It’s entirely possible that this is not a foreign influence campaign. Perhaps there’s a group here that is simply anti-American as its primary interest, and passionately so to upvote each other.
On the other hand, one should not discount the value of HN as tastemaker and trendsetter. Also, it would be fairly easy to run bots here. I wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.
I would encourage dedicated readers here to aggressively and persistently discount the value of HN as a tastemaker and trendsetter.
HN is actually a trailing indicator on tastes and trends, essentially by design. Things only make it to the front page if they get submitted and voted upward by a large number of people. That means it’s all stuff that is public and seems cool to a bunch of random people browsing a website. Not exactly cutting edge.
Basically every community, online or not, over-indexes on its own importance. Like how random small towns can get so worried about international terrorists targeting them. To folks who love HN, of course the great forces of the world would be attracted to compete here. Look how obviously awesome it is, right?
Paul Graham said HN was set up on the theory that it would efficiently surface great ideas and entrepreneurs for Ycombinator. Needless to say, that did not pan out. (How often do you see PG or any YC leadership here anymore?) Honestly I am mystified as to why YC continues to operate it at all.
> AI X/Twitter — a few hundred accounts effectively set the narrative in the first 24 hours; vibe checks here outrun benchmarks.
> r/LocalLLaMA — the open-weights kingmaker; a model that fails here doesn't get quantized, and unquantized means unadopted.
> Hacker News, and increasingly YouTube/Discord for the practitioner layer.
Source: https://pellmell.ai/s/aefaa217b57ed50be9e2a4b8c9f3173e
For a brief moment the readership of HN heavily overlapped with founders in Silicon Valley, and for those years HN was indeed a platform that acted as a trendsetter or tastemaker. That time has long passed. Twitter is the closest to this today, which is on that that list, and makes it a decent place to listen. r/LocaLLaMa is not bad as a support forum for GGUF and quantizer projects but it's at the level of "Windows tutorial" of software from the '90s.
If anyone is interested in being at the "edge" of this, I suggest simply going to meetups in tech hubs where people are working with AI and models. My guess is any city with a major tech presence will have more "edge" than HN. I'm fortunate enough to be in Silicon Valley right now and have friends who work at foundational lab companies so it's not hard to stay on top of what's happening. The "internet" of 2026 is just much, much bigger than the internet of 2007 when HN was founded, and so it's just a lot harder to find the information that you need.
> wouldn’t be surprised if HN were a field of combat for many parallel influence campaigns, foreign and domestic.
It's much easier to buy politicians in US, e.g. Elon bought POTUS for ~200M, Anthropic revenue is 40B, imagine what they can do
Why not "OpenAI used simplified chinese to create a fake prc-origin campaign and media buzz to convince the public they actually love data-centers and anti-datacenter sentiment is a psyop" there's an equal amount of proof provided for either scenario.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/aug/10/indonesia-clic...
https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/political-post-real-or-m...
Considering this site has international users, it's not hard to find this, especially right now. Hell, Canada is in this group currently.
We've never been the shining beacon of light we would claim to be, but we're so fucking awful now.
Could you expand on what you mean by being "currently anti-American"?
I believe that many Americans that were previously dismissive or ambivalent regarding critiques of US activity at home and abroad (either due to patriotism, realpolitik apologia, or general naïveté) are now re-evaluating some of the beliefs they hold about their country in light of the chronic political dysfunction and an absolutely breathtaking extent of corruption being perpetrated in broad daylight today (as well as indications that extensive corruption has long festered among our elite class, surfaced via the Epstein revelations).
I don't know, just asking.
But I know that in my own upbringing I've always viewed America as a place where, because it's a democracy, we are never going to all be aligned or on the same page about policy direction. Even when I disagree with the Biden Administration or the Trump Administration on some number of issues, and believe my I've got a lot of those issues with the current one, I wouldn't think of myself as anti-American or wishing harm to the country. But that's just my own experience.
I am very pro the "dream" of America, in terms of liberty, democracy, etc. According to every "democracy index" I'm aware of we're not doing so hot in that regard, generally rating as a flawed/deficient democracy and the trends are going in the wrong direction, fast.
> Do you want our businesses and factories to shut down and go out of business?
