Some of you may already have noticed that recently I added a new column, “Bloggers,” under my links, listing my haunts on the major microblogging and SNS sites. Among them, Renren (Xiaonei) was of course there from the beginning, while Follow5 and Digu were opened in December 2010. The latter is mainly used to display my “Digu” status in the blog sidebar, while the former is mainly used to synchronize status updates to Digu, Renren, and Twitter and Facebook. Although Follow5 and Digu are both considered among the earliest microblogging services in China, they have been used more for posting status updates, and cannot really count as having been properly put into use as microblogs. Only recently did I think of following the fashion and trying microblogging——the occasion was that I installed the WordPress microblogging connector plugin, but at the same time I also wanted to experience for myself the power of microblogging. So I registered the four major Chinese microblogging services in one go, first to start synchronizing my status, and then, after watching for a while, to gradually get hands-on with them.
The so-called four major microblogs here refer to Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, NetEase Weibo, and Sohu Weibo. My username is yilinhut on all of them. Students and netizens are all welcome to follow me. At present my activity is still mainly limited to synchronizing updates. After observing for a while and adding a certain amount of follows, I’ll then see which one I should choose for deeper use.
From the current situation, Sina Weibo still dominates the domestic scene, and my friends also seem to be active there more often. But the problem is that Sina is the one site I have no choice but to boycott. You can refer to an earlier post of mine for this: The Blog’s “Contract of Servitude”. Sina’s service agreement is not limited to blogs; of course, it also covers all services including Weibo.
4.5 For any content uploaded by users through Sina network services (including but not limited to forums, BBS, news comments, personal homepages) to areas on the Sina website accessible to the public, the user agrees that Sina shall have, throughout the world, the free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and fully sublicensable rights and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such content (in whole or in part), and/or to incorporate such content into any other form of works, media, or technology, whether currently known or hereafter developed.
I have never seen any site whose terms of service are written with such swagger. I’ve heard that LinkedIn’s terms are also quite harsh, but that site is positioned as a place to share personal profiles, and does not require the sharing of too much original work. Blogs and microblogs are obviously different. Even more puzzling is the fact that Sina Blog and Sina Weibo became so popular precisely because they play the celebrity card. Many cultural celebrities have been invited by Sina to start blogs, but could it really be that none of them care about the terms of service? When people publish original opinions on Sina, upload their own portraits, photography, calligraphy copies, and drawings, do they simply not care about the copyrights in these works? Or is it that the agreements Sina signs with those cultural celebrities are different from the ones signed by ordinary people like us?
In fact, to be precise, the Sina Weibo I am using now has not signed such an agreement with Sina. My Weibo account was brought over through Hotmail (it is hard to imagine Microsoft actually transferring their blog users to such a Chinese website), and during the transfer I paid attention and there was no prompt anywhere telling me to take note of the service agreement. In addition, Sina Blog can be opened directly via mobile access; when I accessed it on my phone, I accidentally opened another one, and again there was no prompt at all about the terms of service during the process. Only when you start from scratch on a computer and register an account do you get such a notice. I rarely see a website so cavalier about its terms of service.
Given that my activities on microblogs at present amount to nothing more than posting some random chatter and, in addition, forwarding shares, to the point that they do not involve much of a copyright issue, I can barely tolerate trying out Sina Weibo. After all, there are simply too many people on Sina Weibo. But I sincerely urge my friends to stay as far away from Sina Weibo as possible. Wouldn’t it be better to find a more honest website with a bit more conscience? The terms of service of the other sites, though not as perfect as those in Google’s family of sites, are still tolerable. My so-called “watching and waiting” actually includes this meaning too: to see whether domestic microblogging will henceforth remain monopolized by Sina, or whether some of the other microblogging services will catch up from behind and build up enough popularity to rival Sina. Or else, when will Sina suddenly come to its senses and revise its contract of servitude. If the only one with lively popularity remains this Sina, then I can only use it in a superficial way for the time being; sooner or later, I will still completely boycott Sina.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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