Hacker news mods have repeatedly said that they only respect professionalism, and they intentionally ban people they feel are controversial to a strong degree.

Hacker news mods have repeatedly said that they only respect professionalism, and they intentionally ban people they feel are controversial to a strong degree. So long as this is true, you are going to lose the passionate 1% of the community. The passionate 1% are those who keep the rest of the riff raff in check ultimately. As far as I am concerned, "Do you want X? This is how you get X." If Hacker News wants to have people care, it has to allow differing and terrible opinions. This is the very basis of the notion of freedom and free speech. When you censor the community, the community will suffer. Note that upvoting and downvoting, especially when done via groups of people determined to make their comments be heard, can itself tend to become a type of censorship ( mass downvoting ). Votes should be purely for the benefit of the original authors of the comments being voted on; not to move content around.