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Ask HN: Why is HN predominated by pro-ChineseCommunistParty people?

• db48x 7y ago
  They pay people to do that.
  • quotz 7y ago
    Yeah, but even HN? This place is dear to me and now theyre destroying it. Its like they found my secret treehouse...
    • r721 7y ago
      HN is actually quite popular website - SimilarWeb's estimate is 12.6 million visits a month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#overview https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com#over...
      • dang 7y ago
        It's more like 150M visits a month. Edit: 147M in September. Edit 2: I'm talking about page views, plus ajax requests like collapsing subthreads. If by 'visits' you mean user sessions, that number would obviously be lower.
        • r721 7y ago
          Thanks! I heard their estimates can be wildly inaccurate, but I didn't think that can mean wrong by order of magnitude...
    • r721 7y ago
      By the way, I just noticed this: >Traffic by countries >United States 36.66% >China 13.19%
      • dang 7y ago
        That's wildly inaccurate. When I ran the numbers, China was less than 1%.
        • yorwba 7y ago
          Did you notice a drop in traffic when the Great Firewall started blocking HN?
          • dang 7y ago
            When was that?
            • yorwba 7y ago
              Since I'm no longer in China, I rely on GreatFire Analyzer to check: https://en.greatfire.org/https/news.ycombinator.com https://en.greatfire.org/https/news.ycombinator.com According to that data, it started in August, which is also when people started to notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20599249 (Edit: just noticed you were in that thread. I think it was the first; at least I can't find any others with this search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Blocked%20China&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ) The block doesn't seem to be absolute, as some of GreatFire's servers still occasionally get through. Based on previous experience, I guess it's location-dependent, but can't say for sure.
• jstewartmobile 7y ago
  I'm sure CCP has more than enough people in their employ to hasbara the shit out of any public forum. They do it in colleges all across the country! At least they can't get violent on HN. edit: Corporations also police this site pretty hard. Since this is a ycombinator side-project, the resources to fight against that are probably somewhat limited.
  • quotz 7y ago
    They do it in colleges? Could you tell me more about this? I am just hearing about it now.
    • jstewartmobile 7y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students-western-campuses-china-influence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/chinese-students-weste... From what I hear, this problem is even worse in Australia.
      • quotz 7y ago
        Jesus Christ... I dont even know what the solution to this is... Its frightening. I come from an ex-communist country and now live in the US. Cant we ever get away from the mess??
      • quotz 7y ago
        Look at this. I literally posted this comment 10 seconds ago and I got instantly downvoted. What the hell is going on
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
• sawaruna 7y ago
  Reading comments of random topics (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190265) most comments seem to not be siding with China. The HN community certainly isn't pro-CCP, but there are probably just random weibo drones browsing and downvoting anything they disagree with.
  • quotz 7y ago
    I am getting spam downvoting on like a lot of antiCCP comments. Shouldnt HN deploy that feature that some platforms have where you cant mass-downvote one users comments?
    • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      I think they already do have measures to prevent mass downvoting, flagging, vote rings etc. Dang would know more. Downvotes might be because your trope one liner put downs aren't adding much. "I thought the western world was immune to communism", "This place is dear to me and now theyre destroying it", what because we're exposed to views different to ours? Which "they"? Who is to say whatever downvotes you've caught aren't entirely from Western pro-capitalists? As someone not of Asian heritage who has been active in Hong Kong related threads, has friends there, and supports the demonstrators, I can say to my eyes, it is _not_ predominated by pro CCP people. I've certainly had a discussion or two, disagreements, a different view of how history played out - they get their spin from media, we get ours. There's a few people with a distinct perspective. It's always useful to hear the opposing view, or evidence you're mistaken, even if you never reach agreement.
