It breaks the site guidelines to insinuate this with no objective basis. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

Another user expressing a view you dislike is evidence of nothing but that a topic is divisive. Accusing, attacking, and insinuating otherwise about people is one of the most popular internet sports, but it's poison, so we don't allow it here.

I don't have any windows into state activity but we have extensive experience with internet behavior on HN, and I can tell you for certain that the vast majority of these accusations are 100% pure projection. People run across a few data points and connect the dots with their imagination, usually to concoct a sinister picture to explain what they notice and dislike. An internet forum is a massively multiplayer Rorschach test. That's why accusations of abuse need some objective basis or some form of evidence or...something, rather than nothing at all. It's all too easy to fire off rounds of these cheap shots without considering who you may be wounding (because that's what unjust accusation does) or what it does to the community.

It seems that if the distance between the other person's view and our own is too great, it's somehow too much of a stretch to believe that they could possibly be sincere, so we turn them into enemies, manipulators, astroturfers or spies. Now just imagine what this does to someone foreign (say, a 22-year-old Ph.D. student studying in another country and language) when they show up and they get hounded in this way, accused of being a foreign agent or a communist shill or whatever it is—simply because they come from a different background and speak from that perspective.

Is that the kind of community we want to be? how we want to treat others? Of course not; it's ignorant and indecent. What would you say about a small country town that treated outsiders like that? Every HN user would have a lot of choice language to label that sort of behavior in others, and would feel utterly superior to it. Yet we're constructed the same way and do the same thing, and not only do we not see this in ourselves, we're certain that we're right and noble for doing it.

I don't mean to pick on you personally; like I said, it's popular. But it's harmful and it comes from someplace dark in human nature, so please don't go there here. This isn't theoretical—people have already been hounded away from HN simply because they were of a different background and tried to express their views. That's sickening. None of us wants to be a person who would do that or belong to a community that would do that, so let's take conscious care to actually not do it.

HN is a much more international community than it seems, first because HN members are living in many different countries, but also because many HN members immigrated to different countries, or their families did, not so long ago. Some are from China or have Chinese family background, but there are a lot of different backgrounds here. We can either turn that into a strength by building the capacity to hear opposing perspectives, or we can behave like a mob. Unfortunately, mob behavior is the default, because it happens unconsciously and unintentionally, and actually we feel quite innocent when doing so—so if we want any other outcome, we need to work at it. Please let's do that work.

This has come up a lot, especially in the last year or two. Here are some past comments if anyone wants more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609080

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21818462

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22869961

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...