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Twitch is reportedly blocked in China
- brian-armstrong 8y agoThere is only one solution: Twitch on DVD, over the mail. It's gonna be huge.
- lainga 8y agoWe could start some sort of Net-twitch company to send these DVDs to you, for a monthly fee.
- forkLding 8y agoTwitch was never big in China or Asia in the first place even when it was not censored so you're gonna have more trouble trying to sell Twitch in Asia, theres already popular dedicated localized streaming sites for each East Asian country, it would be like trying to make Uber successful in East Asia: https://www.techinasia.com/talk/gaming-community-why-hasnt-twitch-asia https://www.techinasia.com/talk/gaming-community-why-hasnt-t...
- fermienrico 8y agoDay by day, HN is becoming reddit. Jokes, shenanigans and these types of comments are plentiful on the internet. Please leave HN for serious discussions.
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- mjones72 8y agoThis could be said of many comments in many threads, but by posting a comment you're polluting the site as much as he is. Downvote and move on.
- brian-armstrong 8y agoFor the record, HN's emotional callousness and inability to deal with soft/delicate subjects are for more destructive than shenanigans are
- fermienrico 8y agoProbably, but pointing fingers at a different issue doesn’t help the case for the topic at hand. Whataboutism isn’t acceptable here.
- dang 8y agoI wish I had seen this to respond to sooner. I understand how such impressions develop—one sees something callous and recoils from it, and after a few such unpleasant encounters the impression gets transferred to the community as a whole. But that generalization is not valid at all, and actually the mechanism that produces it is a bit callous in its own right. HN members are full of heart and have shown it on countless occasions, as you can see from histories like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thank%20you%20hn&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thank%20you%20hn&sort=byPo... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thanks%20hn&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=thanks%20hn&sort=byPopular... It's true that there's too much callousness on this site. But humans are like that on the internet everywhere. There's also a lot of mutual support and humane feeling here, to a rare degree in so large a community. This matters to me personally because we pour our own hearts into trying to get HN to be that way and to stay that way.
- shawn 8y agoIt's remarkable that you can post a comment like this one right after your actions in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054502 Viewers note his "mutual support" and "humane feeling," and how much he pours his heart into his work.
- Sholmesy 8y agoHonestly; the HN community does a good job of self-regulating this behaviour. The consensus seems to be against these types of comments, as they are more often than not at the bottom of the post.
- mkio 8y agoThis development has been bugging me as well. And while joke comments used to be ignored, now they trigger a chain reaction of joke answers.
- alexeiz 8y ago> HN is becoming reddit Not without memes it's not. It's time to add memes to HN.
- jhoh 8y agoJust like YouTube on DVD was a huge hit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_UmWdcTrrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_UmWdcTrrc
- Mathnerd314 8y agoShould link to the original article, which is either of: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/20/17883736/twitch-china-block-app-store https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/20/17883736/twitch-china-blo... https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/twitch-vanishes-china-weeks-after-spike-popularity/article/2165056 https://www.abacusnews.com/digital-life/twitch-vanishes-chin...
- etatoby 8y agoThank you. The main link only shows a blank page.
- TaylorGood 8y agoWouldn’t surprise me. Last trip to mainland China and nothing worked online. Apps like Instagram, sites like Google, etc. except Bing and WeChat. Perfect WiFi yet everything filtered.
- fermienrico 8y agoI think this is specifically addressing gaming restrictions deployed enmasse by the Chinese gov. I go to China often and I ask people there what do they think of the govt - everyone nodes in unison with their approval. This is scary.
- ngokevin 8y agoNot true from my point of view, people have the same criticisms of their government as you'd see in any other country. Chinese people aren't like brainwashed.
- chj 8y agoTo any one coming to China, get a shadowsocks server ready first! Or let me know if need help.
- Macuyiko 8y agoTo be even more prepared: spin up two Digital Ocean Shadowsocks servers in case one gets throttled down (which happens after extensive usage). I often combine this with ExpressVPN as well, which still works in China (although many are sceptical of how ExpressVPN has managed to do so over the years, so expect there to be logging). I wonder how long it'll take before Steam going offline as well, now that they are both thinking about implementing streaming and the fact that gaming is seen as unharmonious these days (e.g. refer to Tencent's recent stock drop). Steam is currently handled by Perfect World Games as the Chinese partner, so I'm curious to see what will happen.
- chj 8y agovultr works even better
- shanghaiaway 8y agoCan confirm. Wasn't blocked yesterday but is not reachable right now.
- jdoliner 8y agoI wonder how this is going to work for say, The International 9, which is going to be in China. Is the government really going to block streaming of an event that so many of their citizens will have national pride riding on. Just hosting the event is something I expected the government to be proud of given Dota's profile in China. Edit: Actually they're probably going to have it on national TV, that will allow them to have a layer of control over the broadcast.
