[cyjyar2]

I have seen a number of China-related thread reach HN's frontpage, with lots of comments, only to sink 10 pages within minutes. I believe that some users are gaming the auto-moderation tools by engaging in a downvote war in these threads to have them marked as flamebait and downranked. It doesn't have to be only paid trolls, just enough people unaware of the Tien An Men massacre and Mao's crimes.

Sadly this makes it look like HN is soft-censoring China-related threads...If I were a mod (and if I'm not wrong) I'd be very curious of the downvoting patterns in these cases.

[dang]

I'm a mod, we've looked closely at the downvoting patterns, and the conclusion is that the community is simply divided. Users have different views because of their different backgrounds. That simple explanation is more than adequate to explain what we see here.

Unfortunately, when people encounter opposing views, they don't think of this simple explanation. Instead, they think nobody could possibly hold that opposing view in good faith, and therefore they must be an astroturfer, a shill, a Communist agent, a manipulator, a spy.

There is a great deal of previous discussion on this topic. If you want further explanation see these links:

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

If you take a look and still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know what it is.

[mdorazio]

dang, I think I and a lot of other HN users would appreciate it if you actually posted the results of this investigation somewhere so we have real data to look at. It's pretty clear that it at least seems like it's more than just different views at work here. When you say repeatedly that you've spent countless hours looking at the data and didn't find anything, but then don't share that data it gets really frustrating for users.