You're underestimating the number of HN users with a Chinese background or some China connection (work, marriage, family, travel, study) whose experiences have led them to hold different views than you do. That's perfectly legitimate, and the idea that they must automatically be propaganda accounts is deeply inhumane. I don't want to work on a site where that sort of poison—including the poison in your comment—is considered ok.
My GP comment links to cases where users were abused and even hounded off this site by ethnic/national mob behaviors. Those users were innocent—the evidence for this was overwhelming. It was the mobs who were at fault. I think that's shameful. Like most HN users, I sympathize with underdogs, and seeing people get ganged up on gets my dander up. I'm confident that the vast majority of the community here would agree with me about that—at least when their own passions (and fears) aren't activated. None of us want to be that sort of community, but it can easily end up that way by default, so we need to take conscious care to avoid it.
I've asked FooBarWidget to stop posting exclusively in China-related arguments, because that's against the site guidelines in its own right, but that's hardly proof of, or even an iota of evidence for, the cloak-and-dagger fantasies that internet users love to sling at people in minority positions. Those accusations are against the HN guidelines for deep and good reasons. Therefore you can't post like this here, and I've banned the account.
One sign of how foolish these fantasies are is the certainty with which internet warriors declaim them. They never weigh evidence or consider other possibilities. It's always "demonstrably and with certainty"! What good fortune to be surrounded by enemies who are so evil, yet so dumb as to give themselves away at every turn. It's the best of all worlds: a chicken in every pot, a communist under every bed, and a spy (or three) in every internet thread.
What's poignant is that the users who get abused so dramatically in Western forums like this are often the very ones trying to defend and articulate the West to their communities back home—where they no doubt encounter similarly xenophobic feelings on the other side. They're in an impossible position. You don't have to agree with them, but you do have to drop the Boris and Natasha routine if you want to post to this forum. It is cartoonish and incurious, and would be silly if not for its malicious effects.
Sorry for the delay. You were quite wrong about that, and what's worse, wrong about it in a poisonous way (I'm sure unintentionally). The evidence points decisively to that account being a person of Chinese background who simply has different views than you do. It's natural for people of different backgrounds to have different views. If you can't stretch to accommodate that, and instead need to apply labels like 'astroturfer' or 'shill' in order to explain the presence of views so different from your own, the effect of that is to exclude minority voices. (Keep in mind that on this topic, unlike most others, the HN demographic is overwhelmingly one-sided. Although this is a highly international community, the overwhelming majority is Western and comes from a Western perspective.) Another effect is to poison the ecosystem here. That's not in the interest of this community, so we don't allow users to do that.
On a topic like this one, the cumulative effect of such (unintentional) poison is literally to hound users off the site for ethnic/racial/nationalistic reasons [1]. That's definitely not the community any of us wants to have here. Yet it has happened here more than once. If you read through some of the links at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... you'll find the history. Here's one example of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358.
Also, I compiled this list of past moderation explanations a while ago for a different user who was worried about this stuff on HN. Perhaps it will be helpful to others who are worried: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod
FooBarWidget is definitely breaking the site guidelines by having posted almost nothing but arguments about China for the last couple of years. We don't allow that, for reasons I just explained elsewhere (and many times previously): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29717102. But that's a separate issue. Someone breaking the site guidelines in that way is not evidence of bad faith, let alone being a shill or foreign agent. It is far more likely to be evidence that they feel strongly about a topic for legitimate reasons, such as family background.
I don't disbelieve you, but your comment definitely did not make it clear that you have "nothing against Chinese people". On the contrary, it rather it made it sound as if you did. No doubt you didn't consider this possibility because you know your own intent—but intent doesn't communicate itself. It's your responsibility to disambiguate that.
HN readers with Chinese backgrounds or Chinese connections have just as much a right to be here as anyone else does. I invite you to consider how someone in their position would feel after reading your comment about how "Chinese culture and upbringing" includes "cheating and stealing". Even minimal empathy would make you recoil from what you posted.
HN readers with Chinese backgrounds have already been hounded off this site by prejudicial comments. That's shameful. I don't want it to happen again, and your comment crossed into that territory. Please don't do it again. As I said above, you can make your substantive points—including relating your personal experience—without crossing into prejudicial generalization. It's not that hard - you just need to be mindful of the audience. You're broadcasting to a large, diverse population when you comment here.
Your account has existed for 10 years so I'm not going to ban you outright just now, but the fact that you're using HN primarily (exclusively?) for nationalistic and ideological flamewar is a serious abuse of the site. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of what they're battling for or against. If you want to keep posting to HN, we need you to seriously recalibrate how you're doing it, and reorient to the intended use of the site, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The users foolishly accusing you of being a communist agent are also breaking the rules. That's not relevant to the fact that you're abusing HN.
