The gross generalizations and shill accusations (mostly thrown against users who actually post "genuinely opposing viewpoints") endemic to these China-related submissions are just icing on the cake.
Overwhelmingly the most common case is people accusing others of posting in bad faith merely because the other's view is so far from their own that they can't conceive of them having it for legit reasons. This is a reflexive reaction—a feeling that we all need to recognize and stop ourselves from expressing in raw form. When people vent it into comments, the result is either war between the two sides, or, if one side outnumbers the other, an ugly mob dynamic in which a few people are ganged up on for being different. Those few either leave, or they become resentful and break the site guidelines badly themselves, as a way of lashing back against unfair treatment. All these outcomes poison the community.
Not to pick on you personally—it happens because of how human nature reacts to the weird conditions of the internet, which we're not wired for. It is hard for all of us to grasp how large and diverse the community is, and how divided it is on divisive topics. Nationalistic themes are some of the most divisive ones, and unfortunately are growing more common these days.
1. People who disregard everything about TFA, to remind everyone for the five hundredth time about <some unrelated crime by CPC>, and <why are we still trading with them>, and <can't we just build a wall around it>, and <the Chinese come here to steal all our things>. These posts, depending on how inflammatory they are, or what side of the bed HN woke up on, tend to hover slightly positive.
2. Green-named accounts speaking in... Non-perfect English, praising some aspect of China. These usually get downvoted to oblivion.
There's also a lot number of posts that express more-reasoned/more-on-topic pro/anti-China viewpoints. I don't consider them to be trolling, and I don't really care what colors the names of the people posting them are.
I think the recent issue with the harassment of the Tibetan student council president(?) by Chinese students shows that it doesn't matter whether it's government-sponsored "trolling" or not. If your government punishes people who aren't outspoken in favor of the Party while abroad, then those people are still shilling on behalf of the Party, even if they're not actually paid to do so.
And while they may have a point, they're often off-topic whataboutism. I believe it's a natural outcome of gamifying discussions with imaginary internet point rewards. The first and most eloquent post that's congruent with the hivemind "wins". It's just human nature.
If we go by the data we actually see, the phenomenon itself is vanishingly rare. Why is there so much commentary then? I can think of two explanations: either the foreign spies are cleverer than we are, or there is something in how human nature meets the internet under current social conditions that is leading to mass projection. And of course it could be both—but how are any claims about the former falsifiable?
As far as I can tell this dynamic has nothing to do with reality. Reality is that the HN community has millions of people, is diverse in many ways including internationally, and is divided on divisive topics. That is already enough to explain the comments that show up. But none of us is wired for dealing with that. We're wired for loyalty to our tribe, needing to feel safe, and suspecting outsiders.
It's painful to encounter a sharp opposing view, and people are angrily sharp on divisive topics. Reframing the other as a foreign spy or whatever insulates you from that. It relieves you from considering what truth there might be in that view, and reinforces loyalty to your own—at the cost of feeling surrounded by infiltrators and enemies. This is poisonous to thoughtful discussion, which depends on people being willing to open to differences and truths they may not yet see.
Since the actual phenomenon is vanishingly rare compared to the insinuations people make about it, we have a rule that users not post such insinuations without evidence. A feeling is not evidence. Even the sense "there are a lot of green accounts saying things I disagree with" is usually just a feeling, because we notice things we dislike more vividly than we notice anything else [1]. People on the opposite side have the opposite perceptions, but the identical feelings.
Notice how when people post claims about astroturfing, trolls, and spies on HN, they don't include links; just as when they make claims about "threads about $topic", they don't include links. Why is this? If the perception were of reality rather than a feeling, specific examples would always be available, yet in practice they almost never are. The discussion falls apart when specific cases are mentioned because (a) people never agree about those, and (b) such data as there is never supports the claim. The discussion always stays in a mist of generality, breeding bacteria of suspicion.
[1] Does anybody know or have a name for this bias? It's a huge factor in these discussions and it needs a good name.
Also, thanks for all the hard work here on HN. I know it's not a glamorous job, but yall are doing a great job handling all this. You work hard and it shows.
I know my comment probably will just reinforce your prejudice/bias, and make you laugh and say "wow see what I said? Another troll started to attack me immediately!!", but I don't care.
> At least they're relatively easy to spot,.. sort of grammatical error
Yeah, because they're Chinese, who are using their second language. It is indeed easy to spot non-native speakers (or Chinese if you will), how does it have anything to do whether they're "government shills" or not? Just because people have a different view from you, and the fact they come from China, don't make them government shills. There are plenty of actual Chinese people like me lurking here (mainly to read tech news).
