This seems like it might be worth publishing for two reasons: Douyin is no longer withholding 720p for a new private browsing window. And the question at the end might be helpful as an explanation for some events. Note variations of the question: "are rich people who push the button bad?" "If rich people are 80% of the population, are rich people who push it bad?" "If the effects are flipped, and poor people who push it are safe while rich people who push it take a risk, are poor people who push it bad?"
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Update 06 Oct 2026, 10:46
It's definitely cheating to update this post after 05 Oct.
Tested the Douyin restriction on 720p last night. It isn't an anti-bot measure. It activated if the first page viewed was a video page, and stayed active even if other pages were viewed. It didn't activate if the first page viewed was a profile, or the jingxuan page, or even a v.douyin.com link to a video page.
I have rarely encountered this restriction because I often have checked the profiles of 饱饱兔 and 9玥、 before I started downloading videos I had bookmarked. This restriction tells me that I should always do so. Occasional restrictions I have encountered in the past: the first video page I visit failing to load, giving a network error message, and dumping me to the main page as though the video has been deleted, when it has not; and one time when a lot of videos were failing to load this way, even when the same video worked when it was clicked on in recommended videos, but videos that did not involve dancing were loading just fine (after a delay).
This restriction on 720p is completely separate from the quality restriction that is applied for free users during the evening in China (which for me, is around 4 am). When I encountered that a few days ago, many videos were restricted to 540p, but one user's videos were still available in 1080p; maybe it was based on bitrate or filesize. Videos with green plants in sunlight can use 5x the bitrate of videos with a wall as the background.
Well, after spending half an hour deciding what to say about Douyin: dream that involved fires. I remember a lot of it, though I almost forgot it entirely when I woke up, but all I'll say is that at one point I did put out a few grass flames with my foot or something, and it sort of transitioned into trying to help an alien that turned into a cat or cats.
It wouldn't be notable, except that when I was in the US National Guard, which is a reserve component of the US military, I had firefighting training. And I don't remember if I learned anything at all about fighting fires in it. I got firefighting boots from it ($100+ value), which I had to abandon next to a hotel's trash can about a week before I created this site, due to having too much stuff. There was a test of physical ability, because they didn't want anyone fighting fires who was weak: walking three miles in 45 minutes, I think it was, a pace of 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h). It probably did not even involve carrying anything (but there were hills, which meant feet sliding around in boots and causing blisters). Some people could not sustain that pace. I ran the last portion because I was in danger of failing, even though someone was next to me shouting, "don't run!"
Turtle, or rabbit?
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Update 06 Oct 2026, 13:41
"Note: this is a technique called, 'Making yourself look smart by implying that the question is obvious, and that anyone who is confused as to what the question is actually asking, is stupid.'"
Germanwings Flight 9525: note that Lufthansa paid €75,000 to the family of each victim, while Libya paid an average of over $7 million to the family of each person who was on Pan Am Flight 103. The silence in the cockpit. Poor people don't fly much.
Poll: something about if rich people did an unethical thing, but also made it so a lot of poor people also did the thing or benefited from it, would people criticize people who do the unethical thing.
There were a lot of passenger plane accidents in the 2014~2020 period. The plane shot down by Iran; 'ukraine plane shot down by iran' returned an article from 23 hours ago, as well as one from three years ago and Wikipedia. And MH17. Second result for 'plane shot down over ukraine' is this.
But these were normal commercial airlines, other than the Russian military plane with the musicians and dancers, and the event that killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, which Wikipedia calls a "crash" but was probably an explosion. What I'm trying to suggest is that rich people were not affected by these events. Rich people are not immune to laws; there was the Russian billionaire who died in prison, and the Chinese billionaire or rich person who was executed.
But, with the 'button that allows you to be happy': if flying on a plane is a way to be happy that carries a small risk of death, then it's like the button that poor people have, not the button that rich people have. Are poor people who press the button bad?
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