I posted a video on Xiaohongshu about the fact that I’m learning Mandarin and was flooded with, among other things, requests to become my teacher and for me to sign up for courses. In that process, I did end up talking to someone who’s picking their English education back up. We’ve essentially agreed to be pen pals.

No mention of courses or anything like that. Green flag. She’s also been on the app since mid-2024, so well before the influx of Americans could have been anticipated. Green flag. But she asked to exchange contact info so I gave her my email address and hers is a {a bunch of random numbers}@qq.com.

That immediately set off alarm bells for me, as the random number email addresses I’ve seen have been anonymous throwaways. But I don’t want this to be me being culturally insensitive and just ignorant about something. Maybe it’s more common in China due to Unicode compatibility?

      • crime [she/her, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        1 day ago

        I’m not sure about domain names being primarily numbers, but a lot of non-ASCII domain names (including Chinese characters) use Punycode, which looks like a bunch of random letters if they’re rendered in ASCII. Those typically look like xn-- followed by other characters, e.g., xn--fsq.com which is equivalent to 例.com (which is itself equivalent to example.com)

      • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        7·
        23 hours ago

        QQ is Tencent’s first instant messaging service but was built for PC clients (like MSN Messenger). It’s still got like millions of users, though mostly as an email provider.

        WeChat is Tencent’s second IM app, this one built from the ground up for smartphones and has in built voice, video and walkie talkie chat functions. Also during one of the Five Year Plans where the government was boosting e-commerce they developed an online payment system.