Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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The big difference is that Nazi Germany wasn’t as fundamentally important to us getting larger, cheaper TVs. Economics clearly trump everything else. It’s ok to harvest organs from countless members of ethnicMinorities as long as the system that does it helps out bottom line. If the Soviet Unions economic system has worked well, we would have supported them too /s

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I think you underestimate just how much of the US's immigrant population and culture was either directly German or German-influenced leading up to and in the early years of WWII.

That's a bond that was not easily severed.

i think you are conflating fake accounts supporting china or pro china people from people who are liberal democrats. they are mostly different.

You do realise this forum is run by a venture capital firm? If you're being downvoted it's not because HN is a communist stronghold.

Democracy is indispensable to socialism. - Lenin

The pro-china movement on HN is extremely strong. It's fun to look at all the pro-China commenters, and then look through the account history for how long their account has existed, the kind of articles they submit and their comments.

It couldn't be more obvious.

You do realize that Y Combinator the business is a separate entity from the thoughts and views of the thousands of people who comment here, right?

pg and dang aren't sitting here in the comments slapping everyone for posting their political ideologies. There certainly is not a small number of commenters with a negative view of capitalism here.

Just search for phrases like "late stage capitalism" and you'll find them.

> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’. When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.

-- Norman Finkelstein

> Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.

-- Traudl Junge

My points being

1.) to not compare, even with mass murder, is not being respectful to the victims of the Nazis, and it doesn't make them alive again. It simply means having a reason to look away, today, from the people who need your attention, now.

2.) If 10 billion people shrugged and said "nothing to see here", even one person seeing what they claim doesn't exist would prove that the others could have seen it, too. If ignorance is the result of not wanting to know, it's not really ignorance that could free one from culpability.

Playing the devils advocate, maybe they are using an alt account because they don’t want people like you finding them in real life.

I don't think most lefty-left Westerners are also pro-China. I know in my circles going after China—however ineptly and weakly—is probably the only major thing Trump's done that any of us agree with.

Translation: "Let me dismiss and trivialize that which I'm too scared to admit might be true." Good luck keeping on pretending the opinions of a large chunk of the world don't exist, don't make sense or don't matter.

Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?

Sure, I guess it's easier to pretend the other side doesn't really exist, than to come to understand it. Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?

That's not what playing devil's advocate means in the slightest.

You're making the argument that pro-China activists have more to fear in their online presence than Hong Kong activists? Could you point to some data that backs this up, because it overwhelmingly appears to be the opposite.

That's not playing devil's advocate, it's just projection, i.e. those who pay attention to the stifling of resistance against violence and murder are the real dangerous people, projecting what they resist on them.

Look at it this way- they basically are not allowed to say anything else. I pity them but at the same time I hope things improve for them.

I've run into it on Reddit over a period of time last year as well.

The key identifier for me was what seemed to be either a certain level of intellectual dishonestly, or a real language barrier as sometimes their responses felt like a misunderstanding ... and then the real kicker were the identical links to US news sources that inevitably involved some US college professor (they like those stories) but also didn't quite say what they thought the story said.

If it was a real language barrier it was kinda sad as it was clear they couldn't understand what I was saying in English and their response was sometimes equally baffling to me.

Thanks for proving my point so succinctly!

For the record I'm not complaining about "genuine" Chinese people expressing their opinions. As you said, it's important they have a voice, and we should listen.

What I'm pointing out is the increasing number of accounts that are very, very obviously paid or otherwise government controlled to influence opinions on HN (and obviously elsewhere on the internet)

Do you have some examples? It'd be good if we could keep a list and screenshots of this sort of thing, with some research into the usernames.

I hear people on Reddit talk about 'Russian bots' constantly and I've always wanted to see some examples on a site like HN/Reddit.

The above person lists his Github account and AFAIK he's not a paid shill, just a political contrarian or provocateur for political ends. Which IMO is an important difference if we're going to accuse everyone of being bots and "paid shills".