Actually, I would have a lot more sympathy if you did have a personal connection to China. HN's Chinese users (and those with other connections, such as their family background or couple relationship or work history) are under extreme pressure in these threads, because the forum is majority Western, aligned with Western media and geopolitical views, and a subset of the majority users have the kind of adamancy (and even aggression) that can only come from ignorance. That's a serious problem—users of Chinese background have even been hounded off this site, just for sincerely trying to represent their own viewpoint. I've even been personally accused of being Chinese (as if that were somehow an insult) just for trying to bring more respect into these threads. If you or anyone is interested, you can see some of that moderation history at these links:
None of that applies to your case, though, if I'm reading your comments correctly, because you seem to be posting strictly out of ideological battle. That's, unfortunately, much cheaper and more destructive behavior. We don't allow it here, because the purpose of the site is curious conversation in which people relate to and learn from each other. Smiting enemies is precisely the opposite spirit of that.
I know what it feels like to hold a minority ideological viewpoint too (having been in that situation many times)—it comes with a feeling of righteousness and resentment that causes one to lash out and feel justified in treating others disrespectfully because, after all, one's cause is right and the truth is more important. Unfortunately this syndrome is poison to the sort of internet forum we're trying for here. Regardless of how right you are (or feel you are), or how important the truths you bring are (or you feel they are), we're going to ban you if you continue this way. We have no choice but to do that, in order to try to preserve HN for its intended purpose. Moreover, it makes little difference how right you are or what truths you're bringing, if this is the way you're going about it, because people don't listen when they're being blasted.
Counteracting abuse of this site is the #1 thing we do behind the scenes to try to prevent the value of HN from eroding. That's actually what I spent the first hour of my morning doing, before I realized that there was $BigDrama happening. (Thank you, bat-signaling emailers.) If you ever see me commenting on how "large HN threads are paged for performance reasons, so click the More link at the bottom, and we'll eventually remove these comments once we turn off pagination", well, the reason that's not done yet is because moderation takes 90% of my time, answering emails takes the other 90% of my time, and counteracting abuse takes the other 90% of my time.
The better HN gets, the more people want to suck its juices for their own purposes. Most haven't figured out that the above-board way to do that is simply to make interesting contributions, so they do other things, and there's probably a power law of how sinister those things are. The majority are relatively innocuous, but lame. (Think startups getting their friends to upvote their blog post, or posting booster comments in their thread.)
Users are good at spotting these innocuous/lame forms of abuse, but when it comes to $BigCo manipulation (or alleged manipulation), user perceptions get wildly inaccurate—far below 0.1%—and when it comes to $NationState manipulation (or alleged manipulation), user perceptions get so inaccurate that...trying to measure how inaccurate they are is not possible with classical physics. Almost everything that people think they're seeing about this is merely imagination and projection, determined by the strong feelings that dominate politics.
How do I know that? Because when we dig into the data of the actual cases, we find is that it's basically all garden-variety internet user behavior.
It's like this: imagine you were digging in your garden for underground surveillance devices. Why? Well, a lot of people are worried about them. So you dig and what do you find? Dirt, roots, and worms. The next time you dig, you find more dirt and more roots and more worms. And so for the next thousand places you dig. Now suppose someone comes along and insists that you dig in this-other-place-over-here because they've convinced themselves—I mean absolutely convinced themselves, to the point that they send distraught emails saying "my continued use of HN depends on how you answer this email"—that here is where the underground device surely must be. You've learned how important it is to be willing to dig; even just somebody-being-worried is a valid reason to dig. So you pick up your shovel and dig in that spot, and you find dirt, roots, and worms.
Still with me? Ok. Now: what are the odds that this thing that looks like a root or a worm is actually a surveillance device? Here my analogy breaks down a bit because we can't actually cut them open to see what's inside—we don't have that data. We do, however, have lots of history about what the "worms" have been doing over the years. And when you look at that, what do you find that they've been up to? They've been commenting about (say) the latest Julia release or parser combinators in Elixir, and they've been on HN for years and some old comment talks about, say, some diner in Wisconsin that used to make the best burgers. And in 2020 they maybe got mad on one side or the other of a flamewar about BLM. (Nobody please get mad that I'm using worms to represent HN users. It's just an analogy, and I like worms.)
Or, maybe the history shows that the person gets involved in arguments about China a lot. Aha! Now we have our Chinese spy! How much are they paying you? Is it still 50 cents? I guess the CCP says inflation doesn't exist in China—is that it, shill? If @dang doesn't ban you, that proves he's a CCP agent too!
But then you look and you see that they've been in other threads too, and a previous comment talks about being a grad student in ML, or about having married someone of Chinese background—obvious human stuff which fully explains why they're commenting the way they are and why they get triggered by what they get triggered by.
This ordinary, garden-variety stuff—dirt, roots, and worms in the analogy—is what essentially all of the data reduces to. And here's the thing: you, or anyone, can check most of this yourself, simply by following the public history of the HN accounts you encounter in the threads. The people jumping to sinister conclusions and angrily accusing others don't tend to do that, because that state of mind doesn't want to look for countervailing information. But if you actually look, what you're going to find in most cases is enough countervailing information to make the accusations appear absurd...and then you'd feel pretty sheepish about making them.
