zlacker

"Political" or "controversial" content is always^H^H^H^H sometimes punished by HN (sorry, dang). While I think this is a highly questionable policy which is itself political in nature (reinforcing as it does the status quo), it need not be specific to China.

A statement would certainly be nice, however.

>>dTal+(OP)
This explains the flagging. It does not explain the 'duplicate content' article from CNN on the origins of the Tank Man photo, which I believe requires HN moderator activity.

>>dTal+(OP)
I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them. (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article). Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising this realised that flagging an article is effectively downvoting it.

>>dTal+(OP)
That is false. If you changed "always" to "sometimes" you'd be on the green. I've written about this extensively:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.

If you (or anyone) takes a look at that material and still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Please just make sure that you've actually familiarized yourself with the past explanations, though, because the odds are good that they do answer the question.

>>0-_-0+C7
No one is organizing anything. It is all just community + software + moderation interacting normally. People read sinister "organization" into it purely because of their pre-existing conceptions. It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more.

I say that based on looking into literally thousands of such cases, and spending god knows how many hours poring over data. My comments are based exclusively on what I know about HN—I know nothing at all about other sites because I don't have their data. But I know a lot about HN, and I can tell you that the users making breathless insinuations about this stuff have literally no idea what they're talking about. The truth is just painfully boring. (Edit: here's a detailed explanation - >>27397230 .)

As for why the comments in such threads get downvoted, that is easily explained by the fact that flamewar topics attract shitty comments, and shitty comments get shittier as people get politically and nationalistically riled.

>>dang+8a
Not american here. My reponse is not directly to this subthread, but to likening this subject to politics.

I think there is a massive difference between political discourse (which are mostly about opinions) and fact vs lies discourse (which I would qualify as one where something that is definitely provable or in this case definitely happened is denied as untruth or never happening by one side, with said side pushing for increased conflict in the discourse so as to get the entire thing stopped).

I understand the wish and sometime need to push the first away, but the second is entirely different and when you agree to push it away you are by default siding with the lies faction, even if you have a very good and valid and pure reason for it. The question then remaining being, what obligation has a platform that's massively use for discourse to remain partial to those things ? Legally none, at least in the US. Morally, to each their own.

I understand the issue is way more complex than that, and that you have a third type of discourse which uses the same rules to push something false (eg bill gates vaccine nanobots get activated by 5g !!!), and I have no idea what the correct solution is or isn't. Just wanted to maybe clear out why "we're not taking side" is taken by some as taking sides.

>>0-_-0+C7
I've downvoted everyone in an entire thread before. Not because I'm a member of a shadowy organization (otherwise I'd be blowing my cover posting this) but because all of them were really bad. HN being HN, usually someone will take the time to write a good comment, but especially on emotionally charged topics, the earliest comments will be both short and just a reflection of the posters views before they read the article (if they read it at all) which makes it likely I'll consider them downvote-worthy.

I think there are probably quite a few users who behave similarly. But there's no need for us to form an organization, because each of us can just use the user-moderation tools as intended, without having to coordinate our actions with each other.

>>dang+kb
> It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more.

This is a really insightful way of describing this phenomenon.

>>nolok+yd
I appreciate your comment but I think you make a mistake in treating "facts" as if fact-discourse is somehow different than political discourse. I don't mean 'there are no facts' or 'truth is what you make of it' or anything like that. Rather, the problem is one of selection. There are infinitely many facts. Selecting the facts that serve your purpose and omitting the ones that don't is not only a political choice, it's the quintessence of political discourse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

While I certainly agree (if I hear you correctly) that truth matters and there is such a thing as loving the truth for its own sake, I don't agree that public discourse can be divided in the way you posit. Quite the opposite.