If you feel my tone was aggressive, condescending or negative in other ways then I’m sorry.
I think it’s an unfair interpretation to believe that I don’t want to use HN as intended, I’m just tired of seeing every thread that’s critical of China head down the same path. You said:
> That is not at all an accurate description. This is a classic example of how people feel like the site is biased against their point of view even when it's the dominant one.
The US whataboutism is undeniable, you also acknowledged it yourself, while highlighting the same thing happened with Russian threads. I think it’s naive to believe that “all this shows is what controversy is hot right now”. Because it’s a common and effective tactic that occur on all social media, and in threads that aren’t related to China/Russia, everyone usually seem to be able to behave and stay on-topic.
As for mass flagging and quick downvotes, I can only make assumptions based on personal experience and careful observations (been using HN for over half a decade and tend to refresh the site every few minutes). You seem to blame/credit moderators for causing the threads to disappear, whereas I was under the impression it was often caused by mass flagging.. so I’m genuinely curious if flagging a thread has any effect on its position, or if it simply alert a moderator to take a closer look.
Could you clarify one thing: if a thread has already reached the frontpage (and is in a position where it should only continue to gain popularity rather than disappear, e.g. 50 upvotes in 20 minutes), does mass flagging the thread have any influence on its score? Because from outside observations it surely seems like it does, especially when you take into consideration that I’ve on several occasions seen a thread get knocked out, only for a moderator to push the thread back to the frontpage again.
I would also argue that by allowing users to resort to US whataboutism then these comments break multiple rules by introducing flamewars and engaging in political battles.. which, in my opinion, result in you failing to prevent (a) mind-numbing repetition, and (b) earth-scorching flamewars.
I’m also very curious about the logic behind down-weighting this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336543. In my opinion, it’s very high quality journalism, with two journalists risking their lives to give unprecedented access to a region that’s been technologically cut off from the rest of the world. I also believe it’s the first time we saw what China did to the children of the families that had been sent to the camps.
It's really not. If you spent 10 minutes on HN Algolia and looked through all threads that reference China in the title (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...), and then visited the comment section of any thread that had no relation to USA (e.g. "WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me", "Report on forced organ harvesting in China", etc.) then you'll always find Chinese nationalists/shills resorting to US whataboutism.. You can try to do the same with any other country, and you won't see this trend.
It's also very common for threads that are negative towards China to quickly disappear from the frontpage for no reason despite just recently appearing, or even being at the first position. An example from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336543. I really don't understand how you can deny this.
Every thread that paints China in a negative light on HN always follow the same pattern:
- USA whataboutism
- Mass flagging (resulting in the story getting knocked off the frontpage despite having a great upvote, comment and submission ratio)
- Comments negative towards China receive 1-5 quick downvotes before slowly climbing back to normal again
It’s really unfortunate that an otherwise well moderated community is so easily defeated by this abuse, and that there appear to be nothing being done to fix it despite many obvious and simple solutions (ignore flags and downvotes by those who abuse them, ban shills that resort to whataboutism from posting in threads containing /China/Chinese keywords).
I think it’s an unfair interpretation to believe that I don’t want to use HN as intended, I’m just tired of seeing every thread that’s critical of China head down the same path. You said:
> That is not at all an accurate description. This is a classic example of how people feel like the site is biased against their point of view even when it's the dominant one.
The US whataboutism is undeniable, you also acknowledged it yourself, while highlighting the same thing happened with Russian threads. I think it’s naive to believe that “all this shows is what controversy is hot right now”. Because it’s a common and effective tactic that occur on all social media, and in threads that aren’t related to China/Russia, everyone usually seem to be able to behave and stay on-topic.
As for mass flagging and quick downvotes, I can only make assumptions based on personal experience and careful observations (been using HN for over half a decade and tend to refresh the site every few minutes). You seem to blame/credit moderators for causing the threads to disappear, whereas I was under the impression it was often caused by mass flagging.. so I’m genuinely curious if flagging a thread has any effect on its position, or if it simply alert a moderator to take a closer look.