I don't mean to pick on you personally at all, but I have to reply to you a third time in this thread.
This comment not only broke the site guidelines terribly, it became aggressive enough to count as harrassment. You simply can't bully another user like that on HN. We ban people for that.
Let's look at the larger picture for a minute. Geopolitics between China and the West have taken a polarizing turn. Hacker News' audience is highly international but majority Western, so most users here identify with one side of the story. That's natural, but it means that people representing the other side are in a minority position. No matter how wrong you think their position is, you and other HN users need to treat the people you're arguing with respectfully. Otherwise we get a mob dynamic, which is vastly more destructive to HN than comments being wrong about China—and unfortunately there has been a lot of it lately. HN users who have a Chinese background, or have lived in China and so on, have a right to present their side of the story without being accused of being spies or foreign agents and run out of town. The site guidelines ask you to "assume good faith" for good reason: when people don't, it turns a functioning community into a tire fire.
Our experience with the issue of astroturfing is that internet users are all too eager to imagine it about commenters they just happen to disagree with. Having imagined it they then feel entitled to sling the accusation to twist the knife a bit further in an argument. That's not ok. If you're genuinely concerned about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. But it's not ok to casually insinuate it in the threads: most of the time there's no evidence for it, and the accusation is a powerful poison in its own right.
This comment not only broke the site guidelines terribly, it became aggressive enough to count as harrassment. You simply can't bully another user like that on HN. We ban people for that.
Let's look at the larger picture for a minute. Geopolitics between China and the West have taken a polarizing turn. Hacker News' audience is highly international but majority Western, so most users here identify with one side of the story. That's natural, but it means that people representing the other side are in a minority position. No matter how wrong you think their position is, you and other HN users need to treat the people you're arguing with respectfully. Otherwise we get a mob dynamic, which is vastly more destructive to HN than comments being wrong about China—and unfortunately there has been a lot of it lately. HN users who have a Chinese background, or have lived in China and so on, have a right to present their side of the story without being accused of being spies or foreign agents and run out of town. The site guidelines ask you to "assume good faith" for good reason: when people don't, it turns a functioning community into a tire fire.
Our experience with the issue of astroturfing is that internet users are all too eager to imagine it about commenters they just happen to disagree with. Having imagined it they then feel entitled to sling the accusation to twist the knife a bit further in an argument. That's not ok. If you're genuinely concerned about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. But it's not ok to casually insinuate it in the threads: most of the time there's no evidence for it, and the accusation is a powerful poison in its own right.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site when posting here, we'd be grateful.