But would that really work in this case? China is the number 2 mentioned country and while I don't have any demographic information, I find it hard to believe that there would be that many Chinese on HN. Well, not just any Chinese, but Chinese nationalists (people who still feel like China is "home")?
I guess it's possible it could be the work of their "reputation management" online guerrilla tactics. Though, the people engaging in that work generally aren't even Chinese, they're usually subcontractors paid by the Chinese to promote a "positive China" (in my experience, promoting a positive China usually means downplaying or mitigating whatever bad news has come out that day, or if nothing is going on, Japan bashing is on the docket).
For whatever reason, people are under the false assumption that China only tries to manipulate public opinion and spread propaganda domestically. This couldn't be further from the truth. I remember Digg.com having to sue and fight to get the Chinese to stop gaming their system (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army#Legal_prob...)
People know that the U.S government does it, but they either forget or ignore the fact that other countries do it too. Maybe they just underestimate the scope, or are wholly ignorant of it because they believe they haven't encountered such propaganda before (believing something like that would be "obvious"). But it isn't. Hell, RussiaToday (RT.com) exists almost exclusively for this purpose (to spread russia's narrative of world events). China has their own government ran/directed version as well, Xinhua.com. You see these two websites submitted in excess to reddit and other social media sites.
And do you know what's so great about reddit and HN to a person looking to spread or push an ideology or narrative? The points. They can keep track of what works, what doesn't, how well it works, and they can keep track of their employees. They can see how well each employee is doing at their job. It provides a measurement for them. A quantifiable piece of information to gauge the value of their work. Something they can bring to their bosses.
I know I'm getting off topic here but I'm actually (surprisingly) not surprised India is so high if xkcd's premise holds. While I don't see many Chinese commentors, I do see loads of highly intelligent Indians here. I met one last year on HN who I had do some freelance work for me.
Uhm, the article talks about mentions OF a country, not nationalities of commenters.
So your posts point is somewhat strange - you just generated several mentions of "China" yourself and you're not (I'm guessing) Chinese, neither is your post propaganda or promotes "positive China".
Did you perhaps misunderstand the original article?
> But would that really work in this case? China is the number 2 mentioned country and while I don't have any demographic information, I find it hard to believe that there would be that many Chinese on HN.
I follow you up to this point (although I don't necessarily agree)
> Well, not just any Chinese, but Chinese nationalists
Why would you have to be a nationalist to post about China? In fact, you could submit a "China is bad" post. Everything after this point seems to miss my point completely.
Also, a sister comment didn't read the part of the submission where it stated that "This only counts news stories posted, not comments."
> Why would you have to be a nationalist to post about China?
Because the guy I replied to said: "Surely, you're more likely to submit a post about your home country"
I'm an American but my grandparents are from Ireland. I personally feel no connection to Ireland nor do I have any idea what's going on over there. It's any other country as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't post news about the country to HN. However, if I did, I would be a Irish Nationalist. Feeling any sort of loyalty to a country (whatever the reason or justification) is nationalism. It's literally the definition of the word.
> "This only counts news stories posted, not comments."
I'm not sure that distinction matters for my comment. It may for the study, but my comment was a bit of a tangent anyways.
Regarding demographic information, I canvassed the top 100 HN users by karma in 2013, and at least at that time, the vast majority were from anglophone countries: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html
I guess it's possible it could be the work of their "reputation management" online guerrilla tactics. Though, the people engaging in that work generally aren't even Chinese, they're usually subcontractors paid by the Chinese to promote a "positive China" (in my experience, promoting a positive China usually means downplaying or mitigating whatever bad news has come out that day, or if nothing is going on, Japan bashing is on the docket).
For whatever reason, people are under the false assumption that China only tries to manipulate public opinion and spread propaganda domestically. This couldn't be further from the truth. I remember Digg.com having to sue and fight to get the Chinese to stop gaming their system (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Water_Army#Legal_prob...)
People know that the U.S government does it, but they either forget or ignore the fact that other countries do it too. Maybe they just underestimate the scope, or are wholly ignorant of it because they believe they haven't encountered such propaganda before (believing something like that would be "obvious"). But it isn't. Hell, RussiaToday (RT.com) exists almost exclusively for this purpose (to spread russia's narrative of world events). China has their own government ran/directed version as well, Xinhua.com. You see these two websites submitted in excess to reddit and other social media sites.
And do you know what's so great about reddit and HN to a person looking to spread or push an ideology or narrative? The points. They can keep track of what works, what doesn't, how well it works, and they can keep track of their employees. They can see how well each employee is doing at their job. It provides a measurement for them. A quantifiable piece of information to gauge the value of their work. Something they can bring to their bosses.
I know I'm getting off topic here but I'm actually (surprisingly) not surprised India is so high if xkcd's premise holds. While I don't see many Chinese commentors, I do see loads of highly intelligent Indians here. I met one last year on HN who I had do some freelance work for me.