Generally, no, but this is way too open-ended of a question. I want good economic opportunity for everyone, including every US citizen. But relevant to the OP if Meta got snapped out of existence I think it would be a net positive for the world.
> Are you willing or would you support foreign countries attacking our military at home and abroad?
Nope. But across our entire history ask yourself how many foreign countries have attacked the US? Now ask yourself how many the US has attacked. With those numbers in mind, does the US seem like "the good guys"? really? ...really?
> Are you cheering against our athletes?
Nope, but I'm not cheering for them either just because they are American, I'm not a tribalist.
Well, to be fair people do have different dreams. I'm not sure those indices count for a whole lot. As an example, folks who argue in favor of returning more power to the individual states are, certainly, acting in accordance with stronger democratic principles. I'd argue the EU is actually a bit anti-democratic as it removes more power from local populations and individual states/countries/entities. Yet how would individual democracy indices rate these two?
And if you disagree with my perspective on what is more democratic, well, who is right and who is wrong?
> Generally, no, but this is way too open-ended of a question. I want good economic opportunity for everyone, including every US citizen. But relevant to the OP if Meta got snapped out of existence I think it would be a net positive for the world.
I'm no fan of Meta. But they aren't the only entity where if they snapped out of existence it would be a net positive for the world. I can think of a few non-corporate entities at least.
But fair enough it's a bit open-ended. I guess if push comes to shove when you say you are anti-American do you want to see, for example, economic opportunity increase in other countries at the expense of Americans? Not all relations have to be such give-and-take, but certainly many economic opportunities are. I'm just trying to learn more about what being an anti-american means to you.
> Nope. But across our entire history ask yourself how many foreign countries have attacked the US? Now ask yourself how many the US has attacked. With those numbers in mind, does the US seem like "the good guys"? really? ...really?
I'm fine doing things like removing all of our overseas bases, leaving alliances including NATO, never again being involved in the affairs of other countries, whether that's Korea (Korean War), Kuwait, Bosnia, or Iran, or Taiwan and China, and cutting our military spending quite a bit to reflect your desire to not be the bad guys anymore. I say let's just sit back and let the rest of the world figure out their problems - why do we need to be involved?
Is that something you agree with as well? Would that be anti-American in alignment with your views or is there other nuance here I'm not properly capturing?
> Nope, but I'm not cheering for them either just because they are American, I'm not a tribalist.
And to be clear even if America was even, say, your ideal dream since you're not a tribalist you wouldn't cheer on American athletes and would also label (not as a matter of insult but as fact) other people who cheer on their compatriots as tribalist?
I only care about the content of someone's character and how their actions impact the rest of the world, not the country they happen to be a citizen of, a fact which for non-immigrants (the vast majority of people) is completely random happenstance.
If already wealthy foreign agents become wealthier at the expense of impoverished Americans, I find that to be unfortunate. If already wealthy Americans become wealthier at the expense of impoverished non-Americans, I find that to be just as unfortunate.
I'm not going to cheer someone (athlete, business leader, or otherwise) on just because they are American. The fact that they are American is as irrelevant to me as the color of their eyes.
Do they seem to be a good person who treats others well? If yes, I will cheer for that person, whether they are American or not. Do they seem like an entitled asshole that treats others poorly? If yes, I will cheer against that person, whether they are American or not.
And the reason I currently label myself anti-America is that I believe that collectively we are the entitled asshole that treats others poorly. And we can't just pawn that off on Trump to be the scapegoat. He didn't materialize out of nowhere. We elected him. Twice. The second time after a failed insurrection. We have collective culpability.
I applaud your openness to speak. I've traveled/interacted with many nationalities, and very rarely I come across someone who is open/rational enough to openly state their dislike of their country and denouncing their history.
I wish you the best in life, smart internet stranger!
Being pro a group can be strictly positive sum - wanting to lift that group up, likely because you consider yourself part of it or on the same team. It's possible your intentions are bad, but they certainly don't have to be.
Being anti a specific group is inherently negative. Perhaps they deserve it, but that requires justification in a way simply being positive does not.
Holding both those positions would be hypocritical all right, but are you sure it's the same people commenting/voting in both cases? I don't think there's a strong consensus on Hacker News. Even something like the time of day an article is posted might get different engagement depending on who is active in which time zones.
