Given the outsized effect of flags in comparison to upvotes, I’m of the opinion that Chinese national HN members, and some subset of “no politics evar” crowd is more than enough to flag these to just shy of being dead.
Please keep nationalistic attacks off this forum. You have no idea the sort of pressure that users with minority perspectives because of their national/ethnic backgrounds are under on this majority-Western forum. People have literally been hounded off this site after getting attacked for this. Is that the kind of community you, or any of us, want to be part of? Of course it is not. Therefore, don't include swipes like that in your comments here, and remember that other users are just as human as you are, even if they have different backgrounds than you do.
With all due respect, I disagree. This conversation is specifically about a nation exerting censorship across the web. It is not unreasonable to think those censorship efforts would extend to other sites.
Moreover, I did not mark the primary thrust of the comment as a nationalistic attack. I took it as an observation that a motivated minority (or a nation-state actor) could game the system to mute a conversation by way of flags.
To be clear, I hope Chinese users feel welcome here. I also get it that this is a hot topic where speculation could easily spin out of control. I appreciate the tightrope you have to walk. I just respectfully disagree with your call on this one.
Edit: argh, I confused you with the GP commenter. I'm terribly sorry! Obviously "you" doesn't mean you in the below. I'm usually more careful but today has been a bit hectic with several high-intensity threads going at once, and evidently I've been dropping packets.
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If you hope Chinese users feel welcome here, you need to make some massive adjustments to the commenting style you exemplified above, because accusing "Chinese nationals" of being responsible for things you don't like on HN, based on (seriously) absolutely nothing, is the stuff that a lot of dark human history has been made of.
I realize that's hard to swallow, because (a) none of us wants to see that in ourselves, and (b) internet forums are just so unbelievably innocuous and trivial, until they aren't, but I'm telling you it's fundamentally the same dynamic. Sometimes it shows up in trivial ways and sometimes in hideous ones. If we want to actually be the tolerant, decent people that we imagine we are, we all need to work on this on ourselves. I don't mean to pick on you personally; it's without a doubt universal.
Heh, it might also be hard to swallow because this rebuke puts words in the parent commenter’s mouth — they are not the “Chinese nationals” commenter. Your original point remains, of course, and thank you for saying it.
Yikes! Sorry all, and especially Hnrobert42 - I didn't see that I was replying to someone else than the GP commenter. I've added to my post to clarify that now.
Thank you for the heads up! I usually don't make that mistake, and it's embarrassing.
I certainly appreciate the apology, but please don’t spend another second worried about it. Wrong account but fair point. And even if not, folks make mistakes.
> To be clear, I hope Chinese users feel welcome here.
I don't doubt you believe that too. But as far as I can tell, it's what people in western forums believe too as long as those Chinese people don't opine in a way that's similar to the government that 95% of them support (otherwise they're bots, coherced or brainwashed, or otherwise not full humans).
- China actively works to remove mentions about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
- There are CCP sympathetic posters on HN. I've had them reply to me before. They have identified themselves Chinese.
Combining these two into the statement, "There are posters sympathetic to the CCP stance of censoring the Tiananmen Square Massacre who are flagging these posts," does require some information not available on my side of the screen, but it's not exactly a big jump.
And on a completely personal observation, it wouldn't bug me much if HN did not tolerate such members' attempts to censor the Tiananmen Square Massacre - did not protect them as a group from criticism. Intolerance of intolerance being required for a tolerant society, and all that.
> - China actively works to remove mentions about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
When you say “China”, don’t you think you are being unnecessarily ambiguous?
Any Chinese national can identify with the word “China”, yet unlike Western nationals they’d have absolutely no say in these policy matters, even indirectly through an election.
Think about the effect you want your message to have. With careless phrasing, some of the audience of the message might have two choices: either be left feeling put down in a non-actionable way, or start taking offence—which, if we simplistically pretend there are just two sides in this issue, might mean your message would end up slowly fuelling the opposite side throughout its lifetime on the Web (which would probably be many years).
I personally am trying to be more precise and stick to “CCP” in such context, and in this situation support the sentiment in dang’s note.
I just want to provide you with another data point. I may well be in the minority, but nevertheless I am a bonafide contributor and enjoyer of HN. I should also point out that I did not and would likely not flag posts about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. However, there is a sense in which I could be construed as being "sympathetic" to the CCP and I'm 100% British. I am not sympathetic in the sense that I support the murder and cover up of protesting students, rather I am unsympathetic to the idea that the CCP is motivated by a cartoonish idea of despotism. Whilst I do believe that the most significant component in the censorship of Tank Man is formal CCP policy, I don't believe that extends to the wider conversation. My feeling is that the majority of non-Chinese commentators are disproportionally informed on Chinese history compared to Western history. For example the Opium Wars, or why Hong Kong was a British colony, or the effect the Century of Humiliation had/has on the Chinese collective consciousness. Again, to make sure I'm clear, there is no possible justification for state-sanctioned murder. However my "sympathy" is that we are failing as intelligent and caring fellow human beings if we cannot imagine the CCP as anything other than a Hollywood-esque super villain. So whilst I know I push against these stereotypes, and I suspect so too do Chinese nationals, that doesn't mean I also push against attempts to censor The Tienanmen Square Massacre.