A green name with a single comment being downvoted immediately isn't influencing opinions here, they can't even downvote. But it'd be interesting to measure their frequency as well for a research project.

If it's voluntary, they could voluntarily say nothing instead.

Right. I'd love to see something like this done for HN.

https://twitter.com/AirMovingDevice/status/11811206016430735...

At the risk of being labeled one myself... there are no examples. I've seen dang respond to complaints like this many times and every time it was real people with real profiles being accused of shills, trolls etc.

Also, if you look it up it's almost all politics threads wrt China this year on HN with overwhelming anti-China sentiment, yet here we are, arguing about pro-China influence being too strong.

Then the question is no longer about how many shills are objectively out there that can be quantifiably measured, because this fact is obviously not what people have been basing their accusations on, but what results in the very question of shills being raised in the first place.

The only theory I can think of would be Chomsky's fifth filter, that is, a common external enemy that helps maintain consensus and divert ideological stress from internal antagonism, be it terrorists, Russian trolls, Chinese shills. This is compounded by the universalist belief that it is impossible to hold "genuine" political thoughts other than the End of History liberal democracy project, which is in itself beset on all sides already, making it all more intense.

So in this discussion [1] Checkout all the replies from 'baybal2'. Like this one [2].

Now look at the submissions for that account [3].

Now read more of the comments [4].

That account has been around a while, so I'm not sure it qualifies as "shill", but it certainly seems suspect to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21124115

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126141

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=baybal2

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=baybal2

The other side exists. They have their opinion. I deny them the right to censor me, though.

> Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?

If the other side was doing the same, sure. The other side is actively denying my side the right to speak, though. I give zero empathy to their actions.

> Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?

You don't find it arrogant for China to try to prevent the rest of the world from saying that they support Hong Kong? You don't find it ignorant for China to try to keep information from the west out of China via the Great Firewall? You don't find that "closing your mind"?

China has no right to appeal for us to show those values, when China so clearly has no interest in them itself. (Yes, we should support the values that we claim. China has no right to demand that we do, though.)

"Voluntary" under pressure or fear for safety, repercussions, of course is not voluntary.

Agreed. It's important to understand such things - to have compassion. It's why I also try to explain the circumstances in detail - in hopes that it may reduce the indoctrination, help them develop critical thinking further; building secret allies within the tyrant's machine.

I give empathy due to the coercion (active or passive), relatively forcing them to act in the way they do - but I don't stand idle.

There's not only ignorant behaviour coming from the tyrant-lead China, however the hypocrisy is blatantly obvious. Makes me think of the pro-China indoctrinated students in Canada (and elsewhere) who have the freedom to protest whatever they want, yet they're protesting to allow censorship and against freedom of peaceful assembly; it's clear indoctrination, likely with fear of consequences with falling out of line (for themselves, friends, family) - their own critical thinking perhaps not developed, and perhaps stunted from development - tied into whatever propaganda they're actively fed.

What I want to see is the HN data - anonymized if necessary, so we can calculate averages - and know what accounts are behaving in what brigading behaviour; and so in essence the community of HN can crowdsource moderation - at minimum to help spot and highlight patterns, so each reader or user can independently analyze, interpret and decide for themselves what the data means.

The vast majority of users doing this will be real people who're simply indoctrinated - it's why China's tyrant leadership and censorship/control mechanisms is so effective, albeit powerful - however I don't like wrongly conflating the idea of what true power is with control.

Amateur spammers will create new accounts as needed.

Well-run psyops will build and curate accounts over a longer period of time.

Your comments here and below have broken the site guidelines badly. Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.

No one who reads these threads remotely objectively would say "The pro-china movement on HN is extremely strong". Accounts that argue that side are a tiny minority, and frequently get barraged with accusations of bad faith, which is a form of internet bullying. It's true that people sometimes create throwaway accounts to argue the other side. But it's easy to understand why—like I just said, they get barraged.