• dang 7y ago
  We've looked into this at length on many occasions. There's no evidence I know of that Chinese agents are manipulating HN. What's happening is that HN is a large community whose members come from many different backgrounds. Among those are quite a few users of Chinese descent who either grew up in Western countries or went there for school or work; and also many Westerners who have gone to China to work or for other reasons. As you might expect, these users have a perspective on China and Chinese-Western relations that is quite different from the majority population on HN which, though highly international, is well over 90% Western and whose views naturally reflect the majority views in their countries. This is what happens when people come from different backgrounds and have different experiences—they end up with different perspectives on things. I know that sounds like a platitude, but it's a platitude with consequences. Many stories relating to the current upheaval in Chinese-Western relations have appeared on Hacker News in the last year, including several intense threads within the last few days. The majority perspective here reflects the Western demographics of the community, but the smaller group I've just mentioned, the users with different backgrounds and experiences in relation to China, is also participating in these threads. When they do, a grinding collision of icebergs occurs, as differing perspectives bump up against each other. When people run into a view that is a little different from their own—say one standard deviation away or less—they tend to respond conversationally. Unfortunately, when they run into a view that is a lot different from their own, the standard reaction is to become hostile. Instead of curiosity and openness, people become suspicious and feel that the other person can't be speaking in good faith. They don't think "wow, that's a really different point of view". They think "astroturfer", "shill", "spy", "bot", "troll", and "communist agent". That's what we're seeing on HN these days. Is it ok for commenters to hurl these accusations against other commenters they disagree with? No it is not. Doing so gratuitously, as a way to expunge discomfort or irritation at what someone else said, is poisonous to HN in many ways: it damages community, banishes tolerance, is uncurious and off topic. It also has a boy-who-cried-wolf or field-of-boliauns effect of making real abuse harder to track down. Worse, when people single out others as targets of these accusations, we end up with ugly mob behavior, with individuals being falsely accused and even being run out of town (examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358). None of us in our right mind wants that here. The way to mitigate this is to have a simple rule of looking for evidence when concerns about abuse come up. If people have concerns about abuse, the site guidelines ask them to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look for such evidence. In the absence of evidence, insinuations about astroturfing, etc., are off topic, for the reasons I described. This problem has a lot of complex dynamics that are not what they seem. For example, because the threads about China and Chinese-Western relations have become so intense and flamewar-prone, the users with minority perspectives who I described are often prompted to create accounts and jump into the threads when they have a strong reaction against something that was posted. Making a new account when you're hot under the collar isn't a great way to participate on HN, but it's not in bad faith either—quite the contrary. However, when such green accounts show up in these threads, espousing contrary views in already-irritated ways, the majority view-holders interpret this as an assault of astroturfers and paid CCP agents. After all, they are green accounts making pro-China comments—nothing could be more obvious! Actually, nothing could be more wrong. What you're most likely getting is (for example, let's say) a Chinese-Canadian Amazon or Microsoft employee, who's been reading HN for years and is suddenly hurt and dismayed by all the aggressive anti-Chinese comments that have been showing up on the site—or (let's say) a Chinese grad student who stayed in the US, got a good job and played by the rules, and back home in China is the one holding the other side of the argument, defending the US and his American friends to his family who have been hearing nasty things about them over there. Or it's (let's say) a Brit who went to China to do business, ended up forging personal connections there, learned lots of things that people in the West don't know, and is appalled by how ignorant the comments that are informed only by media sources can be. Based on all the investigation I've done about this, that's mostly the human side behind those accounts. Of course there are always exceptions—one user, for example, has recently decided to become a serial troll and post virulent anti-Chinese comments (or are they anti-American? I forget), to wreak havoc on the commenters whose emotions are already running high. Ironically they seem to have been set off by a perception of horrendous HN bias against their own position on the topic, and that is how they've chosen to react. Another outlier case was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20236444, when an influx of new Chinese commenters showed up because a link to an HN thread was circulating on the Chinese equivalent of Quora. But those cases are rare. From everything we've seen, the vast majority of comments on this topic are being posted in good faith. The tragedy is that so few users have a large-enough frame to be willing to believe that, and to hear conflicting information without going quickly into inflammation.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• quotz 7y ago
  Now its even flagged. I simply asked a question that would probably be on the mind of a lot of users on here that value their privacy, liberty and human rights.
  • dang 7y ago
    Users correctly flagged it because it's off topic, inflammatory, and inaccurate. I'm working on a slower, more detailed reply to your question at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971. I'll probably finish that in the next hour.
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    FYI, I flagged it as the question was "Why is HN predominated by...". That's presumption without evidence. Who says it is? A couple of downvotes? I just answered a different comment with why I don't think your claim is anything near true.
• ArchieLeach 7y ago
  I've had a quick look at your comments, including in this thread, and I think this is because you post inflammatory, unsubstantive comments. Try to post substantive comments on what you disagree with about China and the CCP, show that you know a minimum the issues at hand, rather than "have we forgotten what liberty is" or "how to defeat the communists"...
  • quotz 7y ago
    Hey thanks for your reply. Why dont you post from your main account? It seems like youre hiding your views from the public? Also, I think theres substantive evidence everywhere online except in the great firewall of china that can be used to conclude that dictatorship and communism is bad. Am I really debating this right now?
    • yorwba 7y ago
      The problem with your comments is not that there's no evidence to support your viewpoint, but that you're not telling anyone anything new. You're just telling everyone how angry you are. This site is for intellectual curiosity first and foremost, if it turns into an ideological battleground then only because we're not good at strictly following rules. I'm not perfect either, but my recent comment history may give you an idea of what I mean by "telling others something new."