'“Why are you banned on Quora?”
Quora has received funding from, and is at this point largely controlled by, Y Combinator. “An investor” (probably from Y Combinator, but this has not been confirmed) threatened Quora’s management that, unless I was banned in a public way, they would be rendered unable to raise future funding. Vendetta-driven, intentional product failures are more common in Silicon Valley than most people would like to believe, and they come as often from a company’s investors as from its management.
I was a top contributor to Quora. I had more than 8500 followers (and, now, over 9000) and was a Top Writer in each year. My answers were published to many of Quora’s media partners, including Time, Fortune, the BBC, and the Huffington Post.
Because I was a model contributor, my ban caused a substantial loss of faith, among Quora’s community, in its moderation. User engagement, especially among users deemed to be high-value content creators, began to decline. In reaction to this, Quora asked me to rejoin its community in February 2016, and offered a cash settlement. I turned their offer down.'[0]
2) And of course there's the recent banning of the alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter.
We don't have free speech in the UK (people get arrested for trolling on social networks). It's not as ingrained in our culture. I think it's therefore important for the US to keep their free speech to at least set an example for the rest of the world (a benchmark).
[0] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/what-i-fough...