Comment by dgfl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgfl | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for your clarifications. I don’t really know what to make of these experiences, I know for sure that it can’t be much more than a small percentage of tourists getting pickpocketed. Plausibly, the people with negative experiences are a loud minority.

I also now realize that my original comment may seem harsher than I intended. I fully understand your point of view since I was also born in a comparatively poor place, and I realize how uplifting it is to see everything around you improve at a rapid pace. But despite this, cases like that of Naomi Wu are egregious. Nobody can say for sure how much each “inconvenient” aspect of her online presence (accusing companies, being openly gay, having an Uyghur partner) has contributed to her shutdown, but the fact is that this person can’t publish her videos on tech anymore. This is very hard to justify for me.

Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your opinion. It is very valuable to get your perspective here.

I was also somewhat emotional, after all, relations between China and the EU are more hostile than before, and that naturally affects how people view each other. As for Naomi Wu, she was never that popular in China to begin with—after all, ordinary people don’t really know much about things like open-source licenses. As for her disappearance, well, she disappeared, and not many people really care. Other comments have already pointed out that she was involved in many issues, including violations related to open-source, and possibly some interactions with Linux; it’s hard for me to sort out exactly why she was “banned” on the Chinese internet. Her videos are still there; I don’t know if she still updates them, but indeed, no one really talks about her anymore.

Personally, I don’t quite agree with this kind of action, unless there’s a clear law that she violated. But China isn’t very transparent about such matters, so sometimes what the government does is right, sometimes it isn’t. Each case needs to be studied specifically. However, this lack of transparency is indeed a weakness.

I mean, the reasons for her shutdown are pretty clear: she walked into national security terroritory and attracted attention from paranoid security officials. The reasons came out of her own mouth, as reported by The Dailo Mao. See my other comment on this topic.

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