Based on my own experience and reading, I do think there's a general consensus on this site but I could certainly be wrong about that. I'm less concerned about hypocrisy per se, it's more that the arguments that are used, even if by a minority, seem to apply in only circumstances in which China releases open-weight models.
I am aligned with your viewpoint as well. And I've repeatedly argued it. If China were to take the lead the US can then just release open-weight models. Folks say having the lead doesn't matter because China releases cheaper open-weight models. We can just let them take the lead and then do it back to them.
The problem isn’t that people on HN have a bias, I feel it’s pretty balanced. The problem is that when there are any sides, they spend the top 100 comments rehashing the same arguments, often over a political bugbear or web design faux pas.
That pattern became a lot more obvious when there are five new front page AI posts a day.
It's not even about sides, if for the last few hundred days you read a few AI related threads a day, then you notice that almost all arguments are rehashed, literally it's the same thing repeated using different words for 80%+ of comments on almost every AI thread. I started skipping most of it because there is genuinely nothing new or interesting added to these discussions.
This is a problem with any upvote/downvote based site, in my experience. It only takes a couple people who are highly engaged and who have a lot of free time to refresh the comment section and downvote everyone who disagrees with them.
Some times I’ll write a polite and well-sourced comment correcting some misinformation here and the comment will go to -2 or -3 when I check back in 10 minutes. Information that goes against the angry narrative du jour is often not welcome. Later, as calmer heads read the article and peruse the comments the downvotes start to get balanced out and the comment might rise, but some times the first wave downvoters are aggressive enough to get the comment downvoted into gray text before it has a chance to be seen.
In my experience with other communities, it only takes 3-5 people with a lot of free time to crush conversations they don't like. On a fast moving comment section a wrongthink comment can be buried into the bottom half of the comments with only a few early downvotes.
This comment isn't applicable to me, and if you believed that it applied, you'd have to add it to the OP as well since they feel strongly about Meta[1], they notice data points about Meta's behavior, and they overweight their bias against Meta[1] relative to others. Same with China "leading" and open-source/open-weight models and any time someone says China's strategy is better.
You can repeat this for any online argument or any topic.
It's not that Dang is wrong, however. It's that posting it in response to my comment(s) alone is hypocritical and pointless. Whereas Dang who is more responsible for the entire community is right to speak about it more generally. The message matters but so does the messenger, in this case.
[1] I don't use any Meta products (I don't even click on links), think social media should probably be outright banned, and Meta very likely should have been sued into the ground for the effects that their platform seems to have not just on children and young adults but also on our political system.
There are diverse viewpoints. However there are some topics and threads where it becomes obvious that the comments are going to tilt toward one viewpoint. Participating in those threads with a different opinion will get your comments downvoted to -2 within minutes even if it’s well-written and factually sound.
After this happens a couple times you learn not to engage with those threads because it only takes a few zealous downvoters to bury anything you write. So the illusion of consensus persists.
Concrete example: There was that fake (AI hallucinated) report that Meta spent $2B lobbying on something that was popular here months ago. I actually read the repo and report and noticed the AI hallucination, as well as pointed out that $2B in lobbying spend by a single company was not plausible or supported by any evidence. It didn’t matter how I wrote it, it would risk getting downvotes and angry replies about “How dare you defend Meta!” Some people are here for the anger and to feel revenge against the enemies they think they know (like the US) and will cheer on anything that goes against those enemies, regardless of the other facts surrounding it. Factually accuracy often takes a back seat to pushing agendas.
At this size open weight model, a Western company was already state of the art, Meta is joining that competition.
And my memory is that Gemma 4 got little criticism or doom/gloom. And no, it isn't Chinese.
The comment about Meta is because of particular dislike of Meta, because of their business model, and how harmful they've ultimately turned out to be for the world - disproportionately so relative to their benefits to the world, compared to other big tech companies.
This is certainly what many people around here appear to believe, but there are lots and lots of people who get much more value out of Meta's products than those of any other tech company. Whatsapp alone is probably the most useful tech product for many, many people.
That being said, FB/Meta have done a bunch of awful stuff, but to say that they're worse than Google/Amazon/Microsoft is not necessarily obvious.
Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?
As for DeepSeek or any other Chinese lab, I’m not aware of any practices that would make me consider them a bad actor. Can you say the same about OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic?
