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Comment by rshnotsecure | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has changed ownership structure significant since these comments were made. It is highly unlikely that Tencent would be willing to see their $300 million investment from last year diluted at all [1]. Tencent is also one of the largest companies in China, essentially a State Owned Enterprise (SOE). Such a move would clearly privilege American users, who have been on Reddit significantly longer, than it would Chinese citizens.

Keep in mind the telecom connections to add the internet to China were not made until 1994, and residential was not available even to Beijing until 1997.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/amp/

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You know, on HN I at least expected some nuanced discussion about this idea more than typical Reddit threads, but even here it devolves into "Tencent has a stake in Reddit, everythings censored, China Bad." Think constructively here. I am not touting any of my points as facts that China isn't massively censoring Reddit media, but take these as you will.

1. Tencent's stake is only 10%. This is far less than other VC ownership, and it shows. Reddits board of directors are all placed by American VC firms, and of course the founders themselves [1]. The majority of Reddit's funding is from individual investors and AMERICAN VC funds.

2. Reddit is banned in China. If all these CCP posts get so many awards, which in turn provide (probably negligible) revenue for Reddit, it would make more sense to let all of them slide by instead of ban every single one of them. After all, these "revelations" never reach Chinese users anyway, because there are none.

And honestly, can't you use Occam's razor here? I know I am being very generous here about the CCP/Tencent, but don't you think that when Tencent makes foreign investments... they do it so that they can... wait for it... extract more value from them? This is all supposition, but Tencent will likely not invest in companies like Reddit on the basis of "Oh, a free speech platform, we can get money from this AND stifle their free speech, which is a literal selling point of Reddit in the first place!" I'm going to assume here that Tencent's goal is to make money first. If this is the case, it is in their benefit to maintain the integrity of Reddit, lest it receive the (ultimately meaningless) "wrath" of their "politically aware" userbase. Do these ideas 100% disprove that Tencent somehow influences Reddit to censor anti china posts? No. Am I at least making an attempt to think critically about the situation instead of falling on my crutch of "China involvement --> bad?" I think I am.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0893288D:US

I'm surprised by this too, and then again not really. The Trump strategy to blame China seems to work really well and fit right in with some of the knee-jerk reactions in the tech-world, which does have a strong libertarian tendency.

Censorship is the devil of tech world, and invoking the image of our Satan does not lead to cool and rational thinking. The West tends to want an outside scapegoat these days because things are getting ugly in it's backyard, and China is fit for purpose.

Tencent owns a portion of reddit? BRB deleting my account.

edit: done https://www.reddit.com/user/nsielicki

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