HACKER Q&A
📣 greggsy

What are the most reliable tech sites in east and south Asia?


Almost all of my tech news comes via HN, SubStack, Twitter and Reddit, but they only occasionally cite blogs or reports from China, Japan, South Korea or India - countries where a significant proportion of technology is built, designed, or supported from.

While there is a lot of tech news related to what is going on in those countries (often for the wrong reasons), it’s hard to gage what the tech ecosystem is up to without knowing where to look.

Language barriers aside (which are becoming less of an issue anyway), where would one go for reliable and direct news around semiconductor developments in Taiwan, or the weird products that emerge out of Shenzhen through AliExpress?

Is there an HN of India? Or Indonesia?


  👤 alephnerd Accepted Answer ✓
For India+ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore) I recommend The Ken.

It's basically Stratechery but much more informed about the India+SE Asian technology business. It doesn't hurt that most of the writers for it are ex-VCs and PEs who have worked in the India+ASEAN sector for over a decade.

Inc42 is decent as well.

That said, I'm honestly not impressed with Stratechery anymore. I personally feel the quality of analysis has kinda gone down (sort of feels like he's grasping at straws). But maybe I'm just feeling Dunning-Kruger effect


👤 firstbabylonian
https://restofworld.org is a good place to start.

👤 pdevr
Some of these are excellent recommendations, while some are horrible (sorry!). Rather than replying to multiple posts, here is an alternative to consider.

Add Google Alerts for the keywords you want - "AliExpress", "taiwan semiconductor", or with wildcards in between as needed. Keep monitoring the alerts for several weeks. You will find a lot of general news sites, but you will also find who really publishes things that are useful and interesting to you.

Bonus tip: Once you find these sites, keep monitoring them. Find out where they get their news from. Mostly, they will quote or link to the original source. Go to those places. Those are the pristine sources you want.


👤 awongh
Asianometry is good youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@Asianometry

👤 fomine3
Impress Watch and ITMedia to read general tech news, reviews, and some analysis. https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/ https://www.itmedia.co.jp/

Hatena bookmark is now a toxic community in general, but its search feature is useful. Watching good bookmarking user is also interesting. https://b.hatena.ne.jp/q/Ruby?target=title&sort=recent&users...

zenn.dev and Qiita are like dev.to/substack community.

Japan's HN/Reddit equivalent is Twitter but hard to follow/filtering.

I'm also interested in Mainland China tech websites.


👤 nindalf
Stratechery (https://stratechery.com) is written by Ben Thompson, who is based in Taiwan.

👤 zkid18

👤 SenHeng
Japanese tech news site sort of like Gizmodo from the 90s.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/


👤 arsdragonfly
DigiTimes Asia has some decent semiconductor industry coverage.

👤 angadsg
https://www.techinasia.com/ -- they have high quality tech journalism for Asia

👤 rouslyrunn
https://fossbytes.com/ is India's equivalent of The Verge

👤 ttanimichi
https://b.hatena.ne.jp/hotentry/it is an HN of Japan, but I don't think it's reliable enough.

👤 mgt0012

👤 pkphilip

👤 fredgrott
I have some Asian and Asiatic ones from my medium blog traffic notes:

zk.com apptractor.ru awayvk.com

zk stuff usually is in English.


👤 ydnaclementine
Any korean sites? (even if it's in Korean?) interested as a language learner

👤 muzani
@ecommurz on Instagram for Indonesia. They communicate in the language of meme, but they do have the latest updates and a strong community. Leaks somehow get there within a day; we joke that you shouldn't share anything on social media that you don't want to see on murz.

Malaysia has multiple communities, but Developer Kaki on Facebook is the most representative of the tech community now. https://forum.lowyat.net/ is more for tech enthusiasts but there's similar overlap without the elitism.

Also I think it's interesting to expect a tech community to look like Blind or HN, but in much of the world, it could be a Telegram group or a SMF forum.


👤 iammukunthan
TechinAsia.com and Yourstory.com