The experience of trying to sign up to any site from china

• “to perform {basic function}, you MUST have an account AND our APP”
• you try to download their app
  • it’s either not on the play store, or is geoblocked in your country for some reason.
    • sometimes the play store version is always outdated
  • so you download the apk. makes you wonder why did they geoblock it in the first place
• “no no you can’t register with email, you HAVE to use a phone number”
  • some sites require a phone number from china, basically making it inaccessible to the entire world. fuck you.
• oh wait you can login with wechat. spends 30 minutes tying to login to wechat
  • sometimes you’ll need to bother a friend for the verification
  • and then it turns out it’s there for login convenience cause you still need an existing account with a phone number
• back to square one: register with your phone number
  • the country code selection menu
    • you get reminded of geopolitics because whenever they mention taiwan they have to explicitly specify it’s part of china… or else they get cancelled
    • malaysia is always at the bottom despite the amount of chinese people here. do you know bilibili put malaysia below japan and france? wtf? and of course it’s below singapore. they did this just to spite me.
  • the weird puzzle captcha thingy. sometimes with normal photos, games usually have anime illustrations, while some have their anime mascot.
    • hey google, hcaptcha, and cloudflare, you guys have to step up your game. pleaseeeeee start putting some anime girls in your captcha.
  • the worst part: waiting for the sms code
    • you wait for 5 minutes and no code
    • you tried to request another one
    • a code finally arived
    • turns out it’s incorrect cause it’s the first code they sent
    • you get impatient and request another one
    • still nothing, not even the second code
    • you request ano- wait. you’ve reached your daily limit. you have to try again tomorrow

• you forget about it tommorow.

• yeah.

the only exception is 小红书 (with a really ugly english name - Xiaohongshu) because it’s actually specifically trying to target the overseas market.

weibo is the twitter of china, as in, all of the people you wanna follow are there and only there.

the problem is that, urm, the international phone number option is just there for show. if you try to register it’ll just Never Send You the verification. apparently this has been a thing for years now.

original post on cohost