[dang]

I'm not sure what your point is. Obviously majority vote does not decide the truth, and ignorant people don't know what they're talking about. And still we have to try to find a way to operate this forum and not allow people to destroy it. Burning the community down doesn't serve the truth in any way.

[radmuzom]

Nice talk, but you are one of the biggest offenders by using moderation powers to curtail discussion around topics which may not fit the majority world-view while refusing to treat the view of ignorant morons similarly. I have seen it happen several times over the last decade. And no, I am not going to present any "evidence" here.

[dang]

I'll match your evidence-free comment with one of my own: you have no idea how hard we work to do just what I described above, and how much pressure we come under because of it.

Re what you've "seen happen several times over the last decade": I'm sure you've seen some dots, but how you connect them into the picture you've got is not a thing you've seen, but something you yourself have made out of the dots. If you started with different priors, you'd collect different dots and build a totally different picture—and believe me, people do.

Your (and others') dot collections are smatterings of datapoints out of which, like magic beans, you can grow whatever beanstalk of bias you want. People with different priors have different tastes in datapoints and "ignorant morons", therefore collect different beans, and therefore grow different visions of massive, outrageous bias—and they're all just as angry about it.

[radmuzom]

> you have no idea how hard we work

I'll believe it when I see "anti-China" posts being removed from the first 3-4 pages with as much enthusiasm as much as "anti-US" posts. Or when flags are removed from posts related to death of Kobe Bryant (or conversely, discussion about the death of a nobody like Bill Gates' father demoted by moderation action).

[refenestrator]

Look at this immediate thread above your comment, majority vote did decide the truth about how Chinese people think (they're brainwashed!). Then you scolded someone who got salty about it.

[dang]

If you want to have some actual influence over how we handle these situations, I need you to engage with the detailed explanation I gave above. If you think you know a better way to handle it, I'd like to hear how, but if you don't even try to respond to the argument (and worse, if you just post glib dismissals), that comes across as blaming us for a difficult situation that we actually work hard as hard as we can to try to mitigate. This is not helpful.

[refenestrator]

Ok, fine. Food for thought:

You'd probably like to ban the topic entirely, but it'd be weird to have one banned topic and you've said that doesn't work, so that's out.

So what's left, being even-handed, I guess. Except it's a 10-1 ratio, so being even-handed, ban people from both sides leaves you with a 9-0 ratio.. congrats? Even if you're really, really, really trying to be even-handed with regards to content, most people would bias towards handing out 50-50 to feel fair, while 10-1 (or whatever ratio) is actually statistically fair. But that would feel quite biased if you did it! Practically taking a side! So we get a phenomenon where a bad Chinese-adjacent comment (or even a polite one) is super likely to be moderated, but you can't possibly moderate all of the really bad anti-China comments in this thread, there's too many, they rule the day and they establish truth for passersby.

Tech is one of the few industries with a large Chinese minority during this time of rising tension. It would vastly improve the intellectual tone of the site if we had more of them explaining their viewpoint and less of people telling them they're brainwashed.

Failing that, I think the actual real-world answer is to pro-actively push down the repetitive anti-China stories that hit the front page multiple times a week, and then just deny it if anyone asks. They're not intellectually interesting, they're hostile to a significant tech minority, and you don't like the flamewar. Why keep them?

[dang]

I wouldn't like to ban the topic. I would like people to treat each other respectfully.

I agree with you that it would be better for HN if Chinese users, and users of Chinese background, could share more of their experiences and observations. I've been arguing that for a long time, as I believe you know. But it's not super cool of you to be making that argument as long as your own contributions to HN are undermining that possibility. We're each responsible for how we individually affect the collective situation, and pointing the finger at others—even if they're behaving badly, and even though they're benefitting from an unfair, lopsided fight—is not helpful.

[refenestrator]

That's not good enough.

HN will continue to trend towards having 2-5 content-free "china bad amirite" threads a week with an echo chamber of people who don't know any history of the region saying completely nonsensical things. People who know a little more, or who point out things like "the belt and road initiative isn't a literal road and can't be used to invade someone" will be banned for contributing to flamewar.

For example, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29655341[1]. You can't be everywhere, there will always 10x comments like that for every 'bad' comment going the other way, and your even-handedness means that 9/10 of them are implicitly judged as fine, acceptable and encouraging intellectual something-or-other.

[1] Check that guy's history, he writes Xi Jinping as Hsi Chunping.. his commitment to ideology is so strong that he wade-giles'd Xi, lol

[dang]

I've been trying to persuade baybal2 for years to stop breaking the site guidelines, and have banned and unbanned him over the years, but you're quite wrong in your assumptions—he has a lot of experience in the region and knows a lot. Not only that but people have attacked him unfairly in the past here too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898). I also don't believe that he's primarily an ideologue—his comments (at least many of them) are more interesting than that. Whether he was using an obsolete transliteration as flamebait or not is beyond my ability to say, but he's not a native English speaker, so maybe there are some crossed signals here too.

This is a good example of how people jump to conclusions and assume the worst about each other. It's no more ok when you do that than when other users do it, even if you are (or feel you are) part of a minority that gets treated unfairly.

I understand and empathize about how frustrating this is—but lashing out at the very people who are bending over backwards to try to bring some semblance of tolerance and neutrality to an impossible situation is neither nice nor helpful.

I've discussed the lopsided dynamic of these conversations with you many times. The question is how to deal with it. No matter how frustrating it is, it's important not to respond to ignorance by losing your cool, becoming abusive, and so on. When you do that, you're reinforcing the very situation you deplore, and by that you actually make yourself responsible for the status quo. Each of us has a small quantum of energy to contribute, and it's important not to use yours to cause further harm (even when it's for deep reasons).

It's much better to respond to ignorance patiently and with good information, seeking points of connection and opportunities to treat the other person better than they expect and maybe better than they deserve (or you feel they deserve). Then you're investing your quantum in a good way. Also, it's good to remember that we're all ignorant, just about different things, and we all share the same hard-wiring that causes people to project bad things into dark spaces and thus treat each other poorly. If you happen to know more about $topic and thus can see how ignorant others are, that's not because you're better than them, or any different from them in the end. It's an accident of circumstance.