Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#461

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

isoprophlex wrote: post #459

dang wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not take HN threads further into generic, hellish flamewars. This sort of shallow, angry denunciation is not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. You've broken them in other places recently, too—not cool. Fortunately your good comments are good.

You're right, that wasn't a very insightful or novel comment I made. My apologies for further fanning the flames on this topic. Thanks for calling me out, and thanks for your efforts in keeping this place interesting..!

Appreciated!

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#462

Post by dang » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

refenestrator wrote: post #458

dang wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to persuade baybal2 for years to stop breaking the site guidelines, and have banned and unbanned him over the years, but you're quite wrong in your assumptions—he has a lot of experience in the region and knows a lot. Not only that but people have attacked him unfairly in the past here too ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 ). I also don't believe that he's primarily an ideologue—his com…

This has been eating me up all day in case you happen to check in again. I didn't start posting to whine about being banned a few months ago, I was more concerned about the immediate thread.. but since you brought up my posts, you specifically told me while banning me that civility wasn't "good enough". I was doing this exact recommended pattern of responding patiently and civilly at the moment that you banned me. Ma…

There are two levels to consider. At the individual post level, conversation needs to be thoughtful, respectful of the other person, and patient when correcting wrong information or responding to bad arguments. If that's what you mean by civility, that's good (we stopped using that word years ago, but that's a separate issue).

At the overall account level, an account needs to be using HN for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity. It's not ok to post primarily on battle topics (like nationalistic ones or ideological ones or partisan ones), because curiosity doesn't work that way. If the primary use of one's energy is for nationalistic or political battle, that pretty much guarantees that curiosity is not part of the mix. I've written extensively about this in the past:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

and about how/why we use this as the litmus test for banning accounts:

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

If you take a look at those links and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be interested to know what it is.

Re: Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter

#463

Post by frenchyatwork » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:52 PM UTC

HKH2 wrote: post #345

thaumasiotes wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can definitely hear a 'w' sound. Compare "han wudi de muzang" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9TeG6MdbmY#t=117 Or "wuhan de yi tian" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWw6emkxmos#t=82 Or "yi zuo shi da wuhan" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWw6emkxmos#t=66 (same video as above, earlier timestamp)

You can argue it's not as strong as a 'w' in English, but it's definitely there, enough to justify saying 'a' instead of 'an'.

This is kind of complicated because [u] is a rounded vowel, so it's slightly "labialized" even if it's not preceded by [w].

Additionally, English spelling rules are complete insanity, and if an English speaker sees "uhan" they'd probably pronounce the 'u' as [ju:].