The amount of propaganda is damaging my experience here. Not unlike Facebook and other platforms, HN seems to resist discussing how its platform is being abused and how it damages user experience; users are forbidden from discussing it publicly (in fact, I hope this comment is on the ok side of the guidelines, as I'm not accusing anyone in particular). I'm confident that HN works on the issue, so perhaps my difficulty is with a lack of transparency (again, similar to Facebook) - we have no idea what is being done; we're in the dark. We can't trust that the content we see is in good faith; it's a constant frustration and struggle to read, and most of my time is spent on noise. Propaganda is the worst content; it's noise to the signal and it's worse than noise because it manipulates HN users; we also now know, if it wasn't clear before, that it's a danger to free, democratic society - which is not something abstract, but something that happens right here on HN.

The pattern I see, so often that it's predictable and a source of frustration: 1. It's easy to stay beneath the moderators' radar by sounding 'reasonable' (in fact, on other topics, that's an explicitly taught strategy to white supremacists [0], it's a well-established technique of propaganda going back decades if not centuries, and I expect that professional astroturfers in any domain have the same skills); 2. the astroturfers almost always appear; I expected to see many pro-China comments appear here, including from purported Kenyans / East Africans (I certainly wouldn't say all are propaganda, but the pattern over many discussions seems clear enough that it's predictable); 3. on issues about which few HN users have knowledge or expertise, such as this one, there aren't even many people who can rebut the astroturfers; it's one-sided.

EDIT: Major revisions; apologies to anyone who read an earlier draft.

[0] ... he presented himself as polite, articulate and interested in cultural politics, and though his views are abhorrent, he stated them all so laconically you might forget that he actually believes in the concept of a white ethnostate. And that’s the point: The genius of the new far right, if we could call it “genius,” has been their steadfast determination to blend into the larger fabric of society to such an extent that perhaps the only way you might see them as a problem is if you actually want to see them at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/magazine/FBI-charlottesvi...