When we look into such cases, we nearly always find—to the extent that we find anything—that these commenters are people in Western countries who are either of Chinese background, have experience in China, or are Chinese expats. Sometimes they are Westerners living in China. Overwhelmingly, the evidence is that they are good faith users just like you are, who have different backgrounds and experiences from you, which lead them to see the same situations differently than you do. What that calls for is not accusation and suppression but tolerance. As a seasoned HN user, someone who has shared many of your own wide-ranging experiences over the years, you ought to be practicing and modeling that for others.

Could they be spies or shills or foreign agents? Sure they could; so could you. What can we do other than look for evidence? Some evidence of something—anything. You have zero evidence for making these dramatic sinister claims, which poison discussion and destroy community. Just imagine if someone accused you of being a paid propagandist or spy when you were simply posting in good faith. This is a mob behavior. It's not welcome on HN, which is why we have that guideline. (No, not because we're pro-Chinese or secret communists.)

How you leap from zero evidence to "it couldn't be more obvious" or (downthread) "the increasing number of accounts that are very, very obviously paid or otherwise government controlled to influence opinions on HN" is really shocking to me. You're far from the only user doing this—it's rampant—but it's utterly dismaying to see a longstanding and good HN contributor pouring this poison in here by the bucket.

By the way, when we find accounts that are using HN primarily for political battle, including nationalistic battle, we either ban them or ask them to stop. We do that regardless of what they happen to be battling for—it's against the site guidelines either way. But I can tell you from the heart, as the person responsible for keeping the peace here, that pro-China accounts doing such things are barely a blip of an issue compared to comments like the ones you posted here. They exist, but they're impotent. It's comments like yours, which manifest the real shadow of this community, that have me scared and worried for HN.

You managed some sort of internet trifecta here: Reddit, Nazis, and astroturfing.

This comment breaks several of the site guidelines badly. Could you please read them and follow them here from now on? We've had to ask you this before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You couldn't be more wrong, and the example shows how rooted these discussions are in imagination and skirt the margins of some truly ugly behaviors, which I'm certain you would never knowingly engage in.

I know who baybal2 is—we've exchanged perhaps a couple dozen emails over several years. I know his name and nationality. (Unless you want to argue that he's been emailing under a false identity? That's what spies do, after all.) He's someone with a technical background who's done extensive business in China. His views come from those experiences and no doubt from the rest of his background. This gives him a perspective that's very different from that of more mainstream HN demographics. Do we want a community member like that here? Or would we prefer to hound him out with suspicion and insinuation? Of course we want a community member like that here.

Why all the emails? Because for a while we were repeatedly banning and/or penalizing his account when it broke the site guidelines. When we think a user is persuadable, we'll often try to persuade them by email to use HN in the intended spirit. baybal2 may not have fully cleared that bar, but he's come a long way and that counts for a lot. And if you read his emails you'd see that he's a nice guy who means well and mostly has no idea when he's breaking the rules here; in other words, much like you and me.

Had you taken the time to really look, you'd find posts about traveling wave reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175545) and biaxial helicopters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21168582) and Economist articles (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20950878) just in the last month. This is not how "suspect" accounts behave. This is how normal users, who are as intellectually curious as you and simply have a different background and perspective, post to HN.

In most cases, you can easily figure this out simply by taking the time to look at an account's public posting history. Unfortunately, what people seem to do instead is see a handful of data points—and when I say "handful" I'm being generous—that pattern-match a pre-image they have in their minds ("pro-Chinese agent" or whatever). From those few data points, they autocomplete the rest of the dots into a sinister picture—the picture they already had to begin with. Once they've done that several times, a feeling of pressure builds up that they call "overwhelming evidence" or something like that, which they can't help but vent into the threads. This is the real problem, not the posting history of someone like baybal2.

