#clout chasing existed online for as long as the internet existed

[androgynousblackbox]

I used to be a fan of creepshow but since she got a bigger following and became buddies with other youtubers she's changed. Idk I feel like back when she was smaller you could critique her and she would listen if it was done in a polite way but as I've seen in the last few days those days are clearly gone. It's always the same shit with youtubers as soon as they get bigger they all see criticism as just some haters and people chasing for clout. She seem spiteful these days.

I used to be a suscriber too until it came out a video of her saying “you must accept criticism as a content creator, no matter how insulting it is, because how else are you as an artist suposed to improve??” and unsuscribed because I hate that mentality. I would still have some of her videos recommended to me and I would watch as white note while doing something else, and for that I can tell there was certainly a shift on the way she handled topics or what topics she used. For one, she stopped talking about general artist stuff or youtubers on the artists community to be more broadly drama. I have no doubt this happened specifically because she must have noticed that general drama is a lot more profitable than art drama. So she started talking about Shane Dawson, James Charles and Trisha Paytas and other trendy topics like that, because that was on everyone’s mind and of course would bring a lot of traffic. All she said was information readibly available for everyone and it wasn’t nothing specially controversial. Until then everything was fine. It was silly drama, after all.But then she started talking more about Onision, Vanity and Yaniv, real known predators/abusers whose crimes are extremely serious and should be handled by authorities, and that is where I think she started to get this idea that she was the chosen one to talk about Real Issues(tm). She is someone with no media traning, no training in law, no training in how to handle these serious topics, just a “normal” person with opinions and, fuck, that seemed to be enough. People were telling her “thank god you are speaking about this”, “this person is so awful, we need people like you dennouncing them”, “you are so right, you speaking the truth, queen, yes, just tell them” and other things that convinced her then that she was doing the right thing. That she was making a difference. That this was good. That no one else was going to do what she was doing, so it should be done.So she started to get sloppier. After all, she just had to report things easy to find online and she would get praise for it. Why would you ever need anything else? I first really noticed this with that video about some lady supposedly faking so many illnesses, injuries and food alergies. This lady is the face of body positivity for a lot of people and also for disabled visibility, so she was big and she faking having all those issues was also big. What a fraud! So Crapshow reunited all the “evidence” and put it out. Hey, guys, it’s Sharon, and today we are going to speak about this lady possibly lying for attention, don’t forget to like and suscribe! She didn’t consult with any disabled person about how common the experiences of that lady actually were. She didn’t stopped to think how common is to doubt disabled people’s struggles and how damaging it can be for them spread the narrative that you can “prove” someone’s disability, that in fact you should, because fakers are bad and we can’t allow them to exist, no matter how disproportianaly affects disabled people and their hability to get the assistance they need. People told her this. There was no way no one in the internet wasn’t going to let her know maybe that was unnecesary and irresponsible thing to do. But the response of people telling her “yeeaaaah, you tell them, queen, you bring down those fakers!”, “my queen Sharon is speaking nothing but the truth!”, “I am so glad you are covering this!” was greater and they were more people, so why shouldn’t listen to them instead? They were the majority, and it couldn’t be that ableism is a thing so normalized that people fell into it without realizing, so case close.Then she talked about MAPs in twitter (don’t drag me to map discourse o I will block you) and once again she was getting praised for her bravery and resolution to save the kiddies, for talking about dangerous people, for talking about Real Issues that were Important. The look from that high horse must have been amazing for her, I bet. From there, it was only a matter of time before she spoke about “cartoon cp”. It could have been loli or shota in general, about how it’s wrong and it’s disgusting and how she cannot believe there are people who seek that content out, when those are lItErAlLy cHiLdReN and bla bla bla. Let’s forget about how she defended just-a-fish from detractors who used him following a loli account as a reason to hate on him and call him a pedophile. Let’s forget about how she defended an artist from backlash after making a grown up version of a teen character. Let’s forget about how she has claimed to be the saviour of big titty drawn ladies because art and it’s fine and you are all too damn sensitive. Let’s forget how none of her videos are age restricted and when she still posted her own speedrawings, a lot of times those drawings were about naked ladies.Let’s forget about all of that. There is kiddies to save, money to make and, hey, this should be easy, right? I am sure someone was “hey, Sharon, now that you are speaking about predators on twitter, how about you speak about this artist that does this disgusting shit. Just look at this lewd images and don’t even paid attention to the context of abuse. These literal kiddies are naked! And they do lewd stuff! You have to talk about this, Crapshow, we need you” and that is all she needed. As I said, she was getting sloppier and sloppier already so easy target (small account), easy subject (kiddies in danger!), easy to talk about (it’s disgusting, therefore this is illegal!), so of course she was going to get into it with her personal disgust as the only reason for anything.As long she keeps being praised for the shit she does, she is never have a reason to change her mentality. I am sure she thinks she only spoked the truth, that this was something that should have happened, that this was important and if no one else is talking about it, then, why else does she have a platform. But the way she reacted to people telling her how wrong she was, that only made it clear she gives a solid fuck about honesty or compassion. It’s all performative, just like antis have always been performative. Can you even imagine Crapshow going against her audience’s opinion on anything, ever? I can’t. 

