What's nuts about this how tons of people from all levels of government/society participated in this conspiracy.
It says a lot about the general attitude of Chinese people.
(I'm chinese, btw)
It says a lot about the general attitude of Chinese people.
(I'm chinese, btw)
I made a general observation about corruption and culture, other people decided to respond to it in a bad way.
If this type of comment isn't allowed on HN it's a form of censorship. Basically I can't say anything negative about a culture or a country because it's classified as flame bait.
This is similar to the way the CCP practices censorship in China. People in my country basically can't say anything negative about it. Thank you for perpetuating that sentiment here on HN.
You can call moderation 'censorship'—people mostly just mean by it that they don't like something. I don't see the similarity to the communist party myself, but have been accused of communism so often by now—invariably after doing a bit of standard moderation that somebody disliked—that it has all come to seem more internet-silly than anything anybody actually believes.
The context is fraud in China. The context involves multiple people from all walks of life and society in China contributing to the fraud. A stark contrast to how corruption occurs in the states. I don't think it's obvious flamebait at all. The definition of what is flamebait itself is rather vague..
A good way to definitively define flamebait is to call it any comment which starts a flamewar.
This means a definitive classification of flamebait can only be crystallized after the posting of the comment in question and observing the resulting aftermath...
In this case I see no flamewar, so I don't believe my comment constitutes as such.
There are good reasons why the site guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." and "Eschew flamebait." It's not as if we sat down and dreamt them up one day. They come from many years of experience and directly address how internet forums function, and commenters here need to follow them.
Perhaps you don't feel like this matters, but I can tell you for a fact that people have been hounded off this site by comments of this nature (e.g. China-related slurs), including extremely ugly personal attacks. I don't want to have anything to do with a site where that happens, and I don't believe that the vast majority of this community would either. None of us wants that community. But we can easily end up with it anyway, if we're not careful, because that's how group dynamics work.
Part of the problem here is that the forum feels like an intimate conversation, and in intimate conversation there is more latitude for talking in a grand and speculative way about this stuff, especially if you have high trust from previous interactions. But when you post to HN what you're actually doing is broadcasting to millions of people. Public broadcasting has to have different standards. Imagine what would result if a million people heard the things that you (or I, or any of us) said to your friends, without any mitigating context.
I don't know what you mean by political expediency but it doesn't sound like something the moderation job is replete with.
In reality, for this specific topic, the canyon is not so wide as you believe and I don't think you have the relevant cultural context to make such a judgement call on how wide it is. It's a century old question... how much freedom of speech and how much censorship and at what cost?
In this case you chose to censor something that could potentially be flame bait (but wasn't) at the cost of preventing any discussion about a very real and general truth about China.
I mean, tbh, these are rather vague guidelines. You could say my comments are "thoughtful and substantive." I made an observation that the corruption in the article had many responsible parties and people from all walks of life participating in it, more than what would normally happen in the states. The fact that so many people participated does say something about the culture in general.
As for "eschew flamebait"... how much flame did this post cause? There's definitely a bit a flame, but I would say overall a flamewar didn't happen. So basically you're wrong. You use your "experience" to justify the warning but I would say your experience is wrong for this case... most of the sub threads aren't things that I would classify as flame.
I get where you come from though. It's hard to see from a distance whether a comment will cause a forrest fire.
Maybe put out the forest fire if you see one starting, but don't ban the use of matches all together.
I'm sorry, but I have to pull rank about this, based on years of experience and god knows how many thousands of cases of dealing with this. The issue is the expected value of the subthread: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you're going to comment on a topic this inflammatory, you need to include way more flame retardant in your comment. Two helpful ways to do that are (1) be clear and explicit about your intent, and (2) speak about your own personal experience.
You didn't contain anything. You didn't even respond to the subthread where people were were actually starting fires. You just threw a warning at me after most of the conversation already played out. Not only did a fire not happen, you showed up after most people left the premises.
>I'm sorry, but I have to pull rank about this,
Go ahead and pull rank man. You can even ban me if you wanted to, it's your right. I'm not trying to say anything to the contrary. The servers are based in the states, but they're private property so you are 100% in your rights to do whatever you want.
>The issue is the expected value of the subthread
No offense, but your "years of experience" or "expected value" is equivalent to your "biased opinion" because, as other people in this thread and I have shown, we had another "biased opinion" on what that probability distribution for the expected value looked like. To me it doesn't look like flame bait and it looks like their's plenty of flame retardant as well. Either way, none of these predictions or opinions really matter in the face of what actually occurred.
The expected value of a post is a moving target that eventually coalesces into the actual demonstrated value of the post.
The actual value of this post demonstrates that no flamewar occurred. So you were wrong while other people and I were right.
Whatever... if you want me to add more "flame retardant" next time I'll add it. It doesn't change the fact that for this thread you showed up onsite with a firehose to put out a fire that never occurred.
It's seen in other ways like lack of queuing, littering, and the general corruption throughout all levels of bureaucracy.
The attitude is far less pervasive in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, or other countries with significant Chinese populations.
Can't comment too much on corruption as I don't have much experience there, but I have noticed things like lining up and littering get better as the standard of living has improved over the years.
I'm also Chinese.
But beyond that I'm not sure it has much to do with society as a whole.
In China they have a saying: 能骗就骗.
If you can cheat, cheat.
Can cheat. Do cheat.