I appreciate your many positive contributions to HN, I trust your good intentions, and I definitely don't think you were making the kind of argument that this sounds like. It does still sound like it, though, which is no doubt why you got strong responses below.

If you highlight the first use of the pronoun "we" in my comment, it should be clear that you're responding to a different argument than I was making. (superjan already made this point.)

As for the "sounds like" problem, this string of previous explanations may (or may not) be useful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Agreed, and I of course agree with the argument you actually were making, rather than my misreading of it. Still, it's profoundly disappointing to get responses including the kind of vicious attacks that you see in the thread.

By the way, when you're not in the middle of trying to keep HN users from coming to blows with one another, you might be interested in this comment of mine from yesterday, which gives some context for why I abandoned the site previously, a decision which I recall puzzled you at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389993

Thanks! I will read it with interest once the day's dramas have calmed down.

I think you are misreading him. He says that there is no pressure or indirect influence from china on how HN is run. This is a popular internet forum, of course there’s people trying to push their narrative.

Last time I looked, about 40% of Americans were of German ancestry.

I don't think Angela Merkel is controlling Hacker News.

This is gross.

> There is nothing gross in my comment, tptacek

“Gross” is subjective, so that’s a legitimate viewpoint.

Your comment is overtly, expressly, racist though. For those who find racism gross, its also gross. Obviously, YMMV.

> Your comment, by contrast, amounts to a slanderous innuendo.

I don't think you understand either slander or innuendo if you believe that.

My comment is not racist, either overtly, expressly, subtly, or implicitly. Acknowledging diversity of opinion and the existence of factions does not imply discriminating against any of those factions.

You can find an extensive list of recent comments I've made that are complimentary to China and Chinese people in the last three months in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398213.

I said that many HN users are Chinese and Chinese-American [immigrants]. There is nothing racist about that. The Chinese Communist Party, which is the government of [Mainland] China, is very popular among people from China. There is nothing racist about either of these ideas, nor about drawing the conclusion that if you publicly attack the Chinese Communist Party, you are going to offend a lot of Chinese people, including many HN users.

It's not a logically entailed consequence of the premises—it is theoretically possible that only Chinese people who are opposed to CCP rule, such as many of the students who died in Tiananmen Square, many Taiwanese people, and Falun Dafa members, are HN users—but it is overwhelmingly likely that this is not the case.

Pointing this out is not gross. Falsely accusing people of racism is gross.

The whole sentiment here is gross, but it is particularly fucked up how you keep going out of your way to pull Chinese-American people into it. Why not call me a Papist while you're at it?

If you post a story on HN with a list of historical atrocities attributable to the Roman Catholic Church or to Spanish colonialism, you can definitely expect a significant fraction of Latin American and Spanish people to take exception to it, and I've seen that happen on HN several times in the past. Recognizing and understanding that there are hot-button issues for particular political, national, and ethnic groups is not racism; it's a fundamental part of understanding human diversity, which is necessary in order to achieve peaceful coexistence.

Moreover, it is not necessary to claim that every member of a particular group belongs to a popular factions within that group to do this; it is sufficient to acknowledge a general tendency. For example, there are Latin Americans who are not Catholic, and there are Roman Catholics who deplore the Spanish Inquisition as fervently as any Anglican; nevertheless, if you go around denouncing the Spanish Inquisition as one of the worst things ever to have happened in history in front of a large number of Latin American people, a significant fraction of them are reliably going to object. On HN, they may flag your comment.

Me saying this is not the same as me calling you a "Papist".

What fraction of current Chinese-American immigrants grew up in China in families that were lifted out of poverty by Deng Xiaoping's economic policies? I'm guessing over 10%. How would you expect these people to react to demonization of Deng Xiaoping? Many of them will be offended, either because they regard Deng as a hero or because they see that demonization as being directly motivated by anti-Chinese racism, which in many cases it is: people do sometimes criticize the Chinese government because they hate Chinese people. In other cases, it's a more subtle form of racism, which doesn't directly consider Chinese people bad but considers their feelings unimportant.

And that racism is what I'm standing against, as consistently today as I have for years, as evidenced by my comment history linked above. I don't think a person either has to be racist or have to regard Deng or the CPC as above criticism in order to understand that many Chinese people will be offended by such criticism. Yes, including many Chinese-American people.

Withdraw your baseless attack and apologize.

Addendum: tptacek responded to this with a now-deleted comment saying something to the effect of "I apologize to any Chinese HN users who have to read comments like this."

For what it's worth Kragen, if you ever see this, I understand what you mean and I don't think that you're being racist. We can't even talk about the diversity of humans and what influences their intentions anymore without being called racist.

-Signed a Hindu American living in Asia

I deeply appreciate that. I've been profoundly disappointed in most of this conversation, and your comment is a bright spot.

I think tptacek is the kind of "colorblind" person who would invite you and your parents to dinner at a steakhouse to celebrate, then get puzzled when observant Hindus don't find a beef feast appealing. Probably he thinks it's racist to point out that this is a likely result and would accuse me of stereotyping you, even if I pointed out that some Hindus do eat beef.

I stand by what I wrote, including what I deleted, but I don't want to feed this any further.

"we" doesn't include the users. The users don't operate hacker news. They have an effect on it but it's not top-down censorship which is what's being implied here.

The users certainly have influence over how dang operates the site!

The implications of what you said sound kind of racist to me. I suspect that's why you seem to have been downvoted.

I definitely do not support excluding or discriminating against Chinese users, a practice which is a big problem on HN. I'm just saying that, just as a significant subset of USA users are likely to flag posts that encourage people to burn American flags or claim that the USA is a "white-supremacist state", and a significant subset of Muslim users are likely to flag posts that criticize Muhammad, there's a significant subset of Chinese users who are likely to flag posts that criticize the Chinese Communist Party, even if it's implicit criticism by way of calling attention to particular historical events that its opponents commonly use as rallying points.

My recent comments on China include:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162262 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162354 criticizing another user for an essentialist oversimplified view of Chinese history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161925 criticizing the US for "aggressively escalating the TSMC conflict with targeted attacks on the PRC's nuclear and supercomputing capabilities".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26937581 criticizing coverage of China in the UK press for systematically discounting the sizes of urbanizations in China.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408 tracing the history of Wuxi through three millennia and criticizing its frankly racist dismissal in the UK press.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931665 arguing that Chinese contributions to photovoltaic energy development are huge.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26676997 pointing out that China's vaccination efforts against covid have been head and shoulders above those in the US and Europe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598814 correcting someone who argued that China was merely the source of key materials for photovoltaic energy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542286 pointing out that the UK's covid-testing regime has been pathetically poor compared to China's.

Fair points, I think, to a degree.

Mind you, I wasn't trying to accuse you of being racist. I purposefully phrased my comment the way I did not to be obtuse but to allow for the fact that coming across as racist may not have been your intention. I still think the way you phrased in the comment I replied to had the issue I mentioned.

I agree, and I appreciate it.

yeah true - we really need an ethnicity/nationality test for new accounts before they post to really make sure HN has no foreign CCP influence