So I'm not trying to disprove your point that censoring is actively occurring, I just want to try to add some nuance to the situation, that there are other currents at play here. And that when sweeping sentiments are expressed and reinforced about China there's a danger those other currents get drowned out and even misconstrued. So if I'm interpreting @dang's intentions correctly, I very much support his attempts to navigate this almost impossible situation with fairness yet firmness.
The free world is under attack. We could seriously lose many of our freedoms. It's not racist to be suspicious of CCP sympathizers who are PRC nationals any more than it was racist to be suspicious of communist-sympathizing Russians during the cold war.
Believe me, I'm just as uninterested in losing freedoms as you are. I don't believe, however, that the feeling of being "under attack" is very conducive to this cause. People who feel they are under attack are likely to give up their freedoms in exchange for safety, or rather for a false feeling of safety. Indeed they will do it eagerly, and this can be used to justify anything. Even if it's something you personally would never support, that doesn't matter because it will be effectively exploited by others who do. So if we want a free society we should all be careful about how we handle the language, thoughts, and feelings of under-attackness.
> There is nothing wrong with criticizing the Communist Party of China.
There is, OTOH, something very wrong with equating Chinese national HN users with the Communist Party of China, and your comment that dang responded to about nationalistic attacks was explictly directed at the former, not the latter, and defending it as the latter draws an inappropriate equivalence.
I didn't interpret the comment that way. I read it as a squares-are-rectangles comment, not a rectangles-are-squares comment. Normal people on HN who support the CCP are likely to be chinese nationals, even if the converse isn't true. There are probably enough normal people who support the CCP here to flag a post, which is how I read the comment.
Of course not, but there's something wrong with using that as a fig leaf for garden-variety, ugly human shadow material, and if you don't think that's happening, I'm afraid you're far off the mark.
By the way, I'm not saying this out of any political position on the underlying topics (nor is that any sort of claim to neutrality). I'm saying this because I'm close enough to the data to start to see how basic decency is being violated by a lot of this stuff, and when you see that, you start to feel sick.
I just hope they don't say it was just a mistake ("glitch") that has now been fixed, like:
"Because of a mistake a configuration change meant for some only some regions was also applied to Bing US. This has now been fixed." (To be clear, I just made this up.)
"A significant percentage of the Microsoft employees who work on Bing are based in China, including some who work on image-recognition software, according to a former employee."
> I'm a member of "no politics evar" crowd, but I feel like both deliberate digital censorship AND artificial tweaks to search results are valid topics.
What I'm curious about is why I'm not able to flag comments. I have 8633 karma yet users with a much lower number appear to be able to flag comments. I'm assuming I lost this privilege because I had comments that were flagged?
When you click on a comment timestamp to view an individual comment, do you see a flag link? If not, you might want to contact the mods to see if there is something else going on.
You can’t vouch until the post is dead, meaning that a small number of people can put a post into flagged purgatory and no one can do anything about it until enough people holler for the mods
In addition to the potential for being vouched for - it's also important to remember that brigading on HN has a very limited effect on account karma overall. If you end up being on the sharp end of the stick at least you can take some comfort in only ever losing six points of karma... well unless your comment was atrocious enough to get you a ban from the mods.
I don't think this sort of baseless speculation is useful. God forbid a Chinese citizen support their own government without being an agent or brainwashed. Way to deny a billion people the agency to disagree with you.
OP didn't say that there aren't any Chinese citizens who genuinely support their own government - only that said government is well-known for organized brigading by its agents. Including in China itself, I must add, so it affects plenty of Chinese citizens, too.
When you say support their own government you should remember that it's not their own government. They don't have any choice in who represents them unless they are one of the 9% of the population that is a member of the CCP.
Rank and file CCP members don't really get any meaningful choice, either - intraparty governance be nominally democratic, but in practice it's as much of a sham as outside of it. The only way you can have a say is by making a party career to some position that actually matters, which very few members will achieve. The rest are there solely to signal their loyalty and get the associated benefits (or lack of handicaps).
Something else that I find curious is that this entry vanished from front page for a while, and now it's stuck at the bottom, even though it has twice the points in half the time compared with post number #5 (at the time of writing).
I don't think we need invoke any conspiracies for that; HN's algorithm is ever mysterious. Yesterday a submission of mine hit the front page in 3 seconds with no upvotes.