[englishchinesetranslations]

For much of the 20th century, a section of the western intelligentsia deluded itself that something worthwhile was taking place in the Soviet Union. There were of course those well-known, even notorious intellectuals such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, who travelled east to pay obsequious tribute to the “new civilisation” (the Webbs’s words). However, there was a wider array of apologists who filtered through into the Labour Party, the trade unions and academia.

The romantic penumbra that surrounds the dictatorship in Cuba to this day is a good example of the moral leeway still granted to projects that are nominally socialist, or which seek to transform humanity in some way. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, progressive hearts which are “bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US… suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society”.

But the Soviet Union has been gone for almost 30 years, and today’s Cuba is mainly of kitsch value, its youthful revolutionary heroes preserved as a piece of sixties nostalgie; its diminishing achievements — education (Fidelista indoctrination) and internationalist healthcare (Cuban doctors sent overseas have been likened to indentured labour) — implausibly trotted out to justify over half a century of dictatorship.

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Red alert: the childish fad for socialism

BY JAMES BLOODWORTH

And so a new generation of political “seekers” have turned to China for their ideological sustenance.

Beyond the mere worship of money and power, there is not much to like about the government in Beijing. The programme of socialist modernisation launched four decades ago by Deng Xiaoping has produced an authoritarian state capitalism overseen by a dictatorship which censors the internet, bans independent trade unions and pursues an aggressively imperialist policy in the South China Sea.

What the Chinese regime shares with the Stalinist USSR is contempt for ethnic minorities and civil society. Over recent years China has arrested a million Uyghurs and Kazakhs and placed them in forced labour camps. As Nick Cohen writes for The Observer, evidence of their criminality includes “wearing a veil or headscarf” and the “avoidance of alcohol”.

The esteemed British historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked in an interview for Desert Island Discs in 1995 if communist utopia would have been worth the sacrifice of millions of lives. Yes, the historian replied. The most charitable interpretation of Hobsbawm’s remarks was that it was at least plausible in the 1930s to believe that Stalin’s USSR was the only alternative to a western capitalism which looked increasingly like the handmaiden of fascism. Of course even that is a stretch: there were plenty of individuals at the time who eschewed fascism without embracing Stalinist mass murder.

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A cautionary tale for today's 'woke' movement

BY JOHN GRAY

But does anyone truly believe that contemporary China is forging an egalitarian new civilisation? Income inequality in China exceeds that of the United States. Moreover, when it is not herding Uighurs into the Gulag, the Chinese Communist Party is busy suppressing young Chinese Marxists who have noticed the gap between official rhetoric and the corrupt and unequal reality.

Yet much like during the Cold War, a roll-call of useful idiots have faithfully stepped forward from deep within the cosseted bosom of western liberal democracy to defend China from criticism. Some, undoubtedly chasing clout on social media, have decided that “Muslims are treated better in Russia/China than in the United States”. This is concerning — the “journalist” in question has sixty six thousand followers — but easy to dismiss as inane online prattle. Still, behind the hot air merchants stand “progressive” organisations that have taken the decision to align themselves with the Chinese state while one of the biggest crimes of the 21st century unfolds.

The Morning Star, long an uncritical mouthpiece for authoritarian communism, describes evidence of Chinese persecution of the Uighurs as “laughably weak”, despite mountains of material from independent human rights organisations demonstrating the veracity of the claims. (The paper has history here: The Morning Star’s predecessor The Daily Worker faithfully toed the Soviet line, defending the pact with Hitler and the murderous show trials in Eastern Europe, while of course never mentioning the millions of people being worked to death in the Gulag). It is shameful that the British Left treat The Morning Star with reverence as an alternative to the capitalist press.

