throwaway_9cc8

Thank you, that means a lot!

Alexa and SimilarWeb both agreed US is still by a large margin where the most traffic come from, with India being in the top five. Can't attest to the accuracy but at least it's data.

Consider the fact that English is a (required in school but still) foreign language in China, it's probably not super popular (back) there, although I could be (happily) incorrect.

Good point - I certainly uses GitHub all the time and I should thank you for pointing out my bias. Most of the people probably won't care, but then again, aside from Google, most people here probably won't care about the censored websites either. It's also worth mentioning that Google's Chinese search is atrocious although that might have happened after they quit China.

Good point - I shouldn't have said "don't care" about the criticisms - "don't mind" is a lot better. The Chinese government need more reasonable criticisms.

As for "anti-Chinese" vs. pro something else - if I may, that's a false dichotomy. There are a lot more commonalities among people from mainland Chinese/Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau than differences (practically none if/when the human race rises above this nationality bullshit). Ethnically speaking >90% of the population from those places are Han (there is an uncomfortable undercurrent of (at times reverse) Han chauvinism that I won't go into). I couldn't find (after searching through a couple recent HN threads) positively voted comments that are anti-Chinese so people and mods are doing a great job. OTOH, even downvoted and flagged posts are still representing opinions, unpopular as the content might be. Or maybe I am overly sensitive.

As for Huawei, I don't have love for any Crony capitalism or Plutocracy. They are doing some good research work though, and people working there are still people.

Probably extremely frequently since the GFW blocks a huge number of random things including even GitHub once in a while.

A couple thoughts - assuming you are American:

1) The Facebook campaign is: a) cowardly on the government's part - why don't they just open up the GFW for a month and see what happens? b) somewhat expected even if done by real people out of their own initiative - what do you expect if Long Island decided to go independent? Obviously not equivalent but hopefully you get the idea. c) Censorship is a big deal to some or most of my best friends - but if it is, would they trust you enough to talk about it, especially given that it is a big deal, they still have family and friends at home, and the government has gone to some length to strengthen it?

To be clear I appreciate your comment and yes, that article is an interesting historical event that is worthy of an article on Wikipedia.

EdX and MIT OCW are both based on YouTube - I think they have mirrors or at least unofficial uploads in China but it would be better to just use YouTube. Aside from that, there are a vast amount of video lectures uploaded by university professors that are probably not accessible from mainland China.

I spent the majority of my undergrad YouTube time on MVs, so there's that.

I would not say foreign news/YouTube/Wikipedia are "taboo" in China because that implies a social norm. Avoided in conversations they might be, these are regarded as tools that are useful and potentially more trustworthy at least among some college students.

Throwaway because my real account can be easily linked to my real name.

Being a Chinese living in the US, thoughts:

1) Kudos for doing this experiment - one of the authors works at Peking University and I imagine there must have been at least some pushback for him. I hope this indicates a greater trend where academics gets free passes from censorship but maybe not. That being said...

2) Maybe things have changed but a few years ago the GFW wasn't really a hinderance for me browsing YouTube or Wikipedia or anything. If asked in a survey "have you ever tried to get past the GFW" of course I would have answered no. Of course I am a computer person, but I wonder how valid the findings are given my anecdotal evidence.

3) There are fake news everywhere, both on pro and on anti Chinese government news sources. One thing I have observed is that in China at least among the educated population there's a lower level of trust in pro government news when compared to the trust level in anti Chinese government news in the US educated population (assuming HN is a somewhat representative subset of said population).

4) Chinese media quality is low at least IMHO. Gossips always win over important news, international news are not shown prominently. I would rather read NYT or WSJ or WaPo.

5) Side comment, a lot of the comments on HN are anti Chinese government and sometimes anti Chinese. I don't care about the former, but Chinese people are people and anti Chinese is not cool.