As soon as I saw this news, I signed up there in order to see how it is like. I'm yet to find non-Chinese-language content, as I don't really know Chinese. I mean, I do know from memory some very specific Chinese ideographs (given my special interests) such as maotouying (猫头鹰 lit. "Cat-headed eagle", which is one of the words for "owl", aside from xiao 鴞) which was, unsurprisingly, my first search in Bilibili. (I also know words and ideographs such as hong 红 red, ni hao 你好 greetings, ren 人 person/people, among others that wouldn't suffice for me to, say, buy 500g of bread in a bakery during some trip to China, lol)
The platform quite of reminds me of xiaohongshu (Red note), including the same emoji pack.
Then I tried to search for words with Latin alphabet (e.g. "Ereshkigal" and "Pomba-gira") and the results were nothing directly related to my search query, with Bilibili returning me a list of recommended videos based on my watch history (owl videos) instead.
One thing I liked is the lack of notifications (TikTok used to push notifications a lot) and the (momentary) lack of advertisements, maybe because there aren't companies from my geographic region (Brazil) buying ad placement there yet.
As a Brazilian, I'm sincerely wishing to see more Chinese and nonwestern alternatives to things, including but not limited to video platforms. I've been boycotting YouTube for two years and counting, for example, and it would be interesting to see a Chinese alternative to it other than the westernized TikTok (which is nowhere near to Chinese-only Douyin and its likely better/educational content). And, of course, I'm also rooting for PeerTube to gain traction, because it's native to Fediverse.
Sincerely? I hope not, or at least it must be an opt-in thing rather than something forcefully imbued into the platform.
Languages that I don't know may pose a language barrier to me, but at the same time there's something magic in getting to recognize (and even trying to spell/write) certain words and symbols once I put myself into trying to figure out what's written and how it's written.
This is how I managed to learn (albeit imperfectly and in a fragmented manner) the ideographs I mentioned earlier, among several other languages, including the so-called "dead languages" such as Sumerian and Akkadian (e.g. whenever I see "𒆤", I know it's "lil" meaning wind/spirit)... And this is how I learned, to give broader examples, what a "bumat" (البومة) is in Arabic and which letters are involved in its writing, or what's the difference between a "búho" and a "mochuelo" and a "lechuza" in Spanish, or what a "fukurou" (フクロウ) is in Japanese, or what a "chouette" is in French, or what an "oehoe" is in Dutch (especially how one was able to enfrighten two Dutch villages years ago, the cute yet fierce "terror-oehoe"), or "Eule" in German, or more symbolic words such as "lila" (לילה) "night" in Hebrew or "Лилит" as the Russian transliteration for Hebrew "לילית"... I was able to learn, or at least memorize, a ton of things across languages... Without AI.
Any kind of automatic translation, especially when AI-powered and fused into the UI, would hardly let me learn a language, because it'd bring the whole thing chewed up and translated, with no means for me to break the sentence down to its constituent words and letters/symbols and how much the surrounding context changes their meanings... not to mention how it ends up wiring our brains to expect the machine to do the reading for us, then we become dependent on machines to do what's essentially part of being a living being (humans and whatnot).
Also, translation often involves nuance, tone, sarcasm, emotions. AIs can be able to do "sentiment analysis" and connect words together in order to derive an assessment, but it'll be devoid of the attempted connection from whoever wrote the text being translated.
That said, Bilibili does have an automatic translation for titles and comments, turned on by default. I deliberately turned it off, because I want to see the Chinese ideographs, even though I'm not able to truly understand what I'm reading there. I expect to learn them from context and repetition, from trial and error... And when I get to see one of the ideographs standing out before my vision as something I know, getting to see them and yelling "hey, I know these two symbols, these are baxi 巴西 and together they mean Brazil"... Oh, there's a whole fun to it, a fun that's virtually non-existent when a clanker is doing all the heavy lifting.
Don't get me wrong, I do use translators, I'm not against translators, but I personally prefer using them manually, under my own pace and command while also being able to isolate certain words from surrounding sentences, this way getting to expand my vocabulary a little bit through a research of my own (e.g. looking it up on Wiktionary or other dictionaries out there), because I want to be able to learn something, anything, from it.
!technology@lemmy.world