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How the Left lost all purpose

BY JAMES BLOODWORTH

But The Morning Star is not the only culprit; new organisations are springing up to do Beijing’s dirty work. Today we have the “Progressive International”, launched in 2020 by prominent leftist luminaries including the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (among others). The Progressive International says it wants to “defeat a rising authoritarian nationalism”, yet it has aligned itself uncritically with the Qiao Collective, a vehicle for the promotion of Chinese imperialism combined with the sort of authoritarian nationalist groups that the Progressive International were ostensibly founded to oppose. The Qiao Collective brooks no criticism of the CCP and either denies the persecution of Uighur Muslims, or portrays their oppression as a function of legitimate “anti-terrorism” policy by Beijing.

Together with denial and obfuscation when it comes to the projection of Chinese power, the Qiao Collective pushes Chinese state media which depicts western nations as in the grip of strife and malfeasance. The Russian television station RT has long deployed a similar tactic. Western audiences are urged to scrutinise their own governments and to “Question More” — until RT turns its attention to Russia, when this critical approach is replaced by the party line from the Kremlin.

This glaring double standard is evident to anyone who isn’t trying to make a name for themselves as an anti-American talking head. Just as the Soviet Union accused the West of “warmongering” (sometimes justifiably, as in Vietnam) while it sent armies to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa to prop up bloody dictators, the Chinese State and its obsequious mouthpieces extol the virtues of racial justice in the US, while incarcerating a million Muslims in concentration camps.

It is perhaps understandable, although no less egregious for it, that the Chinese state should seek to downplay its misdeeds and calumnies. Stranger is the spectacle of progressive-minded commentators credulously lining up to offer the Chinese state their support.

Depressingly, a permanent feature of politics seems to be a stubborn rump of ideologues whose criticism of their own government co-exists with a need to develop a corresponding loyalty to another unit. Orwell called this phenomenon “transferred nationalism”. For Orwell, transference has an important political function: “It makes it possible for [the transferer] to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”

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BY JAMES BLOODWORTH

Authoritarian, rapaciously capitalist China is merely the latest “camp” that stands ready to be embraced by those who are temperamentally inclined to transference. “We examined the source data on the claims of millions of Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps,” said Max Blumenthal, the American left-winger and son of a former aide to Bill Clinton, on RT earlier this year. “We haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims,” he added.

Blumenthal is the founder and editor of the far-Left news site The Grayzone. In the past, The Grayzone has supported grisly dictatorships in Syria and Venezuela for no reason other than the latter’s opposition to western liberal democracy. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying and Lijian Zhao have both approvingly tweeted a Grayzone article which sought to rubbish claims that China is persecuting its Uighur population.

The Max Blumenthals of the world may be base and cynical (Blumenthal’s politics took a 180 turn following a 2015 trip to the Kremlin), but in this postmodern age, it’s apparent that people still yearn to be part of something bigger than the self. Materialism and solipsistic self-betterment are not enough though. They have limited appeal next to the desire — felt in the days when Wells visited the USSR, and even more strongly felt today — to be part of a world historical struggle between good and evil. Whether or not this quasi-religious impulse is transposed onto an atheistic communist tyranny is largely beside the point. The search for a tyrannical fatherland, a steady ideological pole to cling onto in tumultuous times, continues unabated.

With the emergence of the contemporary pro-China useful idiot in mind, it is worth paraphrasing the dissident Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, himself a believer at one time in the big idea of communism, who noticed: “when there are no more worthwhile banners, people start to march behind worthless ones”.

[newstfionline]

T-Shirts, Toilet Paper and Rotten Mangoes. This Chinese App Sells It All.

By Raymond Zhong, NY Times, July 25, 2018

BEIJING--Apple, Gucci, Tesla. Many Chinese shoppers love their top-shelf brands.

But another big slice of the population goes gaga for a 40-cent pair of earrings, a $1.50 wireless smartphone charger and 50 rolls of toilet paper for $4.75.

These are the shoppers on Pinduoduo, a Chinese app that drew close to 350 million customers in the past year, more than the entire population of the United States. Its parent company is expected to list shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday, just three years into its existence.

