Since you've got a relatively new account, you might not know that you can see hellbanned users, posts, and comments by going to your user account page and chan

Since you've got a relatively new account, you might not know that you can see hellbanned users, posts, and comments by going to your user account page and changing showdead to "yes". You can then make up your own mind about whether or not hellbanning on HN is a problem. So far, it seems to have the same traits as a spam filter: it's effective most of the time, but occasionally catches a false positive. I don't think I'd go quite so far as to say that you get hellbanned here for "speaking up" -- there are plenty of unpopular or controversial opinions here. I might agree that people with those opinions occasionally get tired of arguing against the crowd and stop contributing as much, and I'd definitely agree that there have been a case or three where somebody got hellbanned under suspicious circumstances (idlewords' account, years ago, is a good example). But that doesn't really indicate a systemic problem here. The rationale for hellbanning is that it lets actual spammers do their thing all day long without annoying the regular users, it keeps a few people with mental health issues from disrupting every conversation here, and it keeps a few malicious people from being too much of a nuisance.