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?

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[–] crime@hexbear.net 13 points 2 weeks 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)