The lightning-fast ascent of Pinduoduo (pronounced a bit like “PING-daw-daw”) suggests that China is not done producing high-flying internet upstarts, despite the vast reach of incumbents such as Alibaba. It also illustrates the clout of an underserved category of Chinese consumers.

They live outside the country’s prosperous megacities, in the cities, towns and hamlets that over a billion Chinese call home. They skew older, less internet savvy. And they absolutely cannot resist a bargain, even if the stuff they’re buying isn’t exactly top of the line.

In the southern city of Foshan, Li Tianqiang and his wife sell rice noodles and other breakfast food out of a three-wheeled truck to hungry factory workers. Over the past two years, Mr. Li, 45, has bought nearly $1,000 worth of merchandise on Pinduoduo--the equivalent of around two months’ income for him. Among his purchases: an inflatable paddle boat, a fishing bag and a cherry-red motorized car for his young daughter to drive around.

Mr. Li knows he is a little addicted. And regretted purchases? He has a few.

Some were made out of curiosity. In other cases, the items were of such lousy quality that he threw them out after they arrived. The toys he has bought for his daughter--including dolls, a violin and a keyboard--have been particularly bad, he said.

It is all so inexpensive, though, that he said he didn’t mind the occasional misfire.

“It’s nothing, really,” he said of his spending on the app.

For many years, China was a byword for shoddy goods produced at mass scale. But that is changing. Wages are rising, forcing manufacturers to compete on quality. Communist Party leaders want to nurture brands known globally for their innovations. Gadget makers such as Xiaomi and Huawei are investing heavily in design, chasing cool and cachet.

To shop on Pinduoduo, however, is to be reminded that many Chinese consumers still check prices first, and that low-end suppliers remain a big part of the country’s economy. The Pinduoduo app’s main page is a bottomless cascade of groceries, fast fashion, household sundries and electronic bric-a-brac--all carrying wildly improbable price tags.

A pair of stretchy, “Playboy”-brand men’s pants: less than $3. Eleven pounds of rice: $4. A four-pack of boxer briefs printed with an image of a wolf’s head: $2. A purple water kettle with “LOL” written along the bottom: $3. A pink, around-the-neck smartphone stand that lets you lie down and watch videos at the same time: $1. A vibrating electric belt that goes around the midsection and supposedly helps shed fat: $6.

Shipping is always free.

Pinduoduo wants shoppers to involve their online friends in the process. Group orders receive discounts. New users who persuade others to sign up are rewarded with one of a selection of free purchases. Tiny pop-ups within the app provide relentless, real-time updates on what others are buying, creating a sense of urgency. Everyone is getting great deals and you are not.

Between the deliriously strange product selection, the next-to-nothing prices, the barrage of coupons and deals, and the ease with which purchases are made, the experience feels less like shopping and more like playing a shopping video game. In regulatory filings, the company calls the app “a combination of Costco and Disneyland.”

Pinduoduo started operations only in 2015. The app is a platform for merchants to sell products: Sellers pay for their wares to be promoted on the app, and pay a fee for each sale. The company, which is based in Shanghai, has grown swiftly enough to attract powerful backers including the venture firm Sequoia Capital and the Chinese internet giant Tencent. It expects to raise $1.4 billion in this week’s share offering. That would give the company a valuation of more than $20 billion.

Because it offers so much cheap stuff, however, Pinduoduo is still way behind its rivals in the total value of goods sold. The company, which is unprofitable, said that its average shopper spent less than $90 on the platform last year. That translates into revenue per shopper of a dollar and change.

“This is the lowest quality of traffic you can get,” said Steven Zhu, an analyst in Shanghai with the research firm Pacific Epoch. And if older people are driving Pinduoduo’s popularity, Mr. Zhu added, then its prospects for long-term growth are grim by default.

The platform has also been accused of being awash with knockoff products. Last week, the company was sued for trademark infringement in the United States.

Pinduoduo declined to comment. But in its filings with stock regulators, the company said it immediately removed counterfeits from the app. And this year, the company’s founder, a former Google engineer named Colin Huang, described his philosophy on price versus quality to the Chinese business magazine Caijing.

His own mother complained to him when two of the nine mangoes she had bought for $1.50 on the app turned up rotten, Mr. Huang told Caijing. Still, he said, she continued to use Pinduoduo. “If you can buy seven good mangoes for $1.50, you’re not losing out,” he said.

