cause that's their entire business model lmao
Tencent owns fintechs and publishes live service games, I feel like we have plenty to pick from. The reason why it wouldn't count is that they're mostly a holding company and some of those companies it owns aren't Chinese