[mazerackham]

Haha don't reach for Orwellian buzzwords so quickly =P. A lot of successful Chinese tech companies don't succeed just because competitors were banned. Even when Google was in China, Baidu catered specifically to local needs whereas Google just paratrooper dropped their product in. Baidu was more successful. As for Wechat, given how Facebook messenger has been shamelessly copying Wechat features for years, I highly doubt Wechat was at danger of losing marketshare to Facebook.

[seanmcdirmid]

Baidu won out because of porn, technically illegal in china. It used to be that almost every image search in baidu, no matter how innocent, would lead to a bunch of naked pictures. Google of course, not being a chinese company, would never have gotten away with that. Baidu is otherwise a horrible search engine for anything productivity related.

That wechat would have won over Facebook is completely hypothetical given that they weren’t allowed to compete. Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube are dominating in china’s backyard, including newly opened internet markets like Cambodia and Myanmar.

[jordanb]

Baidu also made it really easy to find pirated material.

[baybal2]

I remember the joke "if 90% of the Internet is porn, nobody forces you to watch it all"