I don't want to tread outside of HN policy, but in the spirit of a comment I saw Dang leave on a thread about wanting "surprising" comments on posts that tend to go in predictable directions, the sheer predictability of what happens on threads that even mention the Uyghur as a people makes me wonder if there's a good data visualization blog post somewhere here.

I would be interested in seeing someone explore what keywords seem to trigger the reaction, how fast it is, etc... HN has a pretty open API, so it feels like it wouldn't be too hard to make some interesting graphs on how the posts/comments evolve over time.

Heck, I'd be interested in seeing a visualization like that for HN posts in general, but PRC posts are the ones where it seems the most like there's an obvious, reproducible process happening that could be explored and experimented on.