HN is a like a benevolent authoritarian country, say Singapore (I'm sure the analogy is flawed but that's not material). There is a tradeoff between order and giving equal consideration to all opinions. It sometimes rubs one the wrong way, but it leads to an overall quality that doesn't really exist in any bigger forums, and is only really possible because of the relative alignment of most users' views.

It works for small, non-platform community forum, because you can just go somewhere else if you don't like it.