Sorry, no. If I can’t protest here, where can I protest? Is this supposed to be a safe space for billionaires? It’s my community, too. Don’t censor me in the name of curiosities. This isn’t Iran.
This makes it easier to answer questions that would otherwise feel like hard tradeoffs. In this case: should people be shouting angrily in a protesty way in HN threads? No—but not because protest is bad or unimportant. It's just incompatible with intellectual curiosity, and since we're optimizing for the latter, it takes precedence.
When people are protesting or doing battle, they tend to either repeat their most effective phrases (slogans, etc.) or to spontaneously vent their strong emotions (name-calling, etc.). But repetition and name-calling are clearly bad for curiosity. I believe these are even different neurological states: high indignation comes with a level of arousal that rules out the relaxed playfulness that curious conversation depends on.
I hope it's clear that this isn't a judgment about protest or indignation in general—those are as human as anything else and when they're called for they're called for. It's just relative to the particular mandate of this particular site. We're trying to play one game rather than the other.
Is that censorship? Well, that word has become so stretchy that you can apply it however you feel. But I'd say no, for the same reason that chess isn't crokinole. It isn't censorship to say you don't get to whack your opponent's bishop.
You've clearly and concisely stated what I've been struggling to verbalize for several years now: that heated emotional flamewars aren't discouraged/forbidden on HN because emotion is bad (which is a strawman often brought up), but because HN is not the place for that, because we optimize for intellectual curiosity.
Just like programming languages - HN is neither the only forum in existence, nor does it need to serve the needs of every human in existence.
