I look back at my comment history and see that generally speaking, if I say something relatively thoughtful, almost without exception it doesn't get downvoted into oblivion. Were I insulting, rude or uncivil a different standard would apply.

The same simply can't be said for proggit. Proggit has gone the way most mature forums go: elitist, dismissive, intolerant and reactionary. You saw the same thing on Usenet (eg comp.lang.c) in years gone past (if you're old enough to remember that).

There is a certain personality type that seems to float to the top of such dank, stagnant pools of water. I call such people toxic. You see it on forums, in open source projects and the workplace. Such people seem to be attracted to the ability to exercise power without actually contributing anything (although they're convinced they are contributing). Once a certain number of such people are entrenched it's very difficult for any such organization to ever turn itself around rather than fade into irrelevancy so much effort needs to be spent simply keeping such people away from the controls.

Much of Zed's famous anti-Rails rant revolved around such people (a classic example being someone writing security code assuming there were 30 days in every month).

HN is not that way at all and any stay on Proggit should tell you how far off HN is from that in a very short time.