It's funny to see a downvote brigade on anything calling into question Linux's supremacy. The overwhelmingly devops HN crowd is probably the worst group to poll on systems software advancement.
The flipside is that "report" buttons can become surrogate downvote buttons, and the lopsided volume of reports leads to inconsistent enforcement of rules, so commenters unpopular with the crowd or mods are more and more likely to be banned, while discussion devolves to groupthink, cliquishness and sycophancy towards the locally-powerful. IME BBSes are the most prone to fall victim to this; the communities are small enough that you can't be "anonymous," and with threads that can continue and be bumped to the top indefinitely, there's no mechanism besides moderator intervention to stop a flame war. Blogs and HN/Reddit-style aggregators do better because old threads are quickly buried.