For the most part, Kang Xia agrees. Ms. Kang, a 52-year-old retiree in the southwestern city of Chengdu, has used Pinduoduo to buy shoes, clothes, gadgets--“quite a lot,” she said, although the quality isn’t always great.

This spring, she got stung by two bad purchases. First, there was a $5 wardrobe with colorful fabric panels and a “real wood” frame. One touch was all she needed to realize the thing was no good. Then she bought a chiffon skirt with a floral pattern--less than $6, including a yellow T-shirt to wear with it--that arrived with a jagged tear down the side.

Ms. Kang said she is now less likely to buy things on Pinduoduo solely because they are cheap. But she still looks at the app every day.

But Pinduoduo does not have to be stuck in the bargain bin forever, said Tian X. Hou, founder of T. H. Data Capital, a research firm in Beijing. Now that it has used low prices to attract so many users, it can do as Alibaba did and go premium.

“Once you have this trust, you can grow out of the current business and create a new business,” Ms. Hou said.

That might turn off the most fervent deal hunters. But it could raise Pinduoduo’s profile among other consumers.

Zhang Huajin, 34, a manager at a tech company in Guangzhou, bought an iPhone 7 Plus on Pinduoduo this month. Or he thought he did. What arrived was a smartphone, but it was not made by Apple.

Mr. Zhang got his money back, though. And if Pinduoduo improves quality control and helps big brands sell directly on the app, he will probably buy from there again, he said.

[alamante]

BEIJING — Apple, Gucci, Tesla. Many Chinese shoppers love their top-shelf brands.

But another big slice of the population goes gaga for a 40-cent pair of earrings, a $1.50 wireless smartphone charger and 50 rolls of toilet paper for $4.75.

These are the shoppers on Pinduoduo, a Chinese app that drew close to 350 million customers in the past year, more than the entire population of the United States. Its parent company is expected to list shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday, just three years into its existence.

The lightning-fast ascent of Pinduoduo (pronounced a bit like “PING-daw-daw”) suggests that China is not done producing high-flying internet upstarts, despite the vast reach of incumbents such as Alibaba. It also illustrates the clout of an underserved category of Chinese consumers.

They live outside the country’s prosperous megacities, in the smaller cities, towns and hamlets that more than a billion Chinese call home. They skew older, less internet savvy. And they absolutely cannot resist a bargain, even if the stuff they’re buying isn’t exactly top of the line.

In the southern city of Foshan, Li Tianqiang and his wife sell rice noodles and other breakfast food out of a three-wheeled truck to hungry factory workers. Over the past two years, Mr. Li, 45, has bought nearly $1,000 worth of merchandise on Pinduoduo — the equivalent of around two months’ income for him. Among his purchases: an inflatable paddle boat, a fishing bag and a cherry-red motorized car for his young daughter to drive around.

Mr. Li knows he is a little addicted. And regretted purchases? He has a few.

Some were made out of curiosity. In other cases, the items were of such lousy quality that he threw them out after they arrived. The toys he has bought for his daughter — including dolls, a violin and a keyboard — have been particularly bad, he said.

It is all so inexpensive, though, that he said he didn’t mind the occasional misfire.

“It’s nothing, really,” he said of his spending on the app.

For many years, China was a byword for shoddy goods produced at mass scale. But that is changing. Wages are rising, forcing manufacturers to compete on quality. Communist Party leaders want to nurture brands known globally for their innovations. Gadget makers such as Xiaomi and Huawei are investing heavily in design, chasing cool and cachet.

To shop on Pinduoduo, however, is to be reminded that many Chinese consumers still check prices first, and that low-end suppliers remain a big part of the country’s economy. The Pinduoduo app’s main page is a bottomless cascade of groceries, fast fashion, household sundries and electronic bric-a-brac — all carrying wildly improbable price tags.

A pair of stretchy, “Playboy”-brand men’s pants: less than $3. Eleven pounds of rice: $4. A four-pack of boxer briefs printed with an image of a wolf’s head: $2. A purple water kettle with “LOL” written along the bottom: $3. A pink, around-the-neck smartphone stand that lets you lie down and watch videos at the same time: $1. A vibrating electric belt that goes around the midsection and supposedly helps shed fat: $6.

Shipping is always free.

Pinduoduo wants shoppers to involve their online friends in the process. Group orders receive discounts. New users who persuade others to sign up are rewarded with one of a selection of free purchases. Tiny pop-ups within the app provide relentless, real-time updates on what others are buying, creating a sense of urgency. Everyone is getting great deals and you are not.