I feel ambivalent about writing this. On the one hand, it's important to look at specific examples that illuminate how this internet phenomenon of accusing others of astroturfing, etc., fundamentally comes from projection: reading into external situations the image that one carries in oneself. This community badly, deeply needs to take that insight in.

On the other hand, it feels sickening to pick apart individual histories in public. Because we have baybal2's email address, I can at least check in with him. But there have been other cases where that wasn't an option, including this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358, which had a mixed outcome. The user who made the accusation responded magnanimously. Unfortunately, though, the accused user really was hounded off HN and never came back. IIRC, they sent an eloquent email but refused our invitation to keep participating—or maybe that was someone else. There have been many such cases, including one that's sitting in the inbox right now, that I have yet to figure out how to reply to.

Is that really the community we want to be?

Thank you for taking the time to type out such detailed and thoughtful replies here and down thread. I sincerely appreciate your input and perspective.

Obviously you have infinitely more experience and insight than I do, and you have given me a lot to think about. I had never before realized that it is in fact me who is the toxic element in this community by singling out individuals and putting them on trial. I feel bad about it (as I should) and I will never do that again.

Down thread you linked to [1], and I also appreciate your thoughtful and detailed explanation there. I agree with you that putting individuals on trial pitch-fork style is not a nice path to go down, though I can't help wonder if there isn't a "bigger picture" or anonymized way to demonstrate to the community (or just me) that the "shill" problem isn't really an issue on HN.

Like you said I seem to have jumped to the conclusion that "paid government influencers" (for want of a better term) are at work on HN, and it feels like it will be a hard assumption to shake. I'm at a point in my life where I utterly distrust any media, and I have extended that to social media. I strongly believe that virtually everything we are given from media is only one perspective, and typically it's given to us that way to benefit the entity giving the media (financial or political power).

I can only imagine how busy you are, so I feel bad adding to your stack. Would you have any interest in writing a blog post, or a "sticky" with numbers and and data that demonstrates how you know the shill problem on HN is minor? I'm thinking something along these lines [2] , though I'm sure you have way better ideas than I do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358

[2] https://twitter.com/AirMovingDevice/status/11811206016430735...

Thanks for such a calm and kind reply. I've not gone easy on you and I know it sucks to get those sort of moderation comments. I hope you can trust that it's absolutely not personal and that my point was directed at the community, not you.

I do need to write something more definitive about this, if only so I can link to it in the future instead of writing variations of the same comment over and over again, which is slowly driving me crazy. But I fear it won't convince anyone. Personal interactions, like the one we're having here, sometimes seem to move the needle—which btw goes a long way toward repairing the hopelessness I often feel about this issue. But I'm unsure how to effectively deliver this message to the community as a whole, or if that's even possible.

My gut feeling about a statistical analysis is that it would probably be unsatisfying and stir up more objections than it settled. That tweet you linked seems to depend on much higher volume, 1000x if not more, compared to what we see on HN. That is, he's analyzing 5000 instances of a measurable kind of comment, of which HN probably wouldn't even get 5 over the same time period. Trying to analyze the HN corpus on these questions would be frustrating, because you'd be forced into semantic analysis right away and no one would agree whether you'd done it right. But I'm open to suggestions.

Thank you dang. I often think about how great of a job you're doing here and wondered if I could build a Reddit replacement built on your approach to community building. It's such a challenging problem to solve. I wonder if a strong creed and hiring approach could scale up to a larger site but I have my doubts.

It can't be easy doing your job and I hope you understand we very much value your work, even if everyone doesn't realize it's being done.

All your peers are doing it and improving their social credit scores. Do you want to fall behind your peers?

Hello,

What would make you to reconsider? I don't really hide my identity on the Internet, and see no reason to do so for as long as I want to have a life.

Can you be one of those men who trolled me and my coworkers on email in July? If so, you need to work harder "to break my life." We were having good laugh reading that silly correspondence on lunch brakes. Very glad that I work in China now, and that people here don't give a f* about such drama, unlike in US.