I'm not saying the public record is the entire record; of course it isn't. We can look at voting histories, flagging histories, site access patterns, and plenty of other things that aren't public. What I'm saying is that, with rare exceptions [1], what we find after investigation of the private data is...dirt, roots, and worms. It looks exactly like the public data.
And here's the most important point: the accusations about spying, brigading, shilling, astroturfing, troll farms, and so on, are all exactly the same between the cases where the public data refutes them and the cases where the public data is inconclusive. I realize this is a subtle point, but if you stop and think about it, it's arguably the strongest evidence of all. It proves that whatever mechanism is generating these accusations doesn't vary with the actual data. Moreover, you don't need access to any private data to see this.
There are also trolls and single-purpose accounts that only comment in order to push some agenda. That's against the HN guidelines, of course, and such accounts are easy enough to ban. But even in such cases, it doesn't follow that the account is disingenuous, some sort of foreign agent, etc. It's far more likely that they're simply passionate on that topic. That's how people are.
[1] so rare that it's misleading to even mention them, and which also don't look anything like what people imagine
---
Still, power laws have long tails and one wonders what may lie at the end, beyond our ability to detect it. What if despite all of the above, there is still sinister manipulation happening, only it's clever enough to leave no traces in the data that we know of? You can't prove that's not happening, right? And if anyone is doing that it would probably be state actors, right?
You might think there's nothing much to be said about such cases because what can you say about something you by definition don't know and can't observe? It seems to get epistemological pretty quickly. Actually, though, there's a lot we can say, because the premise in the question is so strong that it implies a lot. The premise is that there's a sort of Cartesian evil genius among us, sowing sinister seeds for evil ends. I call this the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator (SSM): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
There are two interesting things about the SSM scenario. The first is that since, by definition, the SSM is immune to anti-abuse measures, you can't postulate any technical measures for dealing with it. It's beyond the end-of-the-road of technical cleverness.
The second interesting thing is that, if you go in for this way of thinking, then either there already exists an SSM or there eventually will be one. And there's not much difference between those two cases. Either way, we should be thinking about what to do.
What should we do in the presence of an SSM? I can think of two options: either (1) give up, roll over, and accept being manipulated; or (2) develop a robust culture of countering bad arguments with better ones and false claims with true information. Of those options, (2) is better.
If you have such a culture, then the SSM is mitigated because the immune system will dispose of the bad parts of what they're saying. If there are any true bits in what they're saying, well, we shouldn't be rejecting those, just because of who said them. We should be big enough to accommodate everything that's true, regardless of where it comes from—just as we should reject everything that's false, regardless of where it comes from. We might prefer to reject it a little more rudely if we knew that it was coming from an SSM, but that's not a must-have.
The nice thing is that such a culture is exactly what we want on HN anyway, whether an SSM exists or it doesn't. The way to deal with the SSM is to do exactly what we ought to be working at as a community already: rejecting what's false and discovering what's true. Anti-abuse measures won't work forever, but we don't need them to—we only need them to last long enough to develop the right habits as a community. If we can reach a sort of (dare I say it) herd immunity from the viruses of manipulation, we'll be fine. The answer to the Sufficiently Smart Manipulator is the Sufficiently Healthy Community. That's what the site guidelines and moderation here are trying to nurture.
Edit: I should add that I'm not 100% confident that this can work. But it's clear that it's the best we can do in that scenario, and the good part is that it's what we ought to be doing anyway.
I can tell you personally with high confidence that neither the Communist Party of China nor any other Communist Party has influence on how we operate Hacker News. I can't say anything about any other site or company or media or government, because I'm not involved with any of that. But unless the communists are zapping me with behavior-control rays or Angela Lansbury had me brainwashed decades ago, zero such influence is happening here.
You don't have to believe me, of course, but if you decide not to, consider these two simple observations.
First, lying would be stupid, because the good faith of the community is literally the only thing that makes this site valuable. So, sheer self-interest plus not-being-an-idiot should be enough to tip your priors. I may be an idiot about most things, but I hope I'm not incompetent at the most important part of my job. The value of a place like HN can easily disappear in one false step. Therefore the only policy which has ever made any sense is (1) tell the truth; (2) try never to do anything that isn't defensible to the community; and (3) acknowledge when we fuck up and fix it.
Second, if you're going to draw dramatic conclusions about sinister operations, it's good for mental health to have at least one really solid piece of information you can check them against. Otherwise you end up in the wilderness of mirrors. What you see on internet forums—or rather, what you think you see on internet forums, which then somehow becomes what you see because that's how the brain does it—is simply not solid information. Remember what von Neumann said about fitting an elephant? (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) He asked for a mere five degrees of freedom. Nebulous internet spaces give you hundreds at least. That's way beyond enough to justify anything—even dipping in a ladle and getting one ladle's worth is enough to justify anything.
(Edit: people have been asking what Angela Lansbury has to do with this. If you don't mind spoilers, Angela will explain it for you here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3ZnaRMhD_A.)
Please do not perpetuate flamewars on HN. I realize you didn't start it, but if people didn't perpetuate these things, they'd die out quickly, which is what they deserve.
Edit: I just noticed what you wrote in your profile about having an account only for Chinese topics. I appreciate the transparency, but single-purpose accounts like that are not allowed on HN, and especially not on flamewar topics. It's not in keeping with the intended spirit of this site, which is thoughtful, unpredictable conversation on a wide range of curiosity-driven topics.
You can see from the many past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that we're aware of the pressure that HN's Chinese users (or those with a background connected to China - for example, family or work) experience on a majority-Western forum like HN, where pro-Western views inevitably dominate. We can't do anything about that, but we can, and do, insist that HN users follow the site guidelines and treat each other respectfully. When someone else is breaking the rules egregiously, please don't reward them by replying. Instead, flag the comment, and in particularly bad cases please give us a head-up at hn@ycombinator.com.
I'd send the two of you to bed without any supper for posting such shameful tripe to this place. Please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules so we don't have to ban you—regardless of which country you have a problem with, or how fond you are of grandiose rhetoric. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26892834.
All: these threads have all become the same hellish flamewar, endlessly repeated. Anything this flamey and/or repetitive is off topic here. HN is for thoughtful, curious conversation, not smiting enemies: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please see these recent explanations:
A: Sure—more important than most of what's on HN. That doesn't mean that HN's rules stop applying or that flamewar becomes ok. Also, people angrily yelling on the internet has nothing to do with helping oppressed peoples. It is about activated tribal emotion, and in that sense belongs to the problem rather than any step toward solution.
Q: Are you secretly a spy, Chinese agent, communist, astroturfer, racist, or sympathizer thereof?
A: No; see step 4 of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. The idea of HN has always [1] been to avoid becoming scorched earth [2] or at least to stave off that fate for a while longer [3]. Scorched earth is not interesting, and threads like these are unfortunately a fast road to hell.
All: China-geopolitics threads on HN jumped the shark years ago; now they're jumping the ocean the shark is in. This is damaging HN, which is for curious conversation, not flamewar.
What to do? Perhaps more explicit instructions will help. I've put together the following algorithm. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.
Before you comment on a topic like this, please follow these simple steps:
(2) If you understand that flamebait, name-calling, ideological rhetoric, nationalistic rhetoric, and flamewar are off topic on HN regardless of how right you are or feel you are, go to step 3. Otherwise go to step 1.
(3) If you understand that anything which has been repeated many times is off topic here (example: "$x is evil" for any popular or unpopular $x), go to step 4. Otherwise please see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and then go to step 1.
(4) If you think I might be posting this because I'm secretly a foreign agent, communist, racist, or $x-sympathizer, go to step 1.
(5) You now have enough information to know whether or not you want to use HN as intended. If you do, great! skip the remaining steps. If you don't, proceed to step 6.
(6) It's ok if you don't want to use HN as intended, but in that case please don't damage HN by posting to it. This ecosystem is fragile and needs protecting. You wouldn't drop a lit match in a dry forest, dump engine oil in a mountain lake, or litter in a city park, so please don't do the equivalent here. Plenty of other platforms are designed for engagement-above-all and will welcome your posts. Pick one of those and comment there instead.
HN isn't optimized for engagement—it's for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). That's a softer and more delicate feeling than the ones which drive internet flamewars, and it requires a baseline of kindness, openness, and respect in order to function. Not engaging is always an option here, and not engaging in ways that destroy the commons is a necessity. Before you hit "add comment" or "reply", ask yourself "is curiosity what I am feeling right now?" If the answer is no, please wait for that to change.
I've had to warn you before about using HN primarily for nationalistic battle and flamewar. I understand that it's a different situation when you're representing a minority viewpoint in defense (I'm imagining myself into your position here) of a disparaged group that you either belong to or know a lot about. If that's the case, fair enough—but you still have to follow the rules, and by focusing overwhelmingly on one flamewar topic, you're not doing that.
Moreover, you're not just defending, you're playing the same flamewar game that the others are, with tedious "no you" disparagement and name-calling about the West which mirror the things you're objecting to. That's not cool.
Worse yet, you're crossing into personal attack. I know how difficult it is to resist these temptations, but everyone who posts here has to follow the rules. You're breaking them, and we need you to fix that. Whether you're breaking them as badly as the next person is irrelevant.
I've put a ton of time and energy into the difficult task of convincing HN commenters to be level-headed and decent when addressing China/West geopolitics during this time of heightened propaganda and nascent enmity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I've stood up repeatedly for HN's Chinese users, and/or users of Chinese descent, and/or users who have a family or business background in China, for their right to share what they know on the site and not be attacked or hounded off. What you're doing here, unfortunately, undermines that.
If you want to post in the spirit of sharing knowledge and helping to overcome ignorance and prejudice, you're welcome to do that. If you're just fighting a nationalistic battle from the minority side, that's as bad as the comments you're objecting to, and you're damaging this site. That's not ok.
I realize this asks more of you in terms of dignity and self-control than it asks of the users who are in the majority position and therefore under less pressure. That's not fair, but it's how group dynamics work, it's the same all over the world, and it isn't going to change—we have to play the cards we're dealt. If you can find it in yourself to post in a spirit of respect and patience, no matter how ignorant others are or you feel they are, that would be lovely. But if all you're after is "triggering folks", we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you, so would be grateful if you'd please fix this. Currently, you're giving ammunition to the lame and foolish accusations that we're trying hard to combat here.
If you do want to help overcome ignorance and increase understanding, here are two things you can specifically do that would help a lot: (1) find things to agree with in the comment you're replying to—this is nearly always possible (if not, you probably shouldn't be replying), and establishes respect and good faith. (2) Scrupulously eliminate every trace of pejorative language from your own posts, regardless of how wrong the other comment is or you feel it is.
What country you're in when you make a comment doesn't affect whether it's a good HN comment or not.
Your comment wasn't a good comment for HN because it used name-calling ("yellow journalism", "hating on", "FUD"), and because it was clearly a step further toward conflict between countries in the thread, which is what I mean by nationalistic flamewar.
I'm sure it felt like you were just being defensive and I completely get that, but comments here need to be more substantive and less flamebaity, no matter how wrong or unfair other commenters are, or you feel they are. That's not easy, but it's something we all need to work on, regardless of which side we're on.
Also, I don't think it's accurate to describe this specific article, or most of the comments in this thread (with some bad exceptions) as attacking China. We try to watch out for that and have scolded and moderated many commenters who have crossed that line (including some in this thread). HN's Chinese users, and users with Chinese family backgrounds, are absolutely welcome here, just as welcome as anybody else, and we don't tolerate slurs. You can see some of the long history of this here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Are you aware that you're posting in exactly the flamewar style that we're asking people not to? I realize that this is a high-emotion, high-activation topic, but there are certain principles here that everyone needs to respect. That is what the site guidelines are for.
A comment like this one (and worse, "we need to shame China and the Chinese people" – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26548441 - I can't believe that anyone who has been here over 10 years would post something that horrible to HN) takes us deeper into the hell that we're trying to stay out of. I'm not going to ban you for these, because if I imagine myself into your position, my guess is that simply re-reading what you posted, once you've cooled down, will be punishment enough. But if you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
HN has plenty of people who feel strongly on both sides of this issue. In my experience there are many more on your side than the other (probably by an order of magnitude)—certainly the number of times I've had to moderate comments breaking the site guidelines on China-related topics is over 10x lopsided, and no we're not looking to moderate one side more than the other. (Just the unpleasantness of being accused of ugly prejudice from every conceivable angle is enough to make one scrupulous to the point of paranoia about this.)
Each side is utterly convinced that the other side dominates the site and is sinisterly manipulating/astroturfing the community. None of these feelings is based on any reality that I've ever been able to observe. It's all imagination driven by emotion. When it comes to this topic, the main impression I gets from trying to keep this place in some semblance of guidelines-respecting order is one of mass-psychological, tribally motivated insanity.
All: this thread quickly degenerated into a hellish flamewar. Please don't post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN, and do not post cheap internet insinuations about astroturfing, brigading, shilling, spying, foreign agents and communist party operatives. If you're worried about abuse, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. You're not welcome to fill HN threads with fervid imaginations about commenters who have different views than you. HN is a big place and that's the very simple explanation for why not everyone agrees. I've posted about this many times, both about astroturfing in general and China-related topics in particular:
There have been ugly mob behaviors on this site in the past, which have hounded people out of the community. Is that who you want to be? who we want to be? No it is not. Yet it happens all too easily, and the people doing it don't even realize that they're doing it—they just think they're righteously defending truth or freedom or the home team. If you don't want to be that way, then err on the side of respect, benefit of the doubt, and not jumping to predetermined conclusions. (If you do want to be that way, please find some other site to post to.)
We ban accounts that break these rules, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended. It has a very specific intended spirit and most of the people who've posted in this thread so far have been breaking it.
> "We all know that Chinese are NOT capable of innovation"
That's a slur, you can't do that here, and we've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means, at minimum, not posting unsubstantive comments and not posting nationalistic (or other) flamebait, both of which your account was unfortunately doing a lot of.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines egregiously.
Personal attacks are not ok. Smears like this are particularly not ok. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The truth is that the HN community is diverse and divided, with plenty of people on all sides of this issue. Attacking people personally (let alone nationally, ethnically, or racially) simply because they disagree with you is the epitome of what we don't want here. This is not a China issue, it's a Hacker News issue, an internet issue, and frankly a human issue.
HN has many users of Chinese descent living in the West. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves for treating them like this. I'm certainly ashamed.
(Edit: I didn't mean that they should be treated better because they live in the West. Obviously they should be treated better regardless of where they live. I mentioned HN's Chinese users who live in the West because they're an important part of China-related threads, which is not widely understood. Routinely they get accused of being communist shills, etc., when what they're actually doing is trying to bridge the gap between two worlds—an unenviable position as the gap grows. No one is required to agree with their views, but they absolutely should not be abused for this, and the HN users who do abuse them are behaving shamefully.)
However hard we try, it seems impossible to get a large segment of the community to behave any better, and the slurs are getting worse as the geopolitical trend (and associated things like media coverage) continues.
No, I'm not a secret communist supporter or any of the other silly things people come up with about this. Nor do I agree with the GP commenter; I've barely skimmed their posts. I simply want HN users to follow the site guidelines, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and not form xenophobic mobs.
People have literally been hounded off this site by comments like these. Is that the kind of community you all want to be part of? I can't believe it is. It's the default collective outcome, though—not that any of you want that outcome, but it's the group ugliness that posts like this add up to.
I think what you're perceiving as happening in HN comments is a consequence of the macro social/geopolitical trend. HN can't be immune from those.
There is a growing rift between the West and China, and especially between the U.S. and China. It has complex interactions with growing political divisions in the West (and especially the U.S.). This cluster of topics is being increasingly covered in Western media, in an increasingly polarized way. HN users are not coming to HN to talk about this stuff from a blank slate—they're coming with pre-existing views that are conditioned by whatever media and online sources they're engaged with, as well as by their own life experience, as I described above.
What all that means is that we're likely to continue to see more pro- and anti- comments on China-related topics, for reasons that are easily explained by the dynamics in our own societies. Reaching for "CCP shill" as an explanation is unnecessary, and to some extent is harmful because it reflects an assumption that no one could hold certain views in good faith, when we know for a fact that some people in fact do hold those views in good faith—again, for reasons of their own life experience.
This does not imply that we're closed to investigating claims of abuse and manipulation. On the contrary, our contract with HN users is that if someone is worried about abuse, they're always welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com and we will always take a look. I wrote new code the other day to help with such investigations. Another part of our contract with HN users is that we will tell the truth about what we find. The truth is that we haven't found even a trace of anything like that on HN—just a lot of human beings with very different backgrounds and very strong feelings. There's more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23839602 from a couple days ago.
Last I ran the numbers, 50% of HN users were in the US. A lot of those are not Americans, since many HN users have come to the US from other countries. Moreover, a lot of the American userbase on HN are not "well off". So your assumption is far from correct.
What HN certainly is, demographically, is majority Western. What you're seeing on China-related topics is the growing rift between China and the West, the same trend that shows up in Western media and no doubt Chinese media as well. I spend a lot of moderation time and energy arguing for understanding about this. But there's no way we can expect HN to be immune from macro social and geopolitical trends.
There's no reason to believe that "HN is incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.
You guys need to understand that there are many categories of users who might post something like that in good faith.
First, a lot of Westerners hold anti-Western views—for whatever reason. This leads them to pro-China positions as a matter of tactics—the enemy of my enemy etc.
Second, a lot of Westerners hold anti-US views. That's similar to category 1 but different. We see this from some Canadian, Australian, and European users, and of course even from some American users—again, for whatever reason; people are complicated. This sort of user will also take China's side in a China/US conflict, for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with being Chinese communists.
Third, there are Westerners of Chinese background, either immigrants or children of immigrants, who have pro-China views because they identify with the Chinese dimension of their family history. Sometimes the children of immigrants have more strident views on these things than their parents. Where the parents naturally sought to fit in as immigrants in the West, the next generation tries to balance the two worlds by leaning back towards the country of origin. This group is the most likely to sound like "CCP propaganda" because they have deep knowledge of the culture and usually the language. And of course, if they're first-generation immigrants, their English may not sound native.
Fourth, there are Westerners of non-Chinese background who have spent a lot of time in China, usually for work (less often for travel), who developed pro-Chinese views, or complex/ambivalent views, simply by the natural process of having spent time there. This sort of user often feels like their fellow Westerners have a cartoonish and ignorant view of China, and wants to educate them. Sometimes they 'educate' them by insulting their ignorance, which is unhelpful. These users have native English and can sound like ardent propagandists as well, but actually their motive is to correct what they perceive as a distortion in Western public opinion. Their own views tend to be critical of the CCP, but they dislike what they regard as ignorant anti-Chinese views, and so will argue a pro-China position out of contrarianism. They tend to favor friendly trade and political relations with China, and since the trend of the last few years has been clearly against that, they can come across as rather aggrieved.
Fifth, there are many people who grew up in China, who came to the West for school (or work) and stayed here. Often they are caught between two worlds—having to defend the West and their choice to stay there to their families back home, and at the same time struck painfully by the ignorance, misunderstanding and hostility that they encounter about China here. HN has such users and they are in a difficult position: vastly outnumbered on intense, divisive questions that they happen to have deep personal experience of.
Sometimes these categories also intersect: for example there are Canadian children of Chinese-Canadian immigrants who speak Mandarin and have spent time working at tech companies in China. Their views come from having grown up in a Chinese-Canadian family and having spent time in China itself, and they feel demeaned and even slurred by the generalizations about China that they see on Western internet forums. They show up in the threads with counterarguments, and their counterarguments are often intensely detailed because they have so much personal experience with the topics.
Can you see how complex this situation is? Each of these categories is a minority on HN, but HN is big enough that 'minority' can still mean thousands of people, any of whom may comment in a thread like this—and no doubt there are additional categories that I didn't list (edit: here's another: Westerners with Chinese spouses). Any of these users can post what seem like absurdly pro-CCP comments in a HN thread, for complicated reasons that come from their own life experience. When they do that, other users run into their comments with no idea of the background that would lead someone to post that way, and it creates a shock experience. (For more on the shock experience, see [1] and [2]). Basically, they go 'WTF?' and wonder how anyone could possibly post like this.
Now here comes the pivot in the whole business. When you experience that 'WTF?', you have two choices. First choice, you can say "wow, I wonder how different our experiences must be that you would post what seems to me like such an obviously wrong and evil comment!" That fork leads to curious conversation in which people get to know each other better. Second choice, you can say "You must be a communist party shill! No one would post like this for any other reason! How much are they paying you?" Which percentage of HN users makes the first choice vs. the second choice? Exercise for the reader.
What's causing it is clear: the community is divided and people have different opinions. This has been the case for a long time, so it's no sudden inrush. There's natural fluctuation, so it sometimes can feel that way.
I posted about this a lot in the last couple of days. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835613 and the subthread underneath it (which you'll have to uncollapse). You can find other explanations at:
The evidence is extremely clear, by the way. If we'd found any undue influence, we'd say so, but the private data confirms what's already clear from the public record (if you look at other users' commenting histories): people just disagree. The voting patterns don't show anything that the commenting patterns don't.
We can't know for sure. Past account histories count for a lot—if people would simply look at them, I think most accusations of this sort would vaporize. It's not plausible that $secret-enemy planted $hn-user in 2013 to comment about syntactic whitespace and Google Fiber or whatever, so they'd be more credible seven years later when promoting $political-agenda.
Beyond that, we look at relationships between accounts, patterns of site access...I'm not sure what else to tell you. The private data confirms what the public data already shows. There are exceptions, but they don't determine the discourse on the site. What determines that is people simply having different views.
Mostly I just wish people would realize that the spectrum of genuine disagreement is much broader than it seems like it should be, would be, or could be. The world is just a bigger place than we feel like it is.
> You seem very confident that this doesn’t happen here
That's a misunderstanding. I know my posts on this are super repetitive, but I'm careful never to claim such a thing. How could we know? I'm merely saying that the overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be.
I've pored over this kind of data on HN so many times that the patterns are blazed into my skull. I'm happy to change my mind as soon as I see a new pattern—if nothing else, it would be a refreshing change of pace.
So far, that has almost never happened on political topics [1]. It's more common on business topics, but most of those cases are at the boring end (people trying to promote their startup or whatever). I have to call this as I see it and tell you guys what reality is as far as we can tell. It would be a breach of trust with the community to do anything other than tell the truth, and in this case the truth about what we see is as boring and one-sided as my comments on the issue have been for the last five years.
Is it possible that sophisticated state actors are implanting biased comments into HN threads in ways that are so clever and subtle that they fool us completely, leaving zero traces in the data of the kind we know how to check? Of course. It's possible; how could we say otherwise? But this kind of thinking leads to the wilderness of mirrors, in which people see whatever they think they see. That way lies madness. We need some sanity-preserving heuristics. Fortunately we have at least two.
First: before concluding that there is manipulation, we need something objective to go on. We need some evidence—I'm tempted to say any evidence—that we can point to. And if you apply this rule consistently, which we do, the insinuations all evaporate under it. (Again, I mean on political topics. It's more complex on business topics.) Basically, every time we look, we find nothing. I'm happy to keep looking; the deal with HN users is that if someone is worried about abuse, they're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look. There are a couple such emails in the inbox at the moment that I'm hoping to get to tonight. But I don't know how to communicate to you guys how universal this pattern has been so far. The pattern is: HN users are all over the spectrum on divisive topics, they disagree with each other, often vehemently, and many people have trouble recognizing disagreement as genuine.
Second: any sufficiently well-executed astroturfing is undetectable by definition, so we can't rely just on detection. If sophisticated manipulators are among us, smart enough to evade all detection and fool all the moderators, the only defense the community has to fall back on is good-faith discussion: responding to false information with correct information, and refuting bad arguments with better arguments. That's good news, because that's how what we want HN to function anyway. Going into flamewar serves manipulators just fine, so in the long run our best hope is for HN to get better at what it ought to be doing in the first place. That's the best immune system, and the only one which stands a chance of maintaining a community against sufficiently subtle invasion.
[1] I say "almost" for strict accuracy, but the exceptions I'm talking about are boring and I'm leaving them out for brevity's sake, not because there's anything scintillating there.
Internet users are a thousand (actually probably more like a hundred thousand) times too quick to jump to such insidious but exciting conclusions. Having spent countless hours investigating such things I can tell you confidently that the overwhelming explanation is the boring and obvious one, the one Mr. Occam will give if you ask: people just disagree.
People are biased toward underestimating how much legitimate disagreement there is in any large, distributed population sample—which HN is. Probably we're hard-wired to evaluate the world by local conditions around us, and most of us are surrounded by people who see things similarly to how we do. Then we come online, bump into views that are harsh outliers in our world, and poof: an astroturfer under every bed and a spy in every closet.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Please note: this is not to say that abuse doesn't exist. But the overwhelming majority of such insinuations are imaginary, so in investigating real abuse we need concrete evidence to go on—something, anything. The presence of opposing views on an internet forum does not clear that bar—it is evidence of nothing but that the topic is divisive.
> Every time I see anything critical of the US / Europe / Canada and other liberal democracies it's sitting at the top, no matter how unsubstantiated
The key word here is "see". The problem is that we mostly see what we're primed to notice—which is basically whatever we most dislike—and we simply don't see (or don't weight as heavily) all the cases that don't feel that way. This creates a feeling of "every" or "always" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835843 in this thread), which is a true statement of what you've seen, but only because your seeing is extremely conditioned by your passions on the topic. (I don't mean you personally—we all seem to have this bias.) People with opposite passions see literally the opposite picture. Moreover, the degree to which the picture you see feels unfair and unbalanced is a function, not of the raw data stream, but of the intensity of your passion, regardless of which direction it points.
For evidence, if you search my comments you'll find examples where I've admonished users for flamewar in the opposite direction, as well as for flamewar on other topics, including nationalistic flamewar about other countries (India is probably the second most common case; Russia was up there for a few years and still flares up at times).
> any comment that isn’t 100% backing the CCP falls to a negative score in a matter of minutes
This is so bizarrely remote from accurate that I don't know what else to tell you. As far as I can tell, the only explanation for this sort of wild misassessment is that people's perceptions are extremely affected by their passions. The more passionate our beliefs, the more we simply can't see the datapoints that don't fit the filter.
That also explains why these claims are getting more common these days: passions are rising.
When your comments are breaking the site guidelines, you need look no further for why they might be downvoted. I seem to recall that you've done that a lot.
"Always" is a strong word. Usually it just means you noticed some things that you dislike [1]. The problem is that we're all far more likely to notice such cases and to weight them more strongly, so before long we've sample-biased ourselves to "always". The other side feels the opposite "always" [2]. Same mechanism in both cases. It always feels like the mods are against you, just as the refs are always against your team and you're always the one who gets the speeding ticket.
All: HN has been seeing a dismaying increase in nationalistic flamewar. This is not allowed here. I know it feels important when you're caught up in the intensity of such feelings, but it is not interesting, which is what HN is for. Worse, it has the effect on interesting discussion that tank battles have on a city park.
If you don't have something thoughtful and substantive to say, please
don't post until you do. Drop denunciatory rhetoric—it's tedious and evokes worse
from others.
Remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you.
It's absurd to say that slurring "the general attitude of Chinese people" was civil, polite, and on topic. If you say that, I can only imagine that you're not coming into contact with the very large numbers of people who would find such a comment to be the opposite of civil and polite. That's not our situation, and we have to take care of all HN users. Everyone has the right to come here and not see their country or race or ethnic background (or similar groupings they may belong to) put down in that way.
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.
My GP comment links to cases where users were abused and even hounded off this site by ethnic/national mob behaviors. Those users were innocent—the evidence for this was overwhelming. It was the mobs who were at fault. I think that's shameful. Like most HN users, I sympathize with underdogs, and seeing people get ganged up on gets my dander up. I'm confident that the vast majority of the community here would agree with me about that—at least when their own passions (and fears) aren't activated. None of us want to be that sort of community, but it can easily end up that way by default, so we need to take conscious care to avoid it.
I've asked FooBarWidget to stop posting exclusively in China-related arguments, because that's against the site guidelines in its own right, but that's hardly proof of, or even an iota of evidence for, the cloak-and-dagger fantasies that internet users love to sling at people in minority positions. Those accusations are against the HN guidelines for deep and good reasons. Therefore you can't post like this here, and I've banned the account.
One sign of how foolish these fantasies are is the certainty with which internet warriors declaim them. They never weigh evidence or consider other possibilities. It's always "demonstrably and with certainty"! What good fortune to be surrounded by enemies who are so evil, yet so dumb as to give themselves away at every turn. It's the best of all worlds: a chicken in every pot, a communist under every bed, and a spy (or three) in every internet thread.
What's poignant is that the users who get abused so dramatically in Western forums like this are often the very ones trying to defend and articulate the West to their communities back home—where they no doubt encounter similarly xenophobic feelings on the other side. They're in an impossible position. You don't have to agree with them, but you do have to drop the Boris and Natasha routine if you want to post to this forum. It is cartoonish and incurious, and would be silly if not for its malicious effects.