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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I appreciate your many positive contributions to HN, I trust your good intentions, and I definitely don't think you were making the kind of argument that this sounds like. It does still sound like it, though, which is no doubt why you got strong responses below.

If you highlight the first use of the pronoun "we" in my comment, it should be clear that you're responding to a different argument than I was making. (superjan already made this point.)

As for the "sounds like" problem, this string of previous explanations may (or may not) be useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Agreed, and I of course agree with the argument you actually were making, rather than my misreading of it. Still, it's profoundly disappointing to get responses including the kind of vicious attacks that you see in the thread.

By the way, when you're not in the middle of trying to keep HN users from coming to blows with one another, you might be interested in this comment of mine from yesterday, which gives some context for why I abandoned the site previously, a decision which I recall puzzled you at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389993

Thanks! I will read it with interest once the day's dramas have calmed down.

I think you are misreading him. He says that there is no pressure or indirect influence from china on how HN is run. This is a popular internet forum, of course there’s people trying to push their narrative.

Last time I looked, about 40% of Americans were of German ancestry.

I don't think Angela Merkel is controlling Hacker News.

This is gross.

"we" doesn't include the users. The users don't operate hacker news. They have an effect on it but it's not top-down censorship which is what's being implied here.

The users certainly have influence over how dang operates the site!

The implications of what you said sound kind of racist to me. I suspect that's why you seem to have been downvoted.

I definitely do not support excluding or discriminating against Chinese users, a practice which is a big problem on HN. I'm just saying that, just as a significant subset of USA users are likely to flag posts that encourage people to burn American flags or claim that the USA is a "white-supremacist state", and a significant subset of Muslim users are likely to flag posts that criticize Muhammad, there's a significant subset of Chinese users who are likely to flag posts that criticize the Chinese Communist Party, even if it's implicit criticism by way of calling attention to particular historical events that its opponents commonly use as rallying points.

My recent comments on China include:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162262 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162354 criticizing another user for an essentialist oversimplified view of Chinese history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161925 criticizing the US for "aggressively escalating the TSMC conflict with targeted attacks on the PRC's nuclear and supercomputing capabilities".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26937581 criticizing coverage of China in the UK press for systematically discounting the sizes of urbanizations in China.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408 tracing the history of Wuxi through three millennia and criticizing its frankly racist dismissal in the UK press.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931665 arguing that Chinese contributions to photovoltaic energy development are huge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26676997 pointing out that China's vaccination efforts against covid have been head and shoulders above those in the US and Europe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598814 correcting someone who argued that China was merely the source of key materials for photovoltaic energy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542286 pointing out that the UK's covid-testing regime has been pathetically poor compared to China's.

Fair points, I think, to a degree.

Mind you, I wasn't trying to accuse you of being racist. I purposefully phrased my comment the way I did not to be obtuse but to allow for the fact that coming across as racist may not have been your intention. I still think the way you phrased in the comment I replied to had the issue I mentioned.

I agree, and I appreciate it.

yeah true - we really need an ethnicity/nationality test for new accounts before they post to really make sure HN has no foreign CCP influence

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