I also understand that this may not apply to other people's experience in the Silicon Valley, thererfore I said that your mileage may vary.

The bigger question is - Why should we allow Chinese nationals in America (even more so in Australia) to supress free speech and promote CCP ideals? Its one thing to do it inside China, a whole another level to spread it across the world as immigrants.

I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

It's not censorship, censorship would be 'dang doing it.

The downvote really suppressed free speech. I agree with you on that part. But that's the reality everybody need to accept.

For extreme examples: "I don't vaccinate my kids because I don't want them to have autism" is both contrarian and sort of actively disproved by evidence, so downvoting on the latter grounds is entirely reasonable. If you want to run a worthwhile discussion site, the discussions have to be meaningful to discuss. "The open-source movement is a mistake and the world would be better served by changing the Open Source Definition" is a contrarian, unpopular opinion, but there isn't clear evidence either way as to its merit (among other things, it's more of a straight-up opinion than a report of facts), so it's worth discussing, and shouldn't be downvoted just for being contrarian.

The comment above mostly made testable claims about Silicon Valley's culture. "I feel like the SJWs have gone too far" is an opinion. "People cannot criticize the Chinese government in lunchrooms" is a claim that can be proven or disproven.