The one thing that ideologically committed HN readers all seem to agree on is that the community is full of (and the mods secretly in league with) their enemies. If you were in our shoes you'd find it as surreal as I do how consistently we hear this from all sides. The sincerity is similar in all cases, but obviously they can't all be right because their interpretations are opposite.
I don't think 'we must be doing things right if all sides are criticizing us like that'; that's a bad argument because the truth doesn't average out that way. But I do think that perceptions of the HN community and moderation are dominated by cognitive bias in way that makes it hard to have a clear conversation about it.
My point was, whenever you have that mix of 1. an emotionally charged topic, 2. strong, existing community norms, and 3. a public, linear (up + down = 0) voting/flagging system, you're bound to get the results we're seeing in this discussion: comments that reinforce the community's norms being promoted and comments that don't being demoted. This shouldn't surprise anyone who's been on the Internet for more than a few days. Reasonable people can debate the normal run-of-the-mill HN topics, but ones like these don't seem to have much room.
Anyway, I wasn't planning to continue this discussion, but since you provided a thoughtful reply I figured I owed an attempt to do the same.
There are exceptions, but most of the comments being flagged contain some element that is destructive of thoughtful conversation. Having those be marked as beyond the community's tolerance—and I mean 'tolerance' literally, as in, 'more than this will cause the nervous system to go into overwhelm'—is critical to de-escalating the remainder of the discussion enough that people can disagree without ceasing to hear each other.
The important thing to realize is that most flagged comments are not being flagged purely because of the point of view they express. In most cases they add a little extra something—or maybe a lot of extra something—and there are other, unflagged comments that express similar points of view, just more thoughtfully. In most cases, if the flagged commenter got calm enough to explain their point of view more neutrally, the odds of getting flagged would be less. (Inveterate trolling is also a thing, of course, but rarer.) They're welcome to do that and rejoin the land of the living at any time.
It does tend to require some work of self-reflection, though, to avoid getting flagged straightaway again. Most elements that result in flags are things the commenter was unaware of, but which land rather abrasively with the reader. The work is to develop some awareness of what those things are and then avoid them. For bonus points one can consciously replace them with something indicating respect for the opposing point of view or person. That can often be something quite small.
It is true that the ideological distribution of the flagged comments is skewed, but that's a separate question. And there are flagged and moderated comments on every side of the issue.
I don't mind downvotes much, but it's hard to feel like I'm contributing to a worthwhile discussion if my responses are hidden and my ability to reply is removed.
These are entirely reasonable statements, and they're flagged. Not just downvoted, flagged. Censored. Removed from the discussion.
That's my only problem right now. I understand user comment flagging is useful in lieu of moderation, but I'm personally seeing myself silenced persistently in this discussion and it's extremely discouraging.
In at least one instance, I've even been told that directly challenging a sexist call to action is "off-topic" and "insensitive".
This is all happening on an article that is a direct result of sexism being repressed in the industry. Should I just wait a few years for the sexism to fester, then make a blog post of my own once the damage has already been done? Because that seems to be the only acceptable way to express myself here.
To pick the most obvious, you use the word 'sexism' in a contentious way that is bound to land with many readers as trolling—and you didn't just do that once, you dropped it in numerous times. That's the sort of thing that leads to the feeling that the reasonable aspects of your comment are just a pretext, while the subtext is gratuitous provocation. I don't think you did that on purpose, but your claim that people were flagging 'entirely reasonable' comments arbitrarily is inaccurate. Just to be clear, my point isn't about the correct meaning of 'sexism'—it's that if you throw explosive footballs around, however unintentionally, your comment becomes subject to flagging for the sake of a non-flamewar discussion.
Many commenters are blind to the things in their comments that land objectionably with others. They're much (much!) too quick to conclude that the fault is all on the other side, that my 'entirely reasonable' comment is unjustly suppressed, and so on. If you want to get out of that loop you need to take a deeper, more reflective look at your own expressions. Then you can find ways to express your substantive point of view that aren't accidentally bound up with things that produce troll effects and you can participate in a (hopefully) higher-quality discussion.
As I mentioned upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14693838) flagging provides an important service by making a distinction between gratuitously provocative comments and the ones that express similar points of view more thoughtfully. The actual effect in the threads is to make substantive discussion between opposing points of view possible, because otherwise the flamebait would be overwhelming. Indeed it has been so impossible in the past that it's rather astonishing to see it beginning to happen, i.e. people beginning to hear each other and offer at least tentative respect across division lines. That would definitely not be happening if the more inflammatory comments weren't being flagged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14677258
There definitely is not only one viewpoint allowed on these threads, with others flagged or voted down.
The threads attract more flagging and up/down voting wars than usual, but the votes are not all one way, and frankly if anything I think the comments on HN on these threads are pretty male dominated and hostile to the women concerned, plenty of those comments are allowed to stand.