Re:What really happened to Jack Ma?
by rorykoehler on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @03:24PM
(#27764845)
YC got out of China but still invests in Chinese companies. At least that's what the press release that I read said. Is that wrong?
I have no idea. I'm pretty sure YC funded companies all have to be incorporated in the US. But just to repeat the important point, that has literally zero to do with how we moderate these threads. How am I able to say that? Because I'm the one doing the moderation, and I can tell you that "gosh I'd better tell HN commenters not to post flamebait about the great Xi because it might affect some investments I don't know about" is not going through my head.
Re:What really happened to Jack Ma?
by rorykoehler on Thursday July 08, 2021 @05:08AM
(#27769712)
OK. For the record I believe you however I would like to clarify I'm not wrong on the facts but I was wrong on the motivations. I hope you understand that the questions aren't personal but a reaction to what is happening in the broader world. What grated me was you calling it nationalism. Calling out that Xi is committing crimes against humanity has nothing to do with nationalism unless you conflate the CCP with China which is a standard tactic of authoritarian regimes. It is quite literally a core tactic in their playbook. Every day we hear new stories about how the propaganda arm of the CCP is subjugating western institutions to do their bidding, using the weakness of the capitalist system and ideology (prioritising financial gain above all else) against us.
All in all I really meant that I appreciate the work that you do. You do an excellent job in maintaining HN as my favourite forum on the internet. I understand this is probably wearing you thin so I'm going to leave it now but I hope you can understand why I felt it necessary to clarify the above.
As it turns out, you're wrong on the facts as well. YC got out of China years ago. But none of that ever had anything whatsoever to do with how we moderate HN. It's much more straightforward: we don't want predictable, tedious, nasty flamewars on HN, we want the opposite.
That's literally all there is to this, even though I routinely get accused of being a secret agent, stealth activist, or some other sinister entity just for doing this silly job. The only non-obvious mechanism at work here, indeed the sole aspect that isn't brain-dead in its obviousness, is continually trying to figure out new ways to explain this to the community.