Again, personally I tend to fall on the side of the government having less ability to restrict speech but it doesn't really bother me if companies want to restrict the kind of speech their employees can engage in at work, or what kind of speech they'll allow on their platforms. This gets trickier in cases where the companies might have businesses that approach what I would consider a utility, but that's a different topic, and really that has more to do with regulating companies as utilities.

I'm not positive in this, but I do suspect that if stories like the one you linked found themselves on the front page for hours at a time, perhaps if some Googlers tried to unionize and they were all fired, we would probably see quite a few people be defensive of their right to speech. I doubt we would see a complete overlap, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if we would see some overlap in the posters defending their speech rights with those defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis. I suspect we might also see some posters who think all Nazi speech should be outlawed but think this kind of unionization related speech should be protected.

You're of course correct that these topics do tend to bring out the trolls, but on a site like HN I tend to find it relatively easy to identify trolls, even if not through a specific post they make, a quick glance through their posting history often reveals whether they are engaging with the community in good faith.

It seems similar to the claim that there is no outrage of the thousands children dieing to car crashes each day, but a single adult person getting killed in a submarine is world news. Does that mean that people do not care when children are killed?

It's because that is where other people want to throw away things like 'equality under the law' and other such important things, you don't have that for people fired for trying to make things better for other people. Imagine if someone said "just arrest them" for people trying to organise a union, it would be absurd. Yet this is what happened with the Charlottesville thing. People were just reacting to the comments that were destroying legal concepts like "innocent until proven guilty" and "guilt by association". I.E it is a reaction to insane attacks on free speech that originally provoked the defensiveness in the first place.

Also, any comment that was for free speech got dishonestly attacked. There were misrepresentations of what people said, commentators pointing out petty things as if they were really important when they were not, and arguing that random historical thing that isn't relevant anymore is the basis to throw away someones legal rights.

  > But people doing so ought to take a good hard look
  > at themselves and why they choose to spend their time
  > and energy on this cause rather than others.

For example, people that dislike the moral righteousness, views and political violence of antifa generally have a similar or greater level of hatred for nazis, but yet when there is a clash between them they are desperate to say "antifa are also terrible". If they don't say this, they feel that it is tacit support for antifa and for political violence. It's the worst time to say this in terms of messaging (serious context/subtext issues), but there is a large audience watching and they feel that they must get their message out.

We're in a strange situation where we have to continually distance ourselves from words and ideas. We can't say "there are two sides to this" because Trump said that and it is 'moral equivocation' [0]. We can't say we're 'centrists' because people call this tacit support of nazis and will point and laugh that we consider ourselves 'radical centrists' (a desperate attempt to seem cool while standing for nothing or whatever biases they are least conscious of).

Pacifism has always been hated. And moderation was never cool. I think we should reclaim these words and perhaps try to convince people to pick their moments better when trying to persuade other people that these things are good. As the saying goes "Is this the hill you want to die on?"

[0] I personally believe that the frame of good/evil is a childish "two-valued orientation" that closes the mind to deeper thinking and to finding a mutual understanding of the world.

With regards to the algolia link about the "Google diversity memo" that was actually really interesting to me for two reasons. First, I too am somewhat surprised at the number of upvotes some of those articles received, to be honest some of them seem really poorly reasoned irrespective of how one might feel about the whole issue, and secondly, because despite visiting HN daily, and usually checking in a couple of times a day, I can't remember seeing many of those articles. Is there any way to tell how long they remained on the front page?

I don't want to imply that programmers sit in front of their computers all day and slack off browsing HN, but it wouldn't surprise me if many people who are in front of a computer do check in quite often. In my case, I usually only check in during the morning while I eat breakfast, and at night before I go to bed. I don't have access to the internet at work, occasionally I'll browse on my phone during lunch. And I usually only go through the first 50 or so submissions. From my experience, the type of articles that stay on the from page long enough for me to see them, read the article, read the comments, and formulate a coherent response, are either articles that are super interesting to the community or somewhat controversial, since these get the most votes. This obviously biases the kind of articles I usually comment on. I only bring this up to express that their may be a pattern in my commenting that would suggest I'm trying to push a very specific agenda, I hope this isn't the case, but that this might actually be greatly influenced by the kind of content I'm exposed to based on it's position on the front page.

You make a very good point with regards to the difference in treatment between some of the people you list. I've noticed myself falling into that trap personally, and I think it was partially due to none of those people being particularly sympathetic in my eyes. This made it much more difficult to spot any bias that may be occurring in the comments.