That's quite an insinuation. Fortunately I have a long history of posts to HN, and anyone bored enough to search through them will easily see that it's not true. To me the weird thing is running across a smear like this at all; it's surreal when someone is sure they know what you're thinking.
YC doesn't cross my mind while posting these. What has changed on HN over the last year or two is an uptick in nationalistic flamewar. That's happening because of larger social conditions we're all familiar with, but it has never been welcome on HN, and won't be as long as I'm moderating. That, btw, has nothing to do with which countries people are flaming about. It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism.
I have personal and philosophical reasons for being anti socialist and anti communist. I have family that has been killed because of people supporting government actions, like China in the linked article, where they imprison and murder innocent people.
I will try to be less inflammatory in the future, but I believe in western ideals. I think watering down criticism of authoritian regimes is a bit rich coming from a website that believes in the “hacker” ethos and “news” meaning a free press.
I will make my opinions be more developed, but the underlying themes will not change.
I respect your story, as well as those of the many other people on this site whose families have been through unspeakable trauma. Nobody's asking you to "water down" criticism. On the contrary, we're asking people to make more informative comments, instead of just posting empty rhetoric.
Generic ideological comments and denunciations of entire countries are examples of empty, fiery rhetoric that we don't want on HN. Why? Because their information content is low, they provoke others into posting worse, and they lead to extremely predictable discussion. The main thing a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity needs to do is not be predictable, so HN is a bad place to fight the same fights over and over.
In case it helps, I've been asking people for years on this site not to bash each other's countries, and the countries that have come up would make a long list. There's no national bias in it.
> It has to do with the purpose of this site—intellectual curiosity—being incompatible with tribalism.
"You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."
More seriously, though, the highbrow dismissal of very real problems as tribalism on the same site that frequently has slapfights over technology and news/advertising spam of various forms seems a little much.
Like, if the answer is just "Hey, knock it off we don't want flamewars" that's totally respectable...but the other arguments you've used come off as really smug and out-of-touch.
People are welcome to post on "very real problems" if they do so thoughtfully and substantively.
The moderation issue is garden-variety internet flamewar and requiring people to adhere to the site guidelines. That is mundane stuff, regardless of how much rhetoric people pour out on the internet.