I think I've always had a pretty healthy amount of cynicism towards China. In recent years my cynicism towards the US has increased significantly. I don't see all of my US peers with cynicism, but I think you're living in an age of grift, corporate capture, and unheard of corruption. I also think there's nuance to both. There are some US and Chinese companies and people that I do respect regardless of what's going on politically. (Meta / Zuck isn't one of them though...)
I live in the 51st state though, so maybe I'm just overreacting...
Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other countries participate in freedom of navigation and combined arms exercises because they perceive China to be a threat to their countries. [2]
I think it's more of a mixed bag. You see a lot of public talking points, and in Europe specifically a lot more healthy discussion about not being militarily as dependent on the United States as it has in the past and looking itself to follow Trump's lead to onshore capabilities (cloud for example) but I wouldn't read such moves as moving closer to China so much as they are hedging their bets a bit more.
Here's an article [1] that was reporting on this topic that I found interesting along with a select quote from the article:
> Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden said Thursday at an EU summit that China is “an existential threat for our industries.”
> Even Germany, whose economy has long relied on exports to China, is alarmed. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week that Beijing keeps its currency up to 30% undervalued, calling this “a massive competitive disadvantage.”
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/u-s-and-9-allies-just-h... - this isn't the "best" article but I just grabbed one to illustrate the point.
But you're not wrong about the bias here. You just don't see many comments talking about it because they get mass flagged/downvoted for obvious reasons.
Americans seem to take the US’ geeat reputation for granted and don’t realize how it has slipped and what that means. They also take for granted that China BAD is truth when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival. But to the rest of the worlds citizens, China is not starting any wars and is the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries. EV batteries recently. The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war and exports their rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling now to the rest of the world. Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??
Those factors are all rightly part of the sentiment.
Isn't China a single-party state that is run by a corrupt autocrat, has literally enslaved people to build products, and disappears people for saying the wrong things? If America is becoming more like China, shouldn't you dislike China more than America?
> when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival
Well this isn't a sentiment that sprang out of nowhere. It is a sentiment that emerged based on real or perceived behavior.
> China is not starting any wars
Maybe not yet, but they certainly aren't behaving nicely toward Taiwan or other countries in and around the South China Sea, are they? The Philippines and Vietnam come to mind immediately, of course there are others.
> the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries
But if those cheap goods run your country's businesses out of business and you have lots of people without work, is that a good thing?
> The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war
The US didn't ask Iran to pursue building nuclear weapons, supply Russia for its ongoing war in Ukraine, or provide weapons and funding to groups in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine which have led to instability in the region. If oil prices are too high, the rest of the world should have worked to address American concerns about Iran. They failed to act, and so the US eventually just did what it thought was necessary.
> rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling
Before sports gambling was a thing in my state (Ohio) I seem to recall traveling to other countries and they had sports gambling too. Maybe I'm wrong?
> Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??
I can't speak for others but since I started this thread I'll chime in. I specifically disagree with the arguments put forth about AI strategy with respect to the US and China. I have no idea and frankly, aside from erroneously being accused of a bot once [1], have no interest in trying to guess if someone is a bot or not. Sometimes I just assume everyone is, because really what's the difference when it's all just text?
Others may feel differently and believe that there is a brigade of bots. I'd ask them for concrete evidence.
The attitude towards Iran is also just arrogant. The US believes they have the unilateral authority to dictate who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't, and is morally in the right for bombing their cities and killing their citizens if they don't comply. Sovereignty be damned, we are gods, fuck you. Same thing with literally kidnapping the president of another country. Not to mention, the Iraq war was started on the exact same WMD excuse and it turned out they never had any real evidence of WMDs back then, they just said they did and it was really about oil. And the government now is 10x more corrupt and cruel and xenophobic than it was back then, and back to a huge focus on fossil fuels - don't you have to be a little naive to just trust them at face value now?
I can tell you the prevalence of sports gambling and betting is exploding in Canada now that Kalshi is directly tying up with banks to put gambling inside fucking banking apps. I'm sure it was prevalent in many countries, I'm also sure it will scale up to huge levels and enter new countries with the amount of marketing and money and influence these US companies will bring, who also happen to have DJT's son on their board. Making them markets also frees them to manipulate and trade against their users covertly in ways that cannot be detected and that a traditional sportsbook could not do.
