Comment by refenestrator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refenestrator | Hacker News Reader

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Ok, fine. Food for thought:

You'd probably like to ban the topic entirely, but it'd be weird to have one banned topic and you've said that doesn't work, so that's out.

So what's left, being even-handed, I guess. Except it's a 10-1 ratio, so being even-handed, ban people from both sides leaves you with a 9-0 ratio.. congrats? Even if you're really, really, really trying to be even-handed with regards to content, most people would bias towards handing out 50-50 to feel fair, while 10-1 (or whatever ratio) is actually statistically fair. But that would feel quite biased if you did it! Practically taking a side! So we get a phenomenon where a bad Chinese-adjacent comment (or even a polite one) is super likely to be moderated, but you can't possibly moderate all of the really bad anti-China comments in this thread, there's too many, they rule the day and they establish truth for passersby.

Tech is one of the few industries with a large Chinese minority during this time of rising tension. It would vastly improve the intellectual tone of the site if we had more of them explaining their viewpoint and less of people telling them they're brainwashed.

Failing that, I think the actual real-world answer is to pro-actively push down the repetitive anti-China stories that hit the front page multiple times a week, and then just deny it if anyone asks. They're not intellectually interesting, they're hostile to a significant tech minority, and you don't like the flamewar. Why keep them?

I wouldn't like to ban the topic. I would like people to treat each other respectfully.

I agree with you that it would be better for HN if Chinese users, and users of Chinese background, could share more of their experiences and observations. I've been arguing that for a long time, as I believe you know. But it's not super cool of you to be making that argument as long as your own contributions to HN are undermining that possibility. We're each responsible for how we individually affect the collective situation, and pointing the finger at others—even if they're behaving badly, and even though they're benefitting from an unfair, lopsided fight—is not helpful.

That's not good enough.

HN will continue to trend towards having 2-5 content-free "china bad amirite" threads a week with an echo chamber of people who don't know any history of the region saying completely nonsensical things. People who know a little more, or who point out things like "the belt and road initiative isn't a literal road and can't be used to invade someone" will be banned for contributing to flamewar.

For example, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29655341[1]. You can't be everywhere, there will always 10x comments like that for every 'bad' comment going the other way, and your even-handedness means that 9/10 of them are implicitly judged as fine, acceptable and encouraging intellectual something-or-other.

[1] Check that guy's history, he writes Xi Jinping as Hsi Chunping.. his commitment to ideology is so strong that he wade-giles'd Xi, lol

I've been trying to persuade baybal2 for years to stop breaking the site guidelines, and have banned and unbanned him over the years, but you're quite wrong in your assumptions—he has a lot of experience in the region and knows a lot. Not only that but people have attacked him unfairly in the past here too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898). I also don't believe that he's primarily an ideologue—his comments (at least many of them) are more interesting than that. Whether he was using an obsolete transliteration as flamebait or not is beyond my ability to say, but he's not a native English speaker, so maybe there are some crossed signals here too.

This is a good example of how people jump to conclusions and assume the worst about each other. It's no more ok when you do that than when other users do it, even if you are (or feel you are) part of a minority that gets treated unfairly.

I understand and empathize about how frustrating this is—but lashing out at the very people who are bending over backwards to try to bring some semblance of tolerance and neutrality to an impossible situation is neither nice nor helpful.

I've discussed the lopsided dynamic of these conversations with you many times. The question is how to deal with it. No matter how frustrating it is, it's important not to respond to ignorance by losing your cool, becoming abusive, and so on. When you do that, you're reinforcing the very situation you deplore, and by that you actually make yourself responsible for the status quo. Each of us has a small quantum of energy to contribute, and it's important not to use yours to cause further harm (even when it's for deep reasons).

It's much better to respond to ignorance patiently and with good information, seeking points of connection and opportunities to treat the other person better than they expect and maybe better than they deserve (or you feel they deserve). Then you're investing your quantum in a good way. Also, it's good to remember that we're all ignorant, just about different things, and we all share the same hard-wiring that causes people to project bad things into dark spaces and thus treat each other poorly. If you happen to know more about $topic and thus can see how ignorant others are, that's not because you're better than them, or any different from them in the end. It's an accident of circumstance.

This has been eating me up all day in case you happen to check in again.

I didn't start posting to whine about being banned a few months ago, I was more concerned about the immediate thread.. but since you brought up my posts, you specifically told me while banning me that civility wasn't "good enough". I was doing this exact recommended pattern of responding patiently and civilly at the moment that you banned me.

Maybe I'm just really oblivious, or a congenitally bad poster, but what would be good enough? It's irrelevant since I'm banned but I always like to self-improve if I can, there must be something I'm missing here. If you're busy or don't see this, no biggie.

There are two levels to consider. At the individual post level, conversation needs to be thoughtful, respectful of the other person, and patient when correcting wrong information or responding to bad arguments. If that's what you mean by civility, that's good (we stopped using that word years ago, but that's a separate issue).

At the overall account level, an account needs to be using HN for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity. It's not ok to post primarily on battle topics (like nationalistic ones or ideological ones or partisan ones), because curiosity doesn't work that way. If the primary use of one's energy is for nationalistic or political battle, that pretty much guarantees that curiosity is not part of the mix. I've written extensively about this in the past:

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

and about how/why we use this as the litmus test for banning accounts:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you take a look at those links and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be interested to know what it is.

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