Between the deliriously strange product selection, the next-to-nothing prices, the barrage of coupons and deals, and the ease with which purchases are made, the experience feels less like shopping and more like playing a shopping video game. In regulatory filings, the company calls the app “a combination of Costco and Disneyland.”

Pinduoduo started operations only in 2015. It has grown swiftly enough to attract powerful backers including the venture firm Sequoia Capital and the Chinese internet giant Tencent. The company, which is based in Shanghai, expects to raise $1.4 billion in this week’s share offering. That would give it a valuation of more than $20 billion.

Because it offers so much cheap stuff, however, Pinduoduo is still way behind its rivals in the total value of goods sold. The company, which is unprofitable, said that its average shopper spent less than $90 on the platform last year. That translates into revenue per shopper of a dollar and change.

“This is the lowest quality of traffic you can get,” said Steven Zhu, an analyst in Shanghai with the research firm Pacific Epoch. And if older people are driving Pinduoduo’s popularity, Mr. Zhu added, then its prospects for long-term growth are grim by default.

The platform has also been accused of being awash with knockoff products. Last week, the company was sued for trademark infringement in the United States.

Pinduoduo declined to comment. But in its filings with stock regulators, the company said it immediately removed counterfeits from the app. And this year, the company’s founder, a former Google engineer named Colin Huang, described his philosophy on price versus quality to the Chinese business magazine Caijing.

His own mother complained to him when two of the nine mangoes she had bought for $1.50 on the app turned up rotten, Mr. Huang told Caijing. Still, he said, she continued to use Pinduoduo. “If you can buy seven good mangoes for $1.50, you’re not losing out,” he said.

For the most part, Kang Xia agrees. Ms. Kang, a 52-year-old retiree in the southwestern city of Chengdu, has used Pinduoduo to buy shoes, clothes, gadgets — “quite a lot,” she said, although the quality isn’t always great.

This spring, she got stung by two bad purchases. First, there was a $5 wardrobe with colorful fabric panels and a “real wood” frame. One touch was all she needed to realize the thing was no good. Then she bought a chiffon skirt with a floral pattern — less than $6, including a yellow T-shirt to wear with it — that arrived with a jagged tear down the side.

Ms. Kang said she is now less likely to buy things on Pinduoduo solely because they are cheap. But she still looks at the app every day.

For the established big shots of Chinese e-commerce, it is unwelcome news that many shoppers will buy very nearly anything if the price is right.

To retain customers and avoid regulators’ ire, Alibaba, which served more than 500 million buyers last year, has fought sales of fakes on its Taobao marketplace. The retailer JD.com, which had around 300 million buyers, has courted upmarket brands and cultivated a reputation for reliability.

“From time to time, there are new players, but the question is whether they can sustain themselves,” Alibaba’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, said at a recent event in San Francisco. “We are also climbing.”

Terry Yao lives in Dandong, a small city in China’s northeast. After looking at some sneakers on Pinduoduo — pairs that should retail for more than $100 were going for a tiny fraction of that, he said — he made up his mind about the authenticity of the platform’s products.

“China has developed so much,” said Mr. Yao, 28. “But if residents of these third- and fourth-tier cities can only use things like Pinduoduo, it feels to some degree like a big failure. We’ve gone backward.”

But Pinduoduo does not have to be stuck in the bargain bin forever, said Tian X. Hou, founder of T. H. Data Capital, a research firm in Beijing. Now that it has used low prices to attract so many users, it can do as Alibaba did and go premium.

“Once you have this trust, you can grow out of the current business and create a new business,” Ms. Hou said.

That might turn off the most fervent deal hunters. But it could raise Pinduoduo’s profile among other consumers.

Zhang Huajin, 34, a manager at a tech company in Guangzhou, bought an iPhone 7 Plus on Pinduoduo this month. Or he thought he did. What arrived was a smartphone, but it was not made by Apple.

Mr. Zhang got his money back, though. And if Pinduoduo improves quality control and helps big brands sell directly on the app, he will probably buy from there again, he said.

Taobao managed the transition, he said, and shoppers’ expectations shifted accordingly. On Taobao, Mr. Zhang said, “everybody already knows what kinds of product should be sold at what price.”

Zhang Tiantian and Claire Fu contributed research.

Follow Raymond Zhong on Twitter: @zhonggg.

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