- tylerhou 8y agoOne of China’s larger tech companies also owns a competing streaming service with casting in Chinese, so most Chinese viewers generally don’t use Twitch.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y agoYou could say that Valve was Shanghai'd
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- cecja 8y agoOver 70% of the TI was watched inside the DOTA client.
- bliblah 8y agoSteam is apparently officially launching in China with the help of Perfect World who have been distributing Dota 2 in the meantime. I assume that this will let Chinese viewers to watch TI9 on Steam.tv or on the Chinese equivalent. I heard positive reviews for Steam.tv during TI8 and that it surpassed the Twitch experience at times. Source:https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/11/17451484/steam-china-announced-valve-perfect-world https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/11/17451484/steam-china-anno...
- dhnsmakala 8y agoWhy are these digital service blocks seen as anything but tariffs by the US government? They cost American companies billions of dollars and help enrich Chinese companies. Yes, maybe censoring is the purpose, but the financial effect is the same. I'm not opposed to foreign countries fighting against tech monopolization either, it makes sense from their perspective. I'm just wondering why the US government doesn't seem to see it as a hostile act and respond likewise. Do they just not understand the effect it has on American companies? That senator asking Zuckerberg how Facebook can offer a free service comes to mind...
- cecja 8y agoThis comment is mindboggling stupid I can't even. Tariffs are artifical this is not, twitch is acting against a law standing for a long time they just did not enforce it. You really want to retaliate because a foreign company breaks the law of the host country? Yikes, mate.
- Maakuth 8y agoResponding likewise? You mean censoring stuff back? That seems like an awful thing to do, to verify for global audience that censorship is a legit tool of foreign politics.
- dhnsmakala 8y agoYou could respond with tarrifs on physical goods. Tarrifs don't have to be on the same item, they could just aim for equivalent financial impact.
- zavi 8y agoChinese treatment of US tech companies (forced technology transfer, IP theft, censorship) is the primary reason why US is imposing tariffs on China. One can see that from reading the primary sources (i.e. press releases on wh.gov).
- dhnsmakala 8y agoThat's interesting, I was not aware of the US response to the IP theft I read about. Well, it's been a long time coming.
- dustinmoris 8y agoI've been to China and before entering the country I was hugely critical of all the things we read on our mainstream media. However, after spending time travelling through large parts of China I'm on the opposite side now. People in China are so calm, so polite and helpful. Their streets are extremely quiet because there is not a single motorized two wheel vehicle. Even though it is a 1.4 billion nation, the largest on the planet, people live comfortable lives, they have space and time to recreate together (you literally see people exercise before and after work everywhere) and most importantly the nation is not divided. Yes, they have problems and not everything is perfect, but heck, they are 1.4 billion people and their president is not Trump, they don't hate each other and nobody shoots children in schools, people don't spend all day on Twitter to kill each other and nobody gets publicly shamed for a small mistake. Their problems in relation to their size are literally peanuts. Maybe democracy and freedom the way we know in the Western world is not that great for everyone after all. They are in a unique position and China is doing pretty well, so whatever they do which makes you think is bad, it seems to work for them better than for the US. On one hand we read how foreign nations manipulate and taint the minds of our people through social media and that we drown in fake news, biased one sided reporting and an agressive ad driven consumerism which makes us vulnerable, but on the other hand we are critical of a nation which basically says no to this through censorship. Maybe the only way to keep 1.4 billion people at peace is through censorship, who knows? We only have one country to measure this experiment and they seem to be doing fine, right? EDIT: Lol, lots of people saying I was in China only for a day or what not and pointing out all the problems the country had to justify their criticism. I don't say they don't have problems, I'm saying their problems in relation to their unique size are actually not that big. The US has also lotsbof big problems, 100s of years of slavery, Vietnam war, Iraq war, killing lots of innocent people for no reason, Guantanamo bay, torture, etc Yes, China is not a role model in human rights when you look at their history, but please save your poor criticism if you can't honestly compare two things without national pride and bias.
- tnolet 8y agoI hope you realize the “non divisiveness” of the Chinese people is a state enforced ruling. Dissidents are jailed or expelled. Just saying looks and initial impressions can be deceiving. I was always reminded of this whenever I saw Ai Weiwei walking up the street in Berlin to his studio https://qz.com/1325316/why-berlin-is-the-favorite-city-of-chinese-dissidents/ https://qz.com/1325316/why-berlin-is-the-favorite-city-of-ch...
- dbuder 8y agoIf they had remained independent, China most likely would not have targeted them. This was probably going to happen anyway, but the timing is geopolitical. Twitch makes too much money to not have a Chinese version and the chat alone is too "dangerous" but by being part of Amazon they get on the list with soyabeans.
- rasz 8y agoin other news Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba's video streaming services, VERY successful after "unfortunate" youtube ban, move into the new game streaming market.
- nayuki 8y agoThe Chinese Internet already blocks nearly all western social media sites. Twitch is a form of social media. Secondly, in June this year, China blocked livestreaming even on domestic sites. So it should come as no surprise that Twitch would be blocked under these rules.