It's not really amazing, HN is incredibly xenophobic, just look at literally any thread that happens to mention China, even tangentially. I guess that's what happens when the majority of the userbase is well off Americans.
What HN certainly is, demographically, is majority Western. What you're seeing on China-related topics is the growing rift between China and the West, the same trend that shows up in Western media and no doubt Chinese media as well. I spend a lot of moderation time and energy arguing for understanding about this. But there's no way we can expect HN to be immune from macro social and geopolitical trends.
There's no reason to believe that "HN is incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.
While he said what he said and you refuted, I think the thought behind what he said was influenced by the rise in anti-Chinese xenophobia of late, and to my mind that is a real phenomenon both on HN and off of it. It is accompanied by, it must be said, a sharp increase in xenophobia in China as well.
I "agree" with the general xenophobia, meaning the lack of progress and backsliding toward China aligning with western democratic and individualistic ideals that I hold dear is very disappointing, but I can also see that indulging in one's xenophobic feelings might not lead to a desired outcome either.
I just say that because, counter to your last statement, there is reason to believe that HN has become incredibly xenophobic (compared to where it was a few years ago), which similar to what you also said, is accompanied by a qualifier.
And that's likely the case so in a way the GP was right. HN is rapidly approaching being large enough to represent a fair cross section of the communities it is active in, with the note that it skews wealthy, educated and tech oriented. Whether that slice of the population is more or less xenophobic as a rule is an open question. I fear for the answer.
Disliking the actions of the CCP doesn’t mean people are xenophobic any more than disliking Trump makes someone anti-American.
> a lot of the American userbase on HN are not "well off"
Oh come on, get serious. This is a board focused on Tech, an industry where our the median/mean is well above almost any other field in the US.
HN is more varied than you're assuming. That is actually the leading problem facing the community. People develop a distorted image of what the HN community is, and then when they encounter posts that contradict their image, they resort to antagonistic explanations that are harmful.
The actual dynamic is this: many people here have wildly different backgrounds, and therefore strongly different views, than your own (I don't mean you personally, but all of us)—views which they come by as honestly as the rest of us come by ours. Yes there are bad actors, but users grossly overestimate the significance of that. We're far too quick to consign each other to the bad actor bucket, because we underestimate the variety and size of the genuine differences between us.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm not consigning anyone to the "bad actor" bucket, but when we talk about filter bubbles we should at least be honest about the composition of groups and what traits they might have. There's no reason to think that the average HN user is representative of the average individual given the content.
Beyond that, due to the upvote system, the majority is amplified, so even if there are millions in poverty on this site, their views are going to be pushed lower than the tens of millions not in poverty. This is a bigger problem than HN obviously, but it does nobody any good to deny it's existence. The same could be applied to any minority group, whether its gender, sexuality, or race for that matter. This is a consequence of the system and you see the same thing on various subreddits (the fact that they split things into smaller boards mean there are communities where the site minority might be able to actually have a larger voice than the majority)
Edit: I was replying to the first version of your comment. I do disagree with the part you added later about upvotes. I think it is overinterpretation of the sort that feels-like-it-must-be-true, or feels-like-it's-probably-true. If there's one thing I've learned from moderating HN it's that those perceptions are extremely in the eye of the beholder and need to be bracketed if one wants to assess anything objectively.
p.s. Just to avoid misunderstanding, your account is still banned because you've continued to break HN's rules since we originally banned you. I restored your comments in this thread in order to reply to them. Users can also do that by vouching for good posts which shouldn't be [dead] (this is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
Compared to what? China?
Topics such as BLM often involve whataboutism with many complaining about the lack of support for Hong Kong by supporters of BLM, see Senator Hawley's comments.
This is part of the coordinated anti-globalism, nationalist movement that Bannon and his cronies are promoting.
I am not convinced that they actually care about Hong Kong or the Uihgurs given how opposed they were to helping out the Syrian migrants.
China is doing some bad shit, but it's hard for me to judge them much more severely than any number of other countries.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-deta...
https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/health-alert-u-s-consul...
What I don't support is when people use China as a tool to discredit movements like BLM because supporters aren't more broadly speaking out on injustices in other countries.
Bannon is strongly supportive of Russia even though the situation there is just as grim, see Chechnea, the loss of human rights for gays, and a Putin dictatorship of the country.
It's hard not to conclude that these criticisms are because China is a global economic power and a communist country.