Throwback Thursday: YouTube Has Been Gone for 9 Years and We Don't Even Miss it, Sorta

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of yesteryear.

Nine years ago, in March 2008, we lost access to YouTube and Yahoo Groups (seriously, what even are Yahoo Groups, I definitely feel very young right now).

Access to the latter was restored shortly after we posted about it on our blog back then, but YouTube never did come back into China-bound lives (at least for those of us surfing from Chinese IP addresses, wink wink). 

Gone were the days of spending your entire workday watching cute little puppies crawling around the house, getting sucked into a vortex of useless videos of tiny animals. Little did we know then that such joys would never be returning, and that this marked one of the biggest changes to our Chinese Internet experience for the foreseeable future.

However, there was no way we were going to live in a world without cute puppy videos, replacing YouTube with Chinese services such as Youku, Soku, and Baidu Video, which also have plenty of feel-good fluffy doggy alternatives. Don't believe us? Check them out here.

And in fact, Chinese streaming services are much better for watching Western TV shows than YouTube anyway because issues of copyright and ownership are ... well ... different. Soku has a bunch of newer shows free to stream such as Westworld, Atlanta, The Night Of, Grimm, and Empire. There's also classic viewing like Friends in its entirety, and Grey's Anatomy up to season 12. All for free. Searching in Chinese and you'll almost definitely find what you're looking for.

iQiyi is also a good solution, although it isn't quite free. For RMB 45 you can get a three-month subscription (pay with WeChat or Alipay) and the website has quite a few English-language options.

The recent loss of Pinterest demonstrates that we're far from returning to an "open" Internet anytime soon, if anything, things are getting tighter.

Other services we don't have access to at the moment and that we miss are:

• Google search (Bing has some great background photos, but who in their right mind has ever said "I'll Bing it" voluntarily when looking for answers?)
• Gmail
• Google maps
• ... All other Google services 
• Picasa
• Blogspot
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• SoundCloud
• Dropbox
• Vimeo
• Snapchat
• Flickr
• DuckDuckGo
• AllMovie

And a whole plethora of news sites that shall remain unnamed. Reasons for the blocking of the above websites and apps have never been fully and officially disclosed, but were likely blocked in the hopes of boosting local Chinese versions of a similar ilk; Chinese consumers spending time on Weibo is better for the Chinese economy than if they were spending their time on Twitter. There's also the small fact that these sites fall into the remit of Chinese law and as such are easier to control in terms of what their users post on them.

For now we'll stick to our usual methods to get around the GFW, and when things get really tough at least there are some local options to help us turn on, tune in, and drop out.

More stories by this author here.

Email: margauxschreurs@truerun.com
Instagram: s.xuagram

Photos: YouTube