> while not actually saying they're from China themselves
Since when people need to reveal their nationality to make an argument or opinion on Internet? Should I claim HN are full of "Western trolls", because the anti-China threads/comments here are probably 10x the amount of the pro-China ones (the ratio would be close to 100:1 on some subreddits like /r/worldnews), and 99% never actually "reveal where are they from" (including you)?
Just to save you a click: I'm a Chinese and I often be frank about it. I don't think it should be necessary, since people should judge my comment purely based on what I said, not where I'm from; but because of people like you I have to do so otherwise my comments will be downvoted to oblivion.
> those people are still shilling on behalf of the Party, even if they're not actually paid to do so
Wow. Brilliant, now we don't even need any evidence to proof these Chinese people are shills (not like there is any to begin with, besides they are somewhat pro-China in SOME ASPECTS), they AUTOMATICALLY are.
3. Instant whataboutism used, even if not appropriate or applicable. If you read about the directives of the 50 Cent Party or the old Soviet propaganda machine, this is one of the universal tools used to derail the discussion from the topic at hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/troll...
Now could this just be normal posters using whataboutism? Sure, but we all spend a lot of time on the internet and listening to arguments, it's basically the language of the internet at this point. And you can just get a feel when something is authentic and when it is not, like a bank teller when they get a counterfeit bill and they can tell something is not right.
I agree that these are probably exceedingly rare on HN, but it seems technically implausible that you'd be able to accurately identify them.
Second, some of the analysis can be done by anyone who wants to. When you encounter specific claims of astroturfing or shillage, look at the history of the commenter being accused. Most of the time their track record makes it implausible. If someone has been posting to HN for five years including about, say, garbage collection in Julia, what are the odds that they're secretly a foreign agent? Far lower than that the other user tossed off an accusation without pausing to look. It's usually not even a serious question.
Now consider that these demonstrably low-probability cases are exactly like the rest of the accusations people post here, and one has evidence for a common mechanism underlying the entire class. I don't assert (how could I) that there are no cases of genuine manipulation that fall outside it. But after looking at thousands of such claims, I believe that this and similar tests account for nearly all of them.
(Edit: it's different in cases of startups or projects trying to game HN to promote themselves; that's super common. And more sophisticated corporate astroturfing is something we've occasionally run into. But on these political, national, and ideological issues: zilch.)
> Much more common, however—by far the typical case—is people suspecting someone else of posting in bad faith merely because that other person's view is so far from their own that they can't conceive of anyone having it for legit reasons.
"Oh no, now all the coordinated disinformation campaigns will start posting five years of high-quality good-faith technical discussion on a variety of topics to evade your heuristic" /s
I'm familiar with that account. Their posts, and what private data we have, are completely consistent with who they say they are: a former Google employee and startup founder who has lived in both China and the U.S., has a Kubernetes war story, opinions about Python, Go, PHP, software deployment and so on, and who is frustrated by comments about China here because they feel many commenters don't know what they're talking about. It's natural that someone who lived many years in both countries would feel that way. Some of their comments have broken the site guidelines, but that's a separate issue—and who of us wouldn't, having our integrity attacked outright like they have?
This is clearly a case of somebody being singled out for suspicion because they have different views, formed by different experiences, than others here. When users do that, it puts us in toxic territory. Is it ok to accuse people of being government agents, shills, spies, or astroturfing, just because they have a different view on some geopolitical or economic question? Obviously we need to not go there.
It's fine if you're not persuaded—I don't expect that—but please consider the downside of being wrong. What if this person is as innocent as you are, motivated by the same things as you? Can you imagine what it would be like to show up here and see it debated whether you're a spy and a liar? Even a single case of someone being unfairly subjected to that is unacceptable. If the community is to avoid "sinking its teeth into itself without realizing it" (Schopenhauer's memorable phrase) and falling into a poisonous swamp, we need a presumption of innocence. And so we do: the guidelines say Assume good faith. If you stand on the dry ground of that assumption, I see no path that gets you to that user being a bad-faith actor any more than you or I are.
I feel bad about holding up an individual user to some sort of public trial like this (another reason why the guidelines ask people to email concerns to us rather than posting them here)—can you imagine what that must feel like? But since the issue is the integrity of the community and its moderation I feel like I'd better say something.
Uh, confirmation bias? Your description is a bit off, it's not that "we notice things we disagree with", but that we notice things that confirms our previous beliefs, in this case that green accounts post opinions that you think come from spies or astroturfers.