People who actually visit China or talk to Chinese citizens are all quite optimistic about it. The tropes people keep throwing around about autocracy are very inaccurate to anyone who actually reads anything about day to day life there. I can't explain all of it here but you can try reading something from Arnaud Bertrand if you're interested [1]. There’s a comical level of propaganda against China since the west recognized them as rivals that does not match reality at all. Anyways, I always see incredible whataboutism these days when talking about the US' problems now. This is what I think your original post that I replied to does too - the parent was criticizing Meta, and you said but what about China? And the thing is, we're talking about Meta because we live in the West and the horrible shit they do impacts us much more directly than whatever China does! It's not really productive to say China Bad!! in that scenario, it's really just saying "yes we suck, but they suck more!" and that doesn't solve anything.. it channels what should be a focus about huge corruption and threats to democracy in western countries into a pissing match on some other country, and its very sad to see how many people are falling for that.
Let me be blunt and let me say: you don't understand why we people support Chinese models.
1. Chinese labs started with open weight models, US labs started with dooms day narrative
2. US VC based companies must become greedy to win and return the money, Chinese companies can make 1/10 of that revenue and still be happy
3. Meta in this case, started nicely with Llama, then switched to closed models, kicked out researchers to build data labeler CEO empire inside Meta. Now opening again, what's next? closing again?
Add distillation to that, and the entire Chinese AI sphere is really just an offshoot of public US AI information...
Regarding distillation, you can also say Anthropic and OpenAI stole /distilled books, articles, blogs from everyone who published things without knowing their work might be used against them
Perfectly valid claim. It could be debated though, since you are talking about a centuries long diaspora of processes.
I'm talking about an architecture that was invented, published, and pioneered by US companies just a few years ago. Not really the same argument IMO.
> Regarding distillation, you can also say Anthropic and OpenAI stole /distilled books, articles, blogs from everyone who published things without knowing their work might be used against them
Yes. I would argue that anthropic et al are only able to exist because of the massive body of work in the anglosphere, both in books and online. That goes hand-in-hand with my view of the Chinese AI sphere.
During the last few years, the published research from USA was only a small fraction from that published from China.
It is absolutely applied accurately. You're commenting on the alleged hypocrisy of people simultaneously criticising American open-source while praising Chinese open-source, and then attributing your perception of hypocrisy to the website as a whole. The reality is the behaviour you've observed comes from completely different individuals, not some kind of HN hivemind. Your comment is such a typical case that it could go in the wiktionary page as the example excerpt teaching people what the goomba fallacy is.
Regular ppl in the west now hold mildly positive views of the ccp and how 'advanced' china is than usa.
Then there are europeans who now are looking for china to give them the technology handout now that relationship with usa has soured.
The United States used to have a dominant middle class that was geographically distributed (cities & rural areas inclusive), but the advent of the tech economy has also been having a similar effect here as it did in China: massive wealth accumulation in Tier 1-3 cities and everyone else being largely left behind.
It'll be interesting to see if there's convergence in the next decade or so, especially with the GOP reducing regulation and increasing the explicit capitalist priorities here. TBH, though, as a generally well-informed political outsider, the feeling I have is that the US government is slow, bulky, inefficient, balkanized and overall poorly run compared to the Chinese government. We'll likely either slowly improve authoritarian efficiency and become more like the CCP ... or we'll pivot left and move more toward the EU model, but we're floundering around right now paying lip service to both.
i thought youtube and instagram are blocked in china. how are these ppl posting these?
See:
https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/decentrali...
https://yiqingxu.org/replications/lpxx2025.html
https://cira.exovera.com/conferences/engineers-of-the-human-...
Meta, "an American company". Being the main driver of an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar - and just sticking your head in the sand when told about it - is just another day's affairs at the average American Acme Inc.
These are comments on a release by easily the most societally damaging Western tech company there is. They so far easily beat Flock, Palantir, Anduril and so on, as a result of their incomparable scale. You're just ignoring that and pretending any negative comments are because it's an American company rather than Meta. That's much more FUD than any pro-China comments I've seen on HN.
Get off HN Mark, you have ten million pervert glasses to sell.
Sorry this comment is a bit snarky, but yours is indeed a sight to behold.