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Answerman - What Social Networks Are Used In Japan?


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Kyjin



Joined: 25 Nov 2005
Posts: 126
Location: Los Angeles
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:14 pm Reply with quote
I've found twitter to be particularly prevalent amongst my Japanese friends. The fujoshi and cosplay twitter scene is pretty large here. I also have a lot of Japanese friends on instagram. A few have Facebook, but not many.

I don't really think of LINE as a social network, but as a messaging service. Nobody bothers to use traditional text messages and sticks to LINE. I do most of my phone calls over LINE as well while in Japan.
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relyat08



Joined: 20 Mar 2013
Posts: 4125
Location: Northern Virginia
PostPosted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 11:14 pm Reply with quote
Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
Shay Guy wrote:
As I recall, CJK characters count double under the new system, so if you're Japanese, it doesn't make much of a difference. Part of the motivation was that CJK speakers effectively had twice as much space anyway, since they could do roughly twice as much with 140 characters, so this levels it out.


I'm pretty certain that CJK characters counted double on the old system too; CJK characters in computing have been 2-byte for a very long time, and I really don't see them artificially coding around the differences there. And I'm fairly sure that Japanese and Chinese manage considerably greater than double information density per character compared to English overall.

At some point I might do some test-tweeting in Japanese to double check.


Interesting. I don't know about before, though that makes a lot of sense. And I did write something up in Japanese a minute ago on my own account and they do indeed count as two. In general, I think you can easily say 3 times as much in Japanese versus English in the same character count, personally.
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Scytalle
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Joined: 03 May 2011
Posts: 53
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 12:56 am Reply with quote
Just to share some perspective on Monster Strike. Mixi has transitioned almost completely away from the social network as their business model. Monster Strike is one of the most profitable games in the world, routinely beating out Candy Crush and other US based juggernauts in terms of revenue.

Of course it isn't based on an existing IP, like Fate GO or Fire Emblem so it doesn't get the same reach over here. The anime is, well, not great. I play the Japanese version of the game since they closed down the English version, and though it's a pain since I can't read Japanese, Monster Strike's gameplay is far and away the best gameplay of any mobile game I've seen, so I completely understand why it continues to top the charts.
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Haterater



Joined: 30 Apr 2006
Posts: 1728
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 2:03 am Reply with quote
Stuart Smith wrote:
A lot of artists have abandoned Pixiv over the past few years due to foreigners. They've moved onto Twitter and blog sites to share their art. Pawoo and Nijie are also popular since the former has less censorship than Twitter and the latter is specifically tailored to R-18 art. Fantia is another popular platform, with the option of Patreon-like donation tiers to support artists and doujinsoft creators. I support a few personal artist friends of mine on there.

-Stuart Smith


Can anyone expand over them abandoning Pixiv due to foreigners? Can't wrap my head around that.
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configspace



Joined: 16 Aug 2008
Posts: 3717
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 2:53 am Reply with quote
LINE is popular in Asia as well. More so than Facebook it seems from people I know. I haven't used it (but I haven't used any of the major social networking sites either except for LinkedIn). Is it also because of the free phone calls? Is that international?
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Wandering Samurai



Joined: 30 Mar 2014
Posts: 875
Location: USA
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 3:31 am Reply with quote
Line is definitely the thing in Japan over Facebook, although thankfully I am able to keep in contact with friends from Japan via Facebook. Some of my friends only use Line, so I have to contact them through that way as well. I know that some people got around the mixi signup part by having people they knew in Japan use their numbers, but I believe there was a short time before when mixi didn't require cell numbers at first. I friend of mine in the US has a mixi account and I I think he still posts on it.
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Amiantos



Joined: 30 Jan 2008
Posts: 345
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 6:00 am Reply with quote
Haterater wrote:
Stuart Smith wrote:
A lot of artists have abandoned Pixiv over the past few years due to foreigners. They've moved onto Twitter and blog sites to share their art. Pawoo and Nijie are also popular since the former has less censorship than Twitter and the latter is specifically tailored to R-18 art. Fantia is another popular platform, with the option of Patreon-like donation tiers to support artists and doujinsoft creators. I support a few personal artist friends of mine on there.

-Stuart Smith


Can anyone expand over them abandoning Pixiv due to foreigners? Can't wrap my head around that.

