Some things are not appropriate to say, and even though I feel that my thoughts are selfish, I can't help but want to say: I really don't like it when foreign products and services "technically identify" mainland Chinese users.
Take a simple example: the new Bing, which is the search engine now combined with chatGPT. Most people may only know recently that the Bing on their Edge browser is a special version for mainland China, and there is even a separate domestic version and international version to confuse users. Microsoft does business in the Chinese market, so when it detects that the IP is from mainland China, it will redirect the user to cn.bing.com instead of bing.com.
But looking at Google, which has long exited the mainland market, as long as you use Google search, there is no distinction between a mainland version and an international version. They don't provide search services in mainland China anymore, and you have to bypass the firewall to use Google services, so naturally they don't do any technical identification of mainland Chinese users in their search services.
Another localized example is the Firefox browser. To avoid confusion, the version for mainland China is called "Zhimou Edition Firefox," while Mozilla Firefox is still called Mozilla Firefox. You can see the differences between the two in this article.
In general, mainland Chinese users are identified through various means such as IP address, browser language, etc. Mozilla will redirect users identified as being in mainland China to the Zhimou Edition Firefox official website. The most troublesome thing is that the account data for Mozilla Firefox and Zhimou Edition Firefox are not interchangeable.
In contrast to Mozilla and Microsoft, I actually feel that companies like Google, which do not provide services to mainland Chinese users at all, are friendlier to me. I no longer need to go to great lengths to evade their technical identification, and I don't need to worry about being disgusted by localized services. I can choose to use the international version of their services because I genuinely feel that the quality of international services is better and makes me more comfortable. Similarly, I believe that localizing international services can achieve better service quality and a better user experience. However, the domestic internet ecosystem is increasingly influenced by a mentality of reckless growth, and there are more and more disgusting phenomena, such as content being deleted again and again on search engines. It makes me feel that the internet experience in Simplified Chinese is getting worse and worse.
Someone asked when Notion will enter China and establish local servers. At that time, I was thinking, if Notion really does that, then I will have to deal with another internet company, and I pray in my heart: please don't come, please don't come.