My comment was a criticism of the San Francisco subreddit on Reddit, not of Hacker News. The rules are much more freeform over there and the site as a whole is

My comment was a criticism of the San Francisco subreddit on Reddit, not of Hacker News. The rules are much more freeform over there and the site as a whole is constantly trying to find its balance between mob rule and moderator authoritarianism. In this particular case the SF subreddit moderators want it to reflect an aspirational view of how they want SF as a city to be, and the users tend to want to discuss the city as it is.