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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological or nationalistic flamewar. No, we don't care about Xi [1]. We just care about not having tedious and nasty HN threads, which is what comments like this point to. Plesae don't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] and if you worry that we may secretly be communist agents please see this mini-FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363 and the associated "algorithm": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365

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The poster did not mention ideology or nationalism. Please don't pretend to misinterpret.

One of the HN community standards is not to presume malintent.

Of course the comment was dripping with it. What else is an internet one-liner like that about? Let's not ignore the obvious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Well Xi is responsible for a lot of bad things, so someone wishing him a trip to the Hague is far from "generic ideological and nationalistic flamewar" but a fair response to what is happening to people that Xi doesn't like.

The only one that is starting the flamewar is you.

It was cheap internet flamebait that guaranteed a degraded discussion. If people have substantive comments to make about such things, they need to clear a much higher bar.

Moreover they need to do it in a way that avoids generic tangents, and the GP was a classic generic tangent, sucking the thread into the nearest black hole:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Eventually sticking your head in the sand is condoning behaviour. I understand your perspective however given YC's conflict of interest due to investing in Chinese companies I think it would be prudent to stick YC's flag in the ground. Inaction and fence-sitting is radically political too.

Wishing for Xi Jinping to visit the Hague does as little to hinder China as much as sticking your head in the sand.

Better than welcoming them in through the front door like we have been doing until now.

It’s come to the point where we need to have a constant and sustain vocalisation against the CCP and the dystopian future they are building. They represent an existential threat to anything that isn’t the CCP and they’ve been very successful in getting their hooks into western society and the world at large. You see it on Reddit all the time. Moderators remove comments because it doesn’t follow some sort of vague guideline, about facts for example, when really it is removed because it is critical of the CCP. The cleverness of this is that it’s hard to prove. While I don’t believe there is direct censorship here on hackernews the above comment and reasoning by dang can be interpreted in the same way. None of the reasons dang gave were present in the comment that was replied to. CCP censorship is here now in western society directly and indirectly through self censorship to protect investments. Our short termism makes us very vulnerable to their bs.

There are plenty of comments critical of the CCP like half the comments here. The difference is that they are actually relevant to the article, which has very little to do with Xi and has even less to do international law. This is probably why dang interpreted as flamebait.

First let me say I think dang does an exceptional job (far better than I could) in moderating this site and I am very grateful for it. Anytime I have fallen on the wrong side of the rules dang has been very fair and patient.

I don't disagree with your comment however none of the rules dang mentioned were actually broken. I read through the link and it only raised more questions. As I see it either the rules need to be updated or an official announcement from YC stating their position on this ever returning topic will put this to bed.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FYI, asserting that ‘inaction’ is a politically radical act is in fact a fringe belief.

In the end, remember that politics is preference, and that whoever is in power gets to assert their preferences more.

At some stage not taking a position is a position in itself, especially in matters of existential threat.

That's quite a stretch for justifying garden-variety flamebait.

As it turns out, you're wrong on the facts as well. YC got out of China years ago. But none of that ever had anything whatsoever to do with how we moderate HN. It's much more straightforward: we don't want predictable, tedious, nasty flamewars on HN, we want the opposite.

That's literally all there is to this, even though I routinely get accused of being a secret agent, stealth activist, or some other sinister entity just for doing this silly job. The only non-obvious mechanism at work here, indeed the sole aspect that isn't brain-dead in its obviousness, is continually trying to figure out new ways to explain this to the community.

YC got out of China but still invests in Chinese companies. At least that's what the press release that I read said. Is that wrong?

I have no idea. I'm pretty sure YC funded companies all have to be incorporated in the US. But just to repeat the important point, that has literally zero to do with how we moderate these threads. How am I able to say that? Because I'm the one doing the moderation, and I can tell you that "gosh I'd better tell HN commenters not to post flamebait about the great Xi because it might affect some investments I don't know about" is not going through my head.

OK. For the record I believe you however I would like to clarify I'm not wrong on the facts but I was wrong on the motivations. I hope you understand that the questions aren't personal but a reaction to what is happening in the broader world. What grated me was you calling it nationalism. Calling out that Xi is committing crimes against humanity has nothing to do with nationalism unless you conflate the CCP with China which is a standard tactic of authoritarian regimes. It is quite literally a core tactic in their playbook. Every day we hear new stories about how the propaganda arm of the CCP is subjugating western institutions to do their bidding, using the weakness of the capitalist system and ideology (prioritising financial gain above all else) against us.

All in all I really meant that I appreciate the work that you do. You do an excellent job in maintaining HN as my favourite forum on the internet. I understand this is probably wearing you thin so I'm going to leave it now but I hope you can understand why I felt it necessary to clarify the above.

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