There are plenty of critical comments about China and the CCP which don't get downvoted or flagged. In fact, there are massive numbers of them. What gets downvoted and flagged are mostly meta deviations (into this sort of off-topic morass) and flamewars. Please don't post like that—it's against the site guidelines, for good reason.
Would you please stop posting this sort of grandiose, generic rhetoric? There are plenty of comments in this thread representing the same view you adhere to. The requirement is simply that people post thoughtfully and reflectively, rather than from a knee-jerk reflex or flamewar place.
No, that's not because we're secret communist sympathizers. It's because on HN, we want threads not to be predictable. Readers come to HN to have their curiosity gratified. There is zero curiosity being gratified in angry, repetitive comments.
This is an area where the interests of readers are not aligned with certain kinds of commenters—the kind that want to do ideological or political or nationalistic or religious battle on the internet. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that, so please stop doing it.
I understand your mod decision. I would also recommend looking into the OP's claim. I have to agree, the downvoting on this topic is much more than I am used to, and I get downvoted often! So, it appears there is more than the normal HN audience at work here.
I'd be happy to look at specific links that anyone is worried about. That's part of the contract we have with users: the guidelines ask people not to post insinuations about astroturfing but they also ask people to send the concerns they do have to hn@ycombinator.com.
Based on everything I've seen, though, the null hypothesis is that what you're describing is explained not by a difference in the audience, but by the topic. China was already probably the single most divisive topic on HN in the last year. Obviously the covid crisis has accentuated that. This isn't an HN thing—it's all through Western media and no doubt a symmetrical version is running through Chinese media as well. HN can't possibly be immune from macro social trends (
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
).
You can see that I've been making this point, including about China, for a long time:
That is a good point. The uptick in downvotes I see could maybe explained by the topic's high profile and divisiveness, instead of astroturf. But, that still leaves the question as to who is in favor of the CCP? Or is it just a reaction to short, dismissive posts on the topic? Must be interesting as a mod to get to quantitatively analyze these questions!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867280.