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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Last I ran the numbers, 50% of HN users were in the US. A lot of those are not Americans, since many HN users have come to the US from other countries. Moreover, a lot of the American userbase on HN are not "well off". So your assumption is far from correct.

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.

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Having recently watched your efforts to moderate discussion in a US v China style debate, you have an unenviable position. Thanks for your work.

> 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.

I don't disagree with any of that. I think we're just scoping the word 'xenophobic' differently. To me that word conveys something deeper and more permanent, especially if one uses 'is' with it, as in "HN is incredibly xenophobic". (which was actually a rather silly thing to say)

> There's no reason to believe that HN is "incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.

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.

Exactly. These behaviors seem to be context dependent, rather than engrained in some people vs. not others, and the context seems to be shifting right now.

> xenophobic

Disliking the actions of the CCP doesn’t mean people are xenophobic any more than disliking Trump makes someone anti-American.

Well off westerners would definitely be more accurate.

> 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.

Sure, and equally obviously there are a lot of users below the median/mean. Millions of them, in fact. Some are below the poverty line.

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 saying that it's exclusively people below the median/mean, I'm saying that due to the content the site focuses on the board is going to skew towards the more wealthy in whatever market they live in. Obviously I don't have the demographic data to back this up, but it's just the reality of the situation. Inside the US, this board's users are going to be wealthier than the average US population. I suspect that would hold true for any group you look at, whether its a global perspective (probably even more skewed if you look at the global average wealth). Beyond that, you need an internet connection at all to come here, so right there you're going to be skewing wealthier than you would if you picked an "average".

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)

I don't disagree with that. It's just that it still leaves many people, hundreds of thousands if not millions, who fall outside the description you're making, and thousands of them post comments here. There's simply a lot more variance in the community than it feels like there is. That mistake has a dramatic effect on discussion.

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).

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