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Comment by givinguflac | Hacker News Reader

When I was younger I wanted to visit China. Currently I have no plans to ever do so, China is a scary country.

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and definitely not nationalistic flamebait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think 'nationalistic flamebait' should be better defined; as time goes on it feels as if any negative comment about any world power is being pigeon-holed into that category, and I think that's incorrect.

It's important to talk about the worlds' woes. Shining light onto issues is how they're resolved.

This thread's topic is about yet another step to reduce anonymity in China. This trend of full-disclosure with regards to any kind of society move ( getting a cell phone, paying a bill, boarding a bus, etc ) IS scary, regardless of the country that employs it.

Lots of countries, not excluding China, have terrible human rights violations that need to be talked about. These kind of issues do make the place a scary proposition to visit for foreigners and tourists -- and furthermore I share the commenters opinion; as a younger person I wanted to travel around China, as an older person who has witnessed recent events, I no longer want to. It's not flamebait, and it's relevant to the thread; these kind of societal decisions sway tourists like myself away from your coutry, regardless of which country it may be.

Can't we reserve 'nationalistic flamebait' for the really ludicrous and racist comments that float around the nation-based threads, rather than the useless anecdotes?

I think you've picked a bad example to make this argument about. "China is a scary country" is an unsubstantive negative statement about an entire country. It isn't nuanced. It's not qualified in any way. That easily falls under whatever moderation rule we might apply.

People often seem to think they're making nuanced factual statements when they're actually making blanket emotional ones. Those have degrading effects on discussion here when they're about entire nations, entire classes of people, and so on—and they're easy to avoid if one chooses to.

Part of the issue is that HN threads feel like intimate conversation—which is wonderful and something we consciously cultivate. But it's all fully in public and the audience is large and highly international. Because that gap isn't obvious, it leads people to say things which might be inconsequential in a small group, but are just the opposite here.

It only takes a little objectivity and/or empathy to get what it must feel like to come to HN and encounter putdowns of one's country or one's demographic. That's not cool, and fortunately it's not necessary, so commenters here are responsible for clearly disambiguating their comments from that.

You are really insulting. If you want to remove my comment, remove my comment. Don’t sit there and make up crap about it. Please tell me how it’s an emotional statement and not purely objective unless you wanna hide your head in the sand from the horrific things China has done and is continuing to do.

Edit: seems you can't even follow your own rules, both for insulting me and "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did." So is my comment egregious and shouldn't be replied to, or is it fine??

I think that’s quite extreme, but ok. Would you feel better if I bullet pointed a list of reasons I feel it’s scary? Or is that also unsubstantive because it’s about a country?

There is a saying like this: if you want to see Tang dynasty, you go to Japan. Sung Dynasty you go to South Korea.

You're not the first person recently to express such. Have you considered "the other China"; Taiwan? It has much of what you might have hoped to find in PRC (depending on what you were hoping to find there), and perhaps lacks some of what you might not like.

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