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> it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion I agree in about 95% of cases. There are certainly

> it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion I agree in about 95% of cases. There are certainly lots of threads on HN lately that descend into nothing but unhelpful, petty emotional arguments. I try (with mixed success) to avoid most of those myself. But with respect, this is not one of them. This isn't about iOS vs Android, or FP vs OOP, or regulation vs the free market. This is a cut-and-dry moral travesty, and I think the allegation in the GP (which of course we can't know for sure with our limited window into the HN metrics) was that the "flame war" in this case may only exist as a result of artificial and coordinated action by a third party. This type of thing is well-documented on other social sites; it's not hard to imagine it happening here. If that didn't happen, I don't think anybody would continue to ask for intervention.

dang 6y ago
It's against the HN guidelines to post insinuations of third-party manipulation, astroturfing, etc., without evidence, because internet users are overwhelmingly (I mean pick as many orders of magnitude as you want, it's still probably true) too likely to just imagine this stuff out of whole cloth. If we're going to look at such abuses in a sane frame of mind, there needs to be something objective to go on. People holding differing, strongly-felt views about China (or any hot $topic) is no evidence at all. It's evidence of something else altogether: that many people have different views than we do. The core problem is that because we're tribal creatures it's difficult for us to acknowledge that other human beings have different backgrounds and different views than we do. It gets even harder when they're right beside us (albeit virtually) arguing fiercely for views which seem monstrous to us [1]. That's why we're prone to invent explanations of bad faith. The majority invents one sort of explanation (spies and agents are among us) while the minority invents a different sort (you just hate people like me), but both are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance. [1] I wrote a longer explanation of this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, and there are plenty more explanations at links like these: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20-recycling%20chin&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

dang 6y ago

It's against the HN guidelines to post insinuations of third-party manipulation, astroturfing, etc., without evidence, because internet users are overwhelmingly (I mean pick as many orders of magnitude as you want, it's still probably true) too likely to just imagine this stuff out of whole cloth. If we're going to look at such abuses in a sane frame of mind, there needs to be something objective to go on. People holding differing, strongly-felt views about China (or any hot $topic) is no evidence at all. It's evidence of something else altogether: that many people have different views than we do. The core problem is that because we're tribal creatures it's difficult for us to acknowledge that other human beings have different backgrounds and different views than we do. It gets even harder when they're right beside us (albeit virtually) arguing fiercely for views which seem monstrous to us [1]. That's why we're prone to invent explanations of bad faith. The majority invents one sort of explanation (spies and agents are among us) while the minority invents a different sort (you just hate people like me), but both are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance. [1] I wrote a longer explanation of this here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, and there are plenty more explanations at links like these: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20-recycling%20chin&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...