> for more than a year I have been watching perfectly fine comments getting buried almost instantly.
Apart from an obvious problem of too many people having downvoting privileges, mods here also silently downweight some accounts even though they leave perfectly good comments. So there are two parts of this problem: mods being assholes towards some people regardless of their comments and mods letting too many people downvote comments. Same problem with flagging, except that flagging doesn't just make some discussions taboo, it also provokes mods to come up with a reason to issue a warning to silence such discussions even more if they feel like it.
But let's be honest, HN was never a place for dissenting views or "intellectual curiosity" as they used to say, it was always a very US, Silicon Valley capitalist-owned place, where the mods, YC tried to push people into one or another direction, push people to think certain way, suppress and disallow some viewpoints under various pretenses. I'm sure you've seen them claim guidelines breaking of people expressing some views, but never the opposite views if the views happened to be a common SV ideology (for example, I don't think I've ever seen an "let's ban sexist words" diversity activism being warned as "ideological flamebait" or such activists being banned, but it did happen with people holding the opposite views, just like it did with the guy from Google). All of this nudges people into echo chambers.
I'll add that it used to have more technical discussions a few years ago, but not so much anymore, you have to go to lobsters and reddit for that, even if they suck, they are at least still there.
Apart from an obvious problem of too many people having downvoting privileges, mods here also silently downweight some accounts even though they leave perfectly good comments. So there are two parts of this problem: mods being assholes towards some people regardless of their comments and mods letting too many people downvote comments. Same problem with flagging, except that flagging doesn't just make some discussions taboo, it also provokes mods to come up with a reason to issue a warning to silence such discussions even more if they feel like it.
But let's be honest, HN was never a place for dissenting views or "intellectual curiosity" as they used to say, it was always a very US, Silicon Valley capitalist-owned place, where the mods, YC tried to push people into one or another direction, push people to think certain way, suppress and disallow some viewpoints under various pretenses. I'm sure you've seen them claim guidelines breaking of people expressing some views, but never the opposite views if the views happened to be a common SV ideology (for example, I don't think I've ever seen an "let's ban sexist words" diversity activism being warned as "ideological flamebait" or such activists being banned, but it did happen with people holding the opposite views, just like it did with the guy from Google). All of this nudges people into echo chambers.
I'll add that it used to have more technical discussions a few years ago, but not so much anymore, you have to go to lobsters and reddit for that, even if they suck, they are at least still there.