If you feel the source is misrepresenting the content in order to 'clickbait', such as saying 'a funder of Reddit' rather than 'Tencent' in order to generate extra outrage, then it's appropriate to make the edit. You can email the mods and ask them to make that edit for you if it's too late to do so yourself on the submission.
This post has already been nuked. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't because the mods had an issue with the title, otherwise they'd have edited it themselves as they usually do with bad titles. So no point reaching out now.
There seems to be a pattern with HN and China specifically. Not Russia, not any other major state actor, just China. Whether that's due to the userbase, external influence, or the admins, we'll never really know. Dang sure as shit will never openly comment on this issue even though reddit ended up admitting that they were heavily manipulated by China after a year of denying it any banning anyone bringing it to light. I've seen enough china-themed discussions that are otherwise on par with HN submissions get nuked to know that something's going on.
I've been commenting as openly as I possibly can on this for years now. The issue isn't that we're hiding the truth (as far as we know what it is) from anyone. The issue is that people's perceptions are so conditioned by their passions that it doesn't matter much what the truth actually is. Many people on both sides of this issue perceive every post they agree with as being flagged and removed, and every post they disagree with as being upvoted to the top every time. That's not an exaggeration. As I said to someone yesterday: if evidence were needed here, they could just look at HN itself.
It's wrong to say this hasn't come up about any other country than China. Before the China wave, there was the Russia wave, and passionate users were saying things like: "YCombinator is in the Kremlin's pocket. Wow. I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion. But wow." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631095) and "Russian money might be making this very site possible" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15630920). These perceptions were just as wrong, and by just the same mechanism.
Blaming this one on the content of the material posted misses the forest for the trees, and denies your responsibility to post content of sufficient quality. Newsworthy is not sufficient if it’s filled with outrage and has a clickbait headline.
I flagged it, because I considered the linked headline and writeup to be of excessively poor construction and quality. The material itself was interesting once I grasped it behind the layers of distraction and outrage-rabblerousing, but I can’t endorse that presentation style here and so I absolutely flagged it.
If you had written up a blog post about this event, linked to supporting material such as the Reddit post, and offered some background on why this is new and terrifying — then I might have upvoted it instead of flagging it.
Comments
If you feel the source is misrepresenting the content in order to 'clickbait', such as saying 'a funder of Reddit' rather than 'Tencent' in order to generate extra outrage, then it's appropriate to make the edit. You can email the mods and ask them to make that edit for you if it's too late to do so yourself on the submission.
This post has already been nuked. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't because the mods had an issue with the title, otherwise they'd have edited it themselves as they usually do with bad titles. So no point reaching out now.
There seems to be a pattern with HN and China specifically. Not Russia, not any other major state actor, just China. Whether that's due to the userbase, external influence, or the admins, we'll never really know. Dang sure as shit will never openly comment on this issue even though reddit ended up admitting that they were heavily manipulated by China after a year of denying it any banning anyone bringing it to light. I've seen enough china-themed discussions that are otherwise on par with HN submissions get nuked to know that something's going on.
I've been commenting as openly as I possibly can on this for years now. The issue isn't that we're hiding the truth (as far as we know what it is) from anyone. The issue is that people's perceptions are so conditioned by their passions that it doesn't matter much what the truth actually is. Many people on both sides of this issue perceive every post they agree with as being flagged and removed, and every post they disagree with as being upvoted to the top every time. That's not an exaggeration. As I said to someone yesterday: if evidence were needed here, they could just look at HN itself.
It's wrong to say this hasn't come up about any other country than China. Before the China wave, there was the Russia wave, and passionate users were saying things like: "YCombinator is in the Kremlin's pocket. Wow. I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion. But wow." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631095) and "Russian money might be making this very site possible" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15630920). These perceptions were just as wrong, and by just the same mechanism.
Blaming this one on the content of the material posted misses the forest for the trees, and denies your responsibility to post content of sufficient quality. Newsworthy is not sufficient if it’s filled with outrage and has a clickbait headline.
I flagged it, because I considered the linked headline and writeup to be of excessively poor construction and quality. The material itself was interesting once I grasped it behind the layers of distraction and outrage-rabblerousing, but I can’t endorse that presentation style here and so I absolutely flagged it.
If you had written up a blog post about this event, linked to supporting material such as the Reddit post, and offered some background on why this is new and terrifying — then I might have upvoted it instead of flagging it.