The trouble with your argument "interesting people don't like censorship" isn't that you're wrong—it's that there are also a lot of people (many more, actually) who post dreck. If you want a forum that doesn't get overrun with internet dreck, you have to have some strategy for countering it. HN's strategy is to have a clear organizing principle (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and clear rules to support it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That barely works, but it's a lot better than nothing.
Edit: reading some of the comments and seeing venom and vitriol. They're the opposite of the feedback I've gotten from elsewhere.