Rather curious myself as the vast majority of the artists I follow on twitter have their pixiv profile linked in their bio and all their stuff is there too.
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kasumicc



Joined: 05 Jul 2007
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 6:24 am Reply with quote
LINE is a closer match to WhatsApp (or maybe, FB Messenger) than Facebook itself; it's meant for IM and one-on-one communication, but it's not suited for wide scale interaction. For the record, I use both LINE and WhatsApp, but I like LINE better. The stickers are adorable. I just wish it was more popular in the West.

As the question itself implies, I would argue that Twitter is actually the most popular social network for public interaction, at least among the anime crew. Mobage hold their campaigns over Twitter (while FB is used for that purpose in the West), and a good chunk of the accounts I follow are seiyuu, doujin authors, anison singers, and so on. Many franchises have their "official accounts" where all news are published, including new merchandise, events, and such. If anything, all of this Twitter activity just makes me want to learn Japanese even more!

Amiantos wrote:
Haterater wrote:
Stuart Smith wrote:
A lot of artists have abandoned Pixiv over the past few years due to foreigners. They've moved onto Twitter and blog sites to share their art. Pawoo and Nijie are also popular since the former has less censorship than Twitter and the latter is specifically tailored to R-18 art. Fantia is another popular platform, with the option of Patreon-like donation tiers to support artists and doujinsoft creators. I support a few personal artist friends of mine on there.

-Stuart Smith


Can anyone expand over them abandoning Pixiv due to foreigners? Can't wrap my head around that.

Rather curious myself as the vast majority of the artists I follow on twitter have their pixiv profile linked in their bio and all their stuff is there too.


Can attest to this. The artists I follow keep their Pixiv accounts as a portfolio of sorts, while most of their content goes to Twitter itself, and only select pieces end up on Pixiv. Many artists just never got into Pixiv... And yes, many did, in fact, delete their accounts due to foreigners. Others opted to make their Pixiv stuff private, only for friends to see. The amount of old bookmarks I have that lead to nowhere because they were made private or simply deleted is just depressing.
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Pidgeot18



Joined: 19 Jul 2015
Posts: 101
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 9:22 am Reply with quote
Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
I'm pretty certain that CJK characters counted double on the old system too; CJK characters in computing have been 2-byte for a very long time, and I really don't see them artificially coding around the differences there. And I'm fairly sure that Japanese and Chinese manage considerably greater than double information density per character compared to English overall.


Ehh... not quite.

Converting text into bytes requires use of a charset, and there are three traditional charsets for Japanese: ISO-2022-JP, Shift-JIS, and EUC-JP. All of these are variable-width formats, in that a single character does not take up a fixed number of bytes. (Similar charsets exist for Chinese and Korean, but these charsets have really fallen out of favor).

Shift-JIS retains ASCII (i.e., every key you can type on your en-US keyboard) for the first 128 characters (save the \ character, which is replaced with ¥ instead of replacing the $ character for ¥, as was originally intended). A section of the upper 128 characters are given over to half-width katakana, and the rest are used to indicate that it's a two-byte character. EUC-JP employs a similar sort of scheme, although the details are different.

ISO-2022-JP is a mode-switching charset. A string starts out in ASCII, and certain escape sequences say "the next bytes are to be interpreted as fixed-width sequences coming from these tables." There's even an extension that has one of the modes be UTF-8, although that isn't widely supported.

When Unicode came out, it was originally specified as having only 65,536 characters, so many people opted for a fixed-width, 2-byte format for Unicode. Shortly after, it was realized that 65,536 is not enough and was expanded to about 1 million (17 planes of 65,536 to be specific). This rendered the old fixed-width format (UTF-16) a variable-width format that a lot of software pretends is fixed-width, causing problems if you're outside that first plane (such as emoji). The preferred format these days is UTF-8, which is a variable-width format, where ASCII characters take up 1 byte, most international characters take up 2, most east Asian 3 bytes, and those outside the original 65,536 4 bytes.

Twitter is almost certainly using UTF-8 internally, but it counts characters based on Unicode codepoint, so à takes up 1 character and à takes up 2 characters (unless it's normalizing first). What's the difference? The second character uses a distinct combining diacritic ( ̀ ).

I know way more about this than I want to...

Edit: apparently, the forum software doesn't like emoji characters.
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relyat08



Joined: 20 Mar 2013
Posts: 4125
Location: Northern Virginia
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 1:44 pm Reply with quote
kasumicc wrote:
And yes, many did, in fact, delete their accounts due to foreigners.


What about foreigners makes these artists not want to be on Pixiv? Confused
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Shay Guy



Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 2296
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 2:51 pm Reply with quote
Pidgeot18 is correct. (Though I can't personally confirm the details about ISO-2022-JP, Shift-JIS, and EUC-JP.) And you can verify that Japanese characters counted as one character each on Twitter before by looking at pretty much any Japanese Twitter feed from more than a couple months back, when the 280-character trial started.

If you're curious, you can find how pretty much any character you can type or copy/paste is represented in different encodings here.

EDIT: And if you're curious about the general question of "How do you translate code points into bytes so that a computer can always tell where one code point ends and another begins and translate them back", this old blog post is worth a read, even if it is probably unnecessarily abrasive. Example: Any byte in a UTF-8 encoded file that starts with 0 in binary is a full code point, a byte that starts with multiple 1s is the beginning of a multi-byte code point (the number of bytes determined by the number of 1s at the start), and a byte that starts with 10 is a continuation of a multi-byte code point.
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Stuart Smith



Joined: 13 Jan 2013
Posts: 1298
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:10 pm Reply with quote
relyat08 wrote:
What about foreigners makes these artists not want to be on Pixiv? Confused


The biggest reason is unauthorized reposting. Artists hate it when their work is reposted on sites like Tumblr, a booru, or the worst being shady paysites which makes profit off their work. Foreigners are the most likely to repost or pirate their work because they don't see the big deal. I've seen a lot of artists pull all their stuff and just quit because of it. Some quit for good, or some retreat to a more private environment where only them and their friends can see.

I'm not an artist, but I've seen how American artists are treated. Begged for free art/requests, harassed over stupid stuff like skin color/pairings. I wouldn't be surprised of that happens to Japanese artists by foreigners. For me personally, it also makes navigation harder. Some tags are just plagued by foreign work and its annoying to sift through.

-Stuart Smith
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mangamuscle



Joined: 23 Apr 2006
Posts: 2658
Location: Mexico
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:24 pm Reply with quote
Stuart Smith wrote:
relyat08 wrote:
What about foreigners makes these artists not want to be on Pixiv? Confused


The biggest reason is unauthorized reposting.


Unless there is proof, saying foreigners are to blame is racist, there is no reason why japanese people can't be guilty also (there are many pixiv artists also at deviantart, so navigating enlgish websites is not an arcane endeavor).


Last edited by mangamuscle on Thu Nov 30, 2017 5:02 pm; edited 2 times in total
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DerekL1963
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Joined: 14 Jan 2015
Posts: 1121
Location: Puget Sound
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:33 pm Reply with quote
Stuart Smith wrote:
relyat08 wrote:
What about foreigners makes these artists not want to be on Pixiv? Confused


The biggest reason is unauthorized reposting. Artists hate it when their work is reposted on sites like Tumblr, a booru, or the worst being shady paysites which makes profit off their work. Foreigners are the most likely to repost or pirate their work because they don't see the big deal.


So, you don't have any actual proof - just accusations.

Quote:
Some tags are just plagued by foreign work and its annoying to sift through.


Interesting... completely unrelated to the topic, but you had to slam anyhow. At least you're consistent.
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Stuart Smith



Joined: 13 Jan 2013
Posts: 1298
PostPosted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 5:15 pm Reply with quote
mangamuscle wrote:
Unless there is proof, saying foreigners are to blame is racist, there is no reason why japanese people can be guilty also (there are many pixiv artists also at deviantart, do navigating enlgish websites is not an arcane endeavor).


You're insinuating that the people who repost works on American websites... are actually Japanese people? That's a bit of a leap in logic, don't you think? Most of those site require usernames to upload, and its quite evident they are not Japanese. Most of them have the transparency to say they scoured an artist's profile and upload their work.

DerekL1963 wrote:
So, you don't have any actual proof - just accusations.


When its the artists who are saying that's why they are quitting, I tend to believe them. There's a reason a lot of artists don't want to deal with foreigners.

-Stuart Smith
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