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Re:TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship by yorwba on Sunday November 24, 2019 @08:11AM (#21620199)
> avoid articles about those geographical locations because comments will be mostly negative

Comments on most topics skew negative. If you agree with something, that's not much reason to comment, but if you disagree, one angry comment coming straight up. That's not limited to the geographical regions you list; most threads on those have a subthread devolve into a discussion of US politics at some point.

> and any dissenting view will be downvoted until it becomes unreadable.

The comments that get downvoted until they become unreadable are mostly dissenting, but that doesn't mean dissenting views collect more downvotes than upvotes on average. When dang bans someone for making a single-purpose account for ideological battle, they usually have positive karma, often in the hundreds: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re:TikTok: Cheerfulness and censorship by oefrha on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:51AM (#21621075)
Single-purpose accounts that are in the black typically post more concerting or at least ambivalent comments than dissenting ones.