[refenestrator]

Ok, fine. Food for thought:

You'd probably like to ban the topic entirely, but it'd be weird to have one banned topic and you've said that doesn't work, so that's out.

So what's left, being even-handed, I guess. Except it's a 10-1 ratio, so being even-handed, ban people from both sides leaves you with a 9-0 ratio.. congrats? Even if you're really, really, really trying to be even-handed with regards to content, most people would bias towards handing out 50-50 to feel fair, while 10-1 (or whatever ratio) is actually statistically fair. But that would feel quite biased if you did it! Practically taking a side! So we get a phenomenon where a bad Chinese-adjacent comment (or even a polite one) is super likely to be moderated, but you can't possibly moderate all of the really bad anti-China comments in this thread, there's too many, they rule the day and they establish truth for passersby.

Tech is one of the few industries with a large Chinese minority during this time of rising tension. It would vastly improve the intellectual tone of the site if we had more of them explaining their viewpoint and less of people telling them they're brainwashed.

Failing that, I think the actual real-world answer is to pro-actively push down the repetitive anti-China stories that hit the front page multiple times a week, and then just deny it if anyone asks. They're not intellectually interesting, they're hostile to a significant tech minority, and you don't like the flamewar. Why keep them?

[dang]

I wouldn't like to ban the topic. I would like people to treat each other respectfully.

I agree with you that it would be better for HN if Chinese users, and users of Chinese background, could share more of their experiences and observations. I've been arguing that for a long time, as I believe you know. But it's not super cool of you to be making that argument as long as your own contributions to HN are undermining that possibility. We're each responsible for how we individually affect the collective situation, and pointing the finger at others—even if they're behaving badly, and even though they're benefitting from an unfair, lopsided fight—is not helpful.

[refenestrator]

That's not good enough.

HN will continue to trend towards having 2-5 content-free "china bad amirite" threads a week with an echo chamber of people who don't know any history of the region saying completely nonsensical things. People who know a little more, or who point out things like "the belt and road initiative isn't a literal road and can't be used to invade someone" will be banned for contributing to flamewar.

For example, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29655341[1]. You can't be everywhere, there will always 10x comments like that for every 'bad' comment going the other way, and your even-handedness means that 9/10 of them are implicitly judged as fine, acceptable and encouraging intellectual something-or-other.

[1] Check that guy's history, he writes Xi Jinping as Hsi Chunping.. his commitment to ideology is so strong that he wade-giles'd Xi, lol