Someone here pointed out that one of the developers on the project is actually the primary developer's vtuber persona.

That's literally it.

Probably just not wanting to deal with the unsavory side of the lurking userbase on HN or the poor, ill-informed discussion on sensitive/political topics? There are certain things HN is not good at talking about

There are multiple people I've seen express this in-desire towards HN

Someone in the project considers HN not a safe-space for queer viewpoints / racist / homophobic.

I am very much at a loss as well as this has never been my experience.

A lot of the arguments started with "when you enable showdead, there's lots of dead comments of people being vile".

Just not sure what to say.

They can’t forbid discussion but they can try to make it so people visiting from HN can’t see the page; they aren’t the only ones, either, as the poster upthread mentioning jwz’s image redirect noted.

IIRC it was if you link directly to the Asahi Linux website then a bit of javascript picks up the HN referrer and blocks viewing the page.

for a short time, he was monitoring the referral header and made his website display an offensive message if you clicked the link from HN.

HN's mods then edited links to his domain so they would emit the referral header, and he responded by implementing a browser exploit to detect if certain HN URLs were in your browser history.

In any case, I apologize for using the wrong wording.