How come China specifically rockets to the top of HN whenever someone finds some negative press? And why did it start after dragonfly was proposed?
But you're right that it's important. We've got to keep building up cultural connections and avoid a cold war. Everyone loses from that. It would be a travesty to give up the amazing human gains of the last 30 years.
And I can't say much about "hate pieces" or whatnot just yet, I only just started to track the rank, score, and comment count of HN stories. So far it seems to go both ways, both things critical of China and positive articles can get penalized. I started doing it because I was suspicious, but then I continued doing it because it helps me find interesting things I would otherwise not have seen (at least not on HN).
For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18595215 https://i.imgur.com/inbQSJe.png
That was never higher than page 6 (the colored bands are pages). And frankly, that's a more interesting and solid article than anything else I saw on HN about that "CRISPR baby", including comments. Oh by the way, did you know the doctor is now missing? If you do, it's not thanks to HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18594814 https://i.imgur.com/0YTEwj4.png
This one had plenty traction, but wasn't allowed to run its course in peace either:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18591521 https://i.imgur.com/jHZMjBf.png
(all graphs go from right to left, dots are in 5 minute intervals, rising line is number of comments, and there green dots mean < 10 comments, yellow < 100, orange < 1000 comments)
To be fair, here's one example I spotted where something got flagged that was not critical of China, and while I can't judge the quality of the article compared to others on the subject, I would say it's a perfectly fine and interesting topic for HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600499 https://i.imgur.com/GiduxhB.png
It's too early to tell, ask me again in 3-6 months. Manipulation of public discourse, even if it's by said public itself, by groups flagging what they don't like, by definition has a public effect that can be measured. Drawing conclusions as to why something is happening is much harder than to find out whether it's happening, but even that will take time. Though the end result will probably be "it's a mess, all sorts of fuckery going on, impossible to tell where one sort of fuckery ends and the next one begins". I do not envy the moderators of this site, that's for sure. But it'll make pretty graphs so there's that.
For the stories I mentioned here's the "worst moments", first column is rank, second is age in minutes, third is score:
I'm trying to err on the side of caution where I can, eg. since a high number of commments can penalize a story IIRC, and I don't know what that number is, I only compare with stories that have less or same number of comments. One thing this can't account for is penalties for getting a lot of comments in a short amount of time (different from total number of comments), so I just ignore that. And instead of figuring out the actual age of a story, I take the "N minutes/hours/days ago" at face value. That also sometimes gets adjusted, here's an example of a very benign post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588069 https://i.imgur.com/PnOCfJP.png
The vertical line is the age jumping to a lower value than it had in the previous timestamp. If I had to guess, I would say this story was flagged by users, then the flags were removed by mods, and shortly after the age was lowered, because it was already too old so removing the flags didn't have much of an effect. Or maybe that's automatic, I have no idea.
Two more examples of adjusted age, though with these I recorded no instances of what I described initially (stories with lower score being higher and all that)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18598179 https://i.imgur.com/ZuUUpQL.png
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18587956 https://i.imgur.com/CwX6mEQ.png
I have no conclusions at this point, but already the strong feeling that it'll be hard if not impossible to draw conclusions. One thing I want to try is to overlay the course of stories that "ran their course" (maybe haven't been seen in the top 10 pages for 3 days or so) into one image, but I need a whole lot more data for that to be useful. I ignore all stories that were already existing before I started this, so it's all still very sparse:
https://i.imgur.com/wvt0et0.png
Notice the occasional shifting up of things, I have no idea what that is yet. The black "lines" are sponsored stories (like $company is hiring $position etc.), i.e. no data for that spot.
2) Most if not all of the china-haters display an astounding lack of context or cultural/historical awareness when talking about China. At their absolute best, they're presenting the xinjiang thing with no context and attempting to define the entire country with it (my wikipedia snark). Or reciting their 5th grade lessons about Russian communism as if that's relevant. At their worst.. it gets really ugly.
Here's what I think is going on: They're against dragonfly 'on principle', but then they hear the case about increased access for Chinese people being a net good. This causes dissonance. How to resolve it? Make the Chinese the bad guys. No more dissonance.
Those of us who know recent Chinese history are very suspicious of such ideological righteousness.
Google search might be convenient for citizens, but claiming that convenience outweighs the moral forfeiture of Google rubber stamping political censorship is a huge jump.
If you don't care about censorship, then it might be obvious to you that Google should move into China. It's not to people who care.
> then they hear the case about increased access for Chinese people being a net good. This causes dissonance.
Not for me, since it's not about "what's good for Chinese non-dissidents", it's about what people who aren't already complicit with totalitarianism must not make themselves complicit with. You can do what you want, but I'll withdraw my support. If someone is a friend with someone who normalizes totalitarianism, I won't be their friend. Nothing more, nothing less, and from where I'm sitting, not my loss at all. What you think turns it all around to a "net good" doesn't even register for me, it's like a few grams on one end of the scale, hundreds of tons on the other.
I'm the kind of humorless German who thinks Germans who "don't want to be bothered about history" should not be allowed to vote (well not literally, but I have no respect for what they are "comfortable" with, I respect history and the demands it places on us, on anyone who would call themselves intellectual doubly so). Compared to that, China and Google and the US have nothing to move me with. There isn't even anything there to hate, for me. They are noobs in a very real sense, never achieved basic mastery in anything I would consider crucial and the minimum, and now innoculate themselves against said mastery. I'm pretty sure that's the distinction between "noob" and "newbie". Oh, and everybody looking down on them is a "hater", can't possibly be someone who knows something they don't. It's always virtue-signalling, never virtue. What must not be can't be.
I can't speak for anyone else. But if you implicitly lump me together with someone I may utterly disagree with on a thousand things, then I'll talk back.
2 fluff pieces, and the story that the linked comment attached to flagged off the front page right quick.
Maybe you want to take a crack at why?
Maybe you want to take a crack at why?