> But it's impossible to have any reasonable discussion on this subject matter when anything remotely negative about the CCP is, somehow, down-voted instantly. And some of the arguments coming from the side defending China are...odd to say the least.

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That applies on Chinese topics as much as any other topic.

We added that rule after years of experience and I don't know how many hundreds of hours poring over data on this. At least on HN, these perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. That is, people perceive such biases based entirely on their pre-existing opinions, and one can reliably predict their opinions from the complaints about bias and secret manipulation that they post. You can find years' worth of cases here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There's a psychological explanation for this phenomenon: pain is more memorable than pleasure. Posts we dislike make a stronger impression than ones we like. We're more likely to notice them and they burn more into the retina, creating an afterimage that's intensely biased—but the bias is in the eye, not the objects. Clear evidence of this is that people with opposing views about X inevitably have opposite views of how the community (or mods) are biased about X. Perceptions of sinister manipulation are a variation of this.

The reason this comes up so often is that HN is a much larger and more diverse community than it seems. People are coming here from all sorts of different backgrounds—a much wider range than most readers assume. When we judge comments by our own range of familiarity, many of those comments end up sounding "...odd to say the least". This is an artifact in the perceiver, not the perceived. We all have a more parochial perspective than we imagine we do. When our sensibilities get hit by what to us is an outlier, a flying internet object of obnoxious opinion, we immediately feel anger and fear. Those feelings suck, so we defend against them by reframing the provocation as not-in-good-faith: a spy, a shill, a sinister manipulator.

The solution is to have one's default reaction to these outlier ("...odd to say the least") comments become expansion rather than protection: that is, to allow the encounter to expand our mental model of what the community is and whom it contains. To do that is to practice the site guideline, "Assume good faith". This isn't easy, because it means you have to tolerate the initial hit of pain and anger and wait for it to subside before settling on a reaction. That's the hard work of tolerance.

It doesn't follow there's no such thing as manipulation, of course. It simply means that one no longer reaches for manipulation as a first explanation for what one finds "odd", instead requiring that there be additional evidence before entertaining such a charge.

This is not an abstract issue for HN, it's an existential one. People have been hounded off this site simply for representing their backgrounds and expressing sincere views. I'm sure the users who did the hounding would be horrified if they knew what they were doing, but it all happens so easily on the internet, at such great distance, where we're all talking not to living humans but to little bits of text that we flesh out with our imagination.