If github can be used as a discussion platform it will be nice, as so far CCP dares not to close github.com, as it will impact its software industry badly.
Are you not going to address the racist dog-whistle? You work in San Francisco where many of your fellow Americans actually do have last names like Dang. Maybe you should consider the harm this type of rhetoric does to them when you ignore it.
Users who are concerned about HN moderation practices around racial (including anti-Chinese) attacks on HN, and personal attacks on HN, won't have a hard time finding examples. Needless to say, this has nothing specifically to do with China or Chinese people. It would be the same for any national or ethnic background.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I take it that you consider moderation in the thread as an attempt at appeasement of the Chinese government?
I'm not sure if you share my opinion, but I've felt that this thread, even though it was about a great article, had very destructive and misinforming discussion. I too am incensed at the contents of the article, but discussing it calmer would be preferable and lead to more useful insight.
There's some god-awful xenophobic comments in this thread, for sure.
[snip for guidelines]
But it's no secret that there's a Chinese propaganda machine out there, fighting to control the media narrative. This article (and the expulsion of US journalists) are just the latest evidence.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That applies on Chinese topics as much as any other topic.
We added that rule after years of experience and I don't know how many hundreds of hours poring over data on this. At least on HN, these perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. That is, people perceive such biases based entirely on their pre-existing opinions, and one can reliably predict their opinions from the complaints about bias and secret manipulation that they post. You can find years' worth of cases here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There's a psychological explanation for this phenomenon: pain is more memorable than pleasure. Posts we dislike make a stronger impression than ones we like. We're more likely to notice them and they burn more into the retina, creating an afterimage that's intensely biased—but the bias is in the eye, not the objects. Clear evidence of this is that people with opposing views about X inevitably have opposite views of how the community (or mods) are biased about X. Perceptions of sinister manipulation are a variation of this.
The reason this comes up so often is that HN is a much larger and more diverse community than it seems. People are coming here from all sorts of different backgrounds—a much wider range than most readers assume. When we judge comments by our own range of familiarity, many of those comments end up sounding "...odd to say the least". This is an artifact in the perceiver, not the perceived. We all have a more parochial perspective than we imagine we do. When our sensibilities get hit by what to us is an outlier, a flying internet object of obnoxious opinion, we immediately feel anger and fear. Those feelings suck, so we defend against them by reframing the provocation as not-in-good-faith: a spy, a shill, a sinister manipulator.
The solution is to have one's default reaction to these outlier ("...odd to say the least") comments become expansion rather than protection: that is, to allow the encounter to expand our mental model of what the community is and whom it contains. To do that is to practice the site guideline, "Assume good faith". This isn't easy, because it means you have to tolerate the initial hit of pain and anger and wait for it to subside before settling on a reaction. That's the hard work of tolerance.
It doesn't follow there's no such thing as manipulation, of course. It simply means that one no longer reaches for manipulation as a first explanation for what one finds "odd", instead requiring that there be additional evidence before entertaining such a charge.
This is not an abstract issue for HN, it's an existential one. People have been hounded off this site simply for representing their backgrounds and expressing sincere views. I'm sure the users who did the hounding would be horrified if they knew what they were doing, but it all happens so easily on the internet, at such great distance, where we're all talking not to living humans but to little bits of text that we flesh out with our imagination.
respect
I agree with what you're saying, and appreciate the point, but there's a practical basis to the frustration as well:
Sometimes seemingly banal comments are down-voted with no explanation or reply, and this starts the "You're posting too fast" chain, and next thing you know any slightly contrarian view (which, apparently, I hold in spades) is prevented from being presented. (It's literally happening to me as I attempted to post this comment).
If people want to down-vote, that's their prerogative; I'm not interested in accumulating points. But the mechanism of throttling people with down-voted comments contributes to an echo chamber, even if it serves a higher purpose. I've been hanging around here for a long time, and it feels like it's gotten a lot worse, especially for someone on the less common side of the political spectrum. It's hard to participate sometimes.
I realize even the discussion of voting is against guidelines, and I have no solution, so I'll bow out. I appreciate the thoughtful reply.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...