That comment was killed by software, similarly to how comments by banned accounts are killed. It was later vouched for by other users, which unkilled it.

Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents. They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably just imagine scenarios that confirm whatever they already believe and get even more upset about it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544490.

> Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents.

I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about.

Now am I being offensive or breaking some rules I am not aware of?

You changed the subject from the original topic to the status of comments on HN. That's meta, because it's an HN comment about HN comments; it's a tangent, because it's a change of subject; it's lame, because meta threads (while superficially exciting to insiders) are highly repetitive and self-referential, and also are nearly always full of inaccurate information as people invent explanations for what they think they're seeing.

Does that make sense?

Clearly there are a bunch of people voting down anything that is too critical of China.

WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.

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.

I agree with all of that.

However the fact that all of the Chinese supporting votes showed up at once, and then the others show up slowly is supportive of a group of people working together.

I really don't think that's correct. Rather it's the eternal problem that randomness contains sequences that look and feel non-random—these are more likely to get noticed, and then get (over)interpreted to fit a pre-existing narrative.

I don't mean to pick on you personally! Everyone does this.

There are no pertinent facts anywhere in this thread. There are no pertinent facts available. We just don't know, and likely won't ever know.

And we should ask that is. The fact that investigations to find patient 0, either never happened or were covered up is strong evidence for the WIV leak theory.

Can you link to something that proves this is only asking for a reference?

That's what the comment sounded like to me, and why I downvoted it. It does not come across to me as a good-faith request for a reference, and more like an attempt to DOS the conversation, similar to a Gish gallop. For example, it's asking for a specific link that constitutes proof of a general observation of tendency. That doesn't scream "reasonable request."

I don't see how any conversation could work under the standard you're proposing. The original comment was based on a wild assertion about the geographical placement of virology labs; no argument or evidence was offered, and it's not clear to me that there's any real trend it's referring to. If it's unreasonable to ask for a more detailed explanation of the assertion or specific evidence in favor of the assertion, how are people supposed to engage?

You're in a thread that was kicked off with unsourced statements about virology and epidemiology, but suddenly we have an urgent need for sources — actually, not just sources, because the demand was for proof — when we encounter the idea "Labs don't occur by chance in random locations around the globe"?

I would say you're supposed to engage the same way everyone had been engaging with the entire thread up to that point. But if you do want to transition to a more evidence-based approach to the subject — which I could get behind — I don't think the right way to go about it is to suddenly demand proof from the first person whose opinion you don't like.

I just don't think that "suddenly" or "urgent" or "demand" are reasonable characterizations of anyone's comments here. It's a discussion, and challenging claims you don't agree with is a routine part of any discussion.

It's not that wanting sources is bad, but a plausible-sounding claim may as well be argued against by providing sources to the contrary, or defend by providing sources in support. Demanding rigorous proof of an intuitive claim is not a good way to argue against it.

This is, unfortunately, one of the issues that's been extraordinarily moralized. I've encountered more than a few people who argue that questions about the lab